Sunday, September 30, 2012

Ik zou het leuk vinden om met je in contact te blijven via Facebook.

Henk JTh van Stokkom wil foto's en updates met je delen.
De foto's van Henk bekijken
Henk heeft je uitgenodigd om lid te worden van Facebook. Zodra je je hebt aangemeld bij Facebook, kun je in contact blijven met je vrienden door foto's en video's te delen, statusupdates te plaatsen, berichten te versturen en nog veel meer.

"In Africa, It's Business as Usual for China"

China in Africa: The Real Story
My invited commentary on the New York Times "Room for Debate" page today, September 20, 2012.

Here was the debate: A Human Rights Watch report recently linked Rwanda to war crimes in Congo, a disturbing mark against a nation that has been held up as an African success story. While Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, has improved the country's economy and kept it stable in the wake of a brutal civil war, he has also been accused of being repressive and autocratic. 

It's not just Rwanda: The late prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, was praised by the West, but under his regime, journalism has been a dangerous pursuit.

How should an influential country like the United States navigate relationships with authoritarian regimes that have improved living standards in their nations, like Kagame did in Rwanda and Zenawi did in Ethiopia?

In the wake of China's growth and the West's continued stagnation, many developing countries now look to China for aid, investment and trade. United States officials have repeatedly warned Africans to be wary of China's warm embrace. But might China's way of engaging in countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia provide lessons for the U. S.?

Like many East Asians, the Chinese have old-fashioned ideas about development. "To end poverty, first build a road," they say. Boost agriculture and manufacturing. Soak up low-skilled workers, then move up the value chain.
'To end poverty, first build a road,' the Chinese say.
Most of our allies developed in just this way, including Korea and Taiwan. Economic development and a growing middle class led to calls for accountability, transparency and greater freedoms. Yet as donors, the U.S. and many others in the West abandoned this recipe, without providing an effective game plan to take its place.

Take Rwanda, where aid from Western donors is now at risk because of several critical reports on Rwanda's alleged secret support for a violent rebellion in nearby Congo. Seventy-five percent of U.S. aid to Rwanda goes to health, the bulk of it to HIV/Aids, with less than 10 percent supporting economic growth. We're keeping more people alive, but we're not doing much to provide jobs.

Asked whether China would join in the growing boycott, the Chinese ambassador to Rwanda demurred. His government planned to keep supporting the roads, agricultural and power projects that make up the bulk of its aid portfolio.

In authoritarian Ethiopia, the U.S. shipped in close to $450 million in surplus U.S. commodities last year: more than half of all our aid. Beijing gave a loan to build a toll road leading to the coast, and supported the construction of the Eastern Industrial Zone. In January, a Chinese company, Huajian, hired and trained 800 Ethiopians to make ladies shoes for the U.S. market. Six large Chinese firms have now invested in Ethiopia's thriving leather products sector, but none from the U.S.

The U.S. can't close its eyes to atrocities in Africa. Sanctions and threats will sometimes have their place. But we could do a lot more to help Africans build their own economic pathway to better governance.
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What are We Learning from Business Training and Entrepreneurship Evaluations Around the Developing World?

Chris Blattman

That's the title of a new review paper by McKenzie and Woodruff.

The cynical take would be "not much", but they offer a slightly more nuanced answer.

…there is substantial heterogeneity in the length, content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated. Many evaluations suffer from low statistical power, measure impacts only within a year of training, and experience problems with survey attrition and measurement of firm profits and revenues.
Over these short time horizons, there are relatively modest impacts of training on survivorship of existing firms, but stronger evidence that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. Most studies find that existing firm owners implement some of the practices taught in training, but the magnitudes of these improvements in practices are often relatively modest.
Few studies find significant impacts on profits or sales, although a couple of the studies with more statistical power have done so. Some studies have also found benefits to microfinance organizations of offering training.

Unfortunately the all-too-common government and NGO approach to aid is, "how about we elites just go and tell these poor people how to live their lives better."

This is also known as the "If-only-they-would-listen-to-us" theory of development. Most of the time it is about as successful as you would think, I think.

In the next week or two I should be putting out some slightly different news in a couple of different impact evaluations. First, some evidence that if you give cash with the training… Wha-bam! (The technical economics term for doubling income.)

Second, to my enduring surprise, the "If-only-they-would-listen-to-us" turns out to be rather good at getting people to change the way they resolve high-stakes land conflicts–essentially persuading them to cooperate better. My intuition in brief is that education and indoctrination is better at norm change than teaching skills.

More to follow. I am experiencing (again) that the last 2% of the paper seems to take 98% of the time….

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Small Farms’ Large Benefits

Project Syndicate - A World of Ideas - the highest quality opinion ...
By 2050, global food production will have to increase by 60% to meet demand from a growing world population with changing consumption habits. But the challenges that agricultural producers currently face, and the food-price volatility that results from these challenges, will not address themselves.
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The Last Hunger Season

SSIR Articles

In Bungoma, the main city in western Kenya about an hour's drive from Leonida's shamba, activity was also accelerating in warehouse 10 at the National Cereals and Produce Board. The sun was just coming up on a late February morning, peeking over the grain silos that were the tallest structures in Bungoma. At their base was a row of cavernous, concrete warehouses. In the warehouse at the end of the row, rented by One Acre Fund, Andrew Youn began to scale a mountain of seed bags.

He stepped awkwardly from bag to bag, as though he were ascending wobbly stairs. The earthy smell of burlap merged with the dank odor of sweat. Thousands of dust specks twinkled in the rays of sun that streamed through the open warehouse doors. When he reached the summit, Andrew looked down on a conga line of strong-backed men carrying twenty-five- and fifty-kilogram bags on their shoulders. The workers wore an array of rags to protect themselves from the dust—one decided to wear a dress—as they snaked their way through a labyrinth of towering columns of farming ingredients to the fresh air of the loading dock where a fleet of trucks waited.

The One Acre founder looked terribly out of place amid the grunting warehouse labor. He was a skinny, bespectacled, bridge-playing, thirty-two-year-old details geek from Minnesota, the earnest son of Korean immigrants, a Yalie with a Northwestern MBA who would likely stagger under the weight of a big fertilizer bag. But Andrew did his heavy lifting with numbers, calculating his task ahead as nimbly as the burly Kenyan warehouse workers completed their task at hand. Andrew really was in his element. From his lofty perch, he filmed the scene with a small video camera cradled in his right palm. Below the camera was a broad smile. For in each bag of seed or fertilizer he saw a prospering farmer. "One of my favorite days of the year," he declared to no one in particular.

This was an Input Distribution Day on the One Acre Fund calendar. It was a day when farmers would receive their seed and fertilizer in advance of the rains and the planting season. It was a day of great anticipation. Singing and dancing and prayers of thanksgiving would greet the arrival of the trucks.

For Andrew, it was a day of great fun that provided a measure of how much the organization had grown. But it was also a day of sober assessment of how much more work needed to be done. He descended the mountain of seed sacks and joined Andrew Wanyonyi, One Acre's purchasing manager who was standing on a stack of empty burlap bags near the warehouse door. He, too, was a slender, bespectacled, numbers man, a Kenyan who had worked with One Acre almost from the beginning when they didn't even need a warehouse to service the first couple hundred farmers. Now he carried a clipboard heavy with computer printouts, which recorded the needs of every farmer.

"How are we doing?" Andrew Youn asked.

"It's really hard to imagine what we've become," answered Andrew Wanyonyi (named for the time when weeds were pulled). "I look at what's going on in this warehouse and say, 'Wow!'"

Wanyonyi knew his boss wanted hard numbers to back up the exclamations. Flipping through the printouts, he came to the warehouse totals: This year, he reported, they would be moving 201 metric tons of maize seed and 2,010 tons of fertilizer to their farmers in Kenya who were ready to plant a total of 20,100 acres. It would all fill about four hundred ten-ton trucks.

"That is pretty ridiculous," Andrew Youn said gleefully in his own burst of astonishment. Ridiculous was a favorite word of his. "In our first year, we couldn't even fill one pickup truck. And this year, four hundred? In five years I hope we'll laugh at how small this operation today was."

Actually, he had a little chuckle now, a melancholy little chuckle, as he put this operation into perspective. "Every time I think about the need, it's amazing how big it is. Four hundred trucks seem like a lot, but each truck is just an eye drop in the ocean of need. A meaningful eye drop, but we need so many more."

As the warehouse emptied of stock, it filled with a great sense of urgency, for this would be a pivotal year for One Acre as well as for the farmers. It was a year that would test the organization's ambitious growth projections. On that February morning, One Acre was working with about fifty thousand farmers in western Kenya and Rwanda after only five years of operation. Andrew was eyeing expansion to Burundi and Ghana and points beyond, perhaps even to Asia; he plotted an annual doubling of the number of farmers served. It was a tremendously rapid rate of growth for a humanitarian organization—a "nongovernmental organization," or NGO, in the parlance of the development world. But for Andrew it was hardly satisfying; in the corporate realm, where he had worked for a couple of years as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, such ambition was expected. His mid-range goal was to be serving 1.5 million smallholder farm families by 2020. His long-term goal was mindboggling.

"Today we're satisfying a fraction of 1 percent of the market," Andrew told his colleagues who had gathered around him on the warehouse loading dock. "The total potential market is over one hundred million farm families in the world. We think fifty million at least in sub-Saharan Africa. We have our work cut out for us."

Andrew and his One Acre cohorts knew their warehouse work was in stark contrast to what was happening in warehouses in other parts of Kenya. The newspapers had recently been filled with stories describing the escalating relief effort to feed Kenyans who had been left hungry by the spreading drought. The United Nations' World Food Program (WFP) was distributing maize and rice and beans, most of it coming in from foreign countries, to feed about 1.6 million Kenyans; predictions were that the number of hungry would soar to more than five million in coming months. Thus, in warehouses in the eastern and northern parts of the country, it was bags of food aid that were being loaded into trucks also making their way to hungry farmers.

Andrew shook his head and frowned when he contemplated the contrast. He appreciated the need for emergency food aid to keep people from starving. But, he wondered, "How much more efficient is one bag of seed than one bag of food? Each bag of seed produces ten bags of food." Indeed, in One Acre's experience, one five-kilogram bag of hybrid maize seed produced an average of ten ninety-kilogram bags of maize. "The idea of bringing in food aid to feed farmers, whose profession is to grow food, is totally absurd, feeding them, creating dependence, rather than empowering people to grow food themselves and feed themselves." There was a rare flash of frustration in his voice. "That's terribly uncreative. The human race is much more creative. We can do better than that."

This determination—"We can do better than that"—placed Andrew and One Acre at the vanguard of a new wave of social entrepreneurs who were upending the development doctrine and practices of the past generation. Talk of poor African farmers succeeding, of growing enough to feed themselves and others, of managing an agricultural enterprise that would improve their standard of living, would have been preposterous a decade or two earlier when those same poor African farmers were being ignored by the development community. At institutions like the World Bank, proposing an agricultural development project was a surefire way to be booted down the career ladder. Hungry smallholder farmers were seen as the problem; they must get out of farming to end their poverty.

Now here was Andrew Youn in a warehouse filled not with food aid but with farming aids, sounding like a revolutionary with his talk of catering to the needs—the business needs!—of the world's poorest and hungriest. He dared called them "customers." He refused to see them as welfare recipients and wanted One Acre's approach to stand in contrast to NGOs that came to Africa and freely handed out food and supplies for a couple of years and then left. "The minute you feed one person, another one hundred are lined up with their hands outstretched," he told his colleagues. "You realize that handouts won't solve a thing, unless you're ready to feed millions of people every year, forever. The only way to make a real difference is to somehow empower the poor to solve their own problems."

Andrew and One Acre were determined to go beyond the old Band-Aid approach of charity relief and emergency aid and pursue new business-based methods of long-term, sustainable agricultural development. He had the audacity to believe that Africa's farmers should see farming as a business, as a way to make a living, rather than merely farming to live.

In the past, very few enterprises had been willing to take on Africa's smallholder farmers as clients. That was why the higher-yielding hybrid seed that had boosted yields in the United States seventy years earlier was so minimally used across Africa, why fertilizer use—even just a thimbleful per plant, as the continent's agronomists prescribed for smallholders—was so rare, why the farming methods were so ancient. Agriculture suppliers simply dropped off seed and fertilizer and tools at supply stores in the big cities. If the remote smallholder farmers needed any of that, the suppliers reckoned, they would come into town and get it.

Andrew didn't understand that philosophy. From business school, he knew there were plenty of case studies that emphasized distribution. He had zeroed in on Coca-Cola's strategy to put a bottle within arms' reach of every person on the planet. Indeed, Coca-Cola had pushed its products out to the remotest points of the African bush. He had also studied the ubiquity of cell phones in rural areas and the customer service tailored to those needs. Similarly, Andrew believed it was possible to inundate every corner of Africa with farm services. "Our secret business ingredient," he often told the One Acre staff, "is distribution."

In passion and ambition, he was the agriculture version of Paul Farmer, the American physician and anthropologist who for twenty years had been challenging the way the world was dealing with health inequalities, be it HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis treatments or horrible hospital infrastructure. Farmer cofounded Partners in Health and went to work in some of the most difficult places on earth, such as Haiti and Rwanda. Andrew greatly admired Farmer. He liked how Farmer lived with the poor to understand their problems, liked how he tirelessly pushed for greater innovation, liked how he asked questions too daring for most set-in-their-ways development organizations. Andrew particularly liked the question, "How can the world do this better?"

From the book The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs (www.publicaffairsbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.

Read author Roger Thurow's introduction to this excerpt.

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The Eight-Word Mission Statement

SSIR Opinion & Analysis

Whatever windy drivel they might put forward as a corporate mission statement, mainstream for-profit businesses have a clear, central mission: make money for shareholders. Some do it more sustainably, some are nicer about it, but they're all in the same boat. If they have a bad idea or execute poorly on a good one, they fail in their mission and eventually go out of business.

Mission statements in the social sector are often the same kind of word-salad, but there isn't a common raison d'etre. As investors in impact, we—the Mulago Foundation—don't want to wade through a bunch of verbiage about "empowerment," "capacity-building," and "sustainability"—we want to know exactly you're trying to accomplish. We want to cut to the chase, and the tool that works for us is the eight-word mission statement. All we want is this:

A verb, a target population, and an outcome that implies something to measure—and we want in eight words or less. 

Why eight words? It just seems to work. It's long enough to be specific and short enough to force clarity. Save kids' lives in Uganda. Rehabilitate coral reefs in the Western Pacific. Prevent maternal-child transmission of HIV in Africa. Get Zambian farmers out of poverty. These statements tell us exactly what the organization has set out to accomplish. Once we've got it, we know whether they are working on something that fits our own mission, and we have a useful starting point for any subsequent conversations.

Notice two things about the mission statements above above. First, they include very concrete results. "Creating awareness," "empowering" somebody, "changing attitudes"—those aren't real impacts. They may be necessary steps on the path to impact, but they don't tell you where that path was supposed to end up. Second, a good mission statement is about the what, not the how. For example, most social entrepreneurs want to dive immediately into their ideas about how change is going to happen—that, appropriately, is their ongoing obsession, what keeps them working in lousy conditions for crappy pay. But I need to understand exactly what that change is, before I can make sense of their notion about how it's to come about.

If we sit down with the leaders of an organization and can't come up with a mutually satisfying eight words, then we probably wouldn't get along anyway. What's been surprising is how long it can take to get those eight words (or less), even with—or maybe especially with—organizations that have been around a while. It's not uncommon to have organizations end up with a mission quite different that the one with which they came in the door.

We've found the eight-word mission a crucial tool for funding decisions; it also turns out to be a great tool for design. You have to know where you're going to be able to figure out the best way to get there. A good eight-word mission helps startups to evolve their big idea without getting pulled off track by their business model, the demands of funders, or the latest shiny object they found by the side of the road. For more established organizations, it can be a guide through a necessary iterative process of re-design, helping them strip the hull of all the barnacles and unnecessary appendages that have accreted on the voyage so far. 

Razor-sharp clarity about where you're going allows you to ask three critically important questions: 1) Is this the best way to get there? 2) Is there anything else we should be doing to accelerate along the path? and 3) Is everything we're doing really focused on getting there? The first question helps prevent the bane of startups, fixing too early and rigidly on a specific idea; the second pushes evolution of models and activities; and the third helps you avoid or get rid of stuff that is a distraction or waste of bandwidth. 

(A classic example of the last issue is an organization that is doing, say, poverty work in Africa, but putting a lot of effort into "educating" people in the United States. That's like installing a mile-long rubber band between effort and impact. The education effort needs to become part of a cost-effective, fund-raising program or a laser-focused effort to change specific policy—or it needs to be killed.)

And finally, the eight-word mission statement is indispensable as a starting point for real measurement of impact. You can't measure impact unless you know what you're setting out to accomplish. Getting your mission right is step one in getting your indicators right. With a good eight-word mission, you can bypass all that input-output-outcomes stuff and cut to the chase with a simple question: "How would I best know if I'm fulfilling my mission?" (We at the Mulago Foundation like to ask people, "If you could measure only one thing, what would it be?"—but that is for the next column). I'd rather get the results of M&E from lay people who have really grappled with their mission than from pros that worked from a mission handed to them.

I'm not an expert in anything, really, and not infrequently I find myself in a room with people smarter and better informed than I am. They're often trying to save the world in one way or another, and they're usually doing their job, which is to pitch for support from our foundation. Most of them do it quite well, and they are, by and large, my favorite kind of people. But I have a job to do as well—to squeeze the most impact out of Mulago dollars—and it is here that the eight-word mission statement becomes my lifeline. It jump-starts a productive and respectful conversation that doesn't waste anyone's time.

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