How to bring education to the poor in Africa – By Richard Dowden

How to bring education to the poor in Africa – By Richard Dowden

African Arguments

A Mvule Trust pupil goes to school in Uganda.

In 2006 some friends of mine were given $5 million by Lisbet Rausing for education in Uganda. They set up an NGO called Mvule (named after a beautiful Ugandan tree), and asked me to be a Trustee. We decided to spend the money on adolescents, especially girls, who had done well at primary or secondary school but had to drop out because their families were too poor to support them.
Identifying them was a labour-intensive and expensive business, but over the next five years some 2500 were selected and places in good schools found for them. They were supported throughout, not just with the fees, uniforms and books, but everything that would try to make them equal to other students, such as travel money, soap and sanitary towels for the girls. They were also provided with mentors and visited regularly by Mvule workers.
We also set aside money to track these students, interview them – and their siblings – at stages throughout their schooldays, drilling down into what happened to them, how the scholarships changed their lives and the lives of their families and communities.
The results of this study – rare if not unique in the aid world – exceeded our wildest dreams. A report entitled: 'These days are for those who are educated' has been produced. It has revealed a wealth of detail about the day-to-day lives, hopes and attitudes of ordinary Ugandans. Education not only utterly transformed the lives of individual students and offered them a future otherwise closed to those who do not go to school; it often transformed their families and communities. This was an indirect and unexpected impact.
Having one child in school often inspired families to find school fees for others. Mvule students also passed on their knowledge and ambition to parents, siblings and neighbours' children. And once they graduated, they almost always paid for an average of two siblings to go to school and built houses for their parents.

Who Created M-Pesa?

Who Created M-Pesa?

Bankelele

M-Pesa is officially over five years old and is celebrated as the greatest use of mobile money in the world with about 15 million users. But the question of who created M-Pesa has never been resolved..until now. 

On Sunday, there was a day long outage of M-Pesa which Safaricom attributed to  a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany and this started quite a bit of discussion on twitter about why the service is run from Germany and how authentically Kenyan M-Pesa really is. 

I've been in touch with Paul Makin before and so I invited him to join the conversation by tagging him and he went on to engage by giving answers to questions from twitter pals like @MediaMK @IddSalim @TerryAnneChebet and @Coldtusker who were genuinely interested and drove the conversation. 

Excerpts: 

- No-one GIVES me authority. As the original architect, I TAKE it.

- Original team was Nick Hughes and me. I came up with concept and architecture.

- Nick forced it through the business. Susie Lonie joined after about 6 months.

- This was all back in 2004. Took 3 years to get to launch.

- Susie made sure it worked on the ground. She went round forcing people to work together.

- We chose Sagentia to do the build. They did a good job. M-Pesa was a good team in those days.. didn't say that. The TEAM chose Sagentia.

- So I didn't build it, the team did. It was my concept and original design, though.

- DFID money said KE and/or TZ. We couldn't find right partners in TZ.. plus we liked entrepreneurial culture in KE. People were keen to work with us.

- It was matched funding. DFID money only helped pilot. VF money funded the live service. VF invested a lot.

- VF own all the IP. They paid for it.

- There was a small pilot. Once proven, VF turned it into a commercial service

- SF extremely helpful, and KE a good environment for innovation. People willing to try new things and try to make business!

- No but they were a good partner network. Very supportive. And you can't do proper security without being in the network!

- We spent a lot of time in KE, talking to ordinary people (not big business). That's where the idea came from

- I get annoyed when I see people who joined months/years l8r claiming they designed it!

- we talked as a team in a Nairobi bar. Came up with it, asked the barman (edit). He liked it, so it stuck. VF didn't like the name. Not corporate enough. But Nick fought for it, and won.

- Wouldn't have happened without him. He made sure SF worked with us, and worked with Nick to get it through VF

- There were the agents, who worked very hard. Without agents, M-Pesa

Co-operative model could be the answer to economic woes

Co-operative model could be the answer to economic woes

Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

Beyond the ethics, co-operatives have weathered the recession well – and private enterprise would do well to take note
Jiang Xingsan's day job is helping to run a vast agricultural group, the All-China Federation of Supply and Manufacturing Co-operatives, which serves millions of farmers across China, and has increased its payroll by 200,000 in the past year alone. But he was in Manchester last week, paying tribute to the Rochdale Pioneers.
"I'm especially proud to come to Manchester, because this city was the birthplace for co-operatives," he says. When the so-called Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society set up shop in 1844, promising good quality food at fair prices, and a share of the profits for their customers, they couldn't have known that their big idea would spread around the world.
More than 7,000 people, from 90 countries, gathered at the vast Manchester Central venue for "Co-operatives 2012" – part trade-show, part conference, part jamboree and the culmination of a UN-backed "Year of Co-operatives".
Namibian weavers, Canadian bankers and Malaysian tour guides gathered with just one thing in common – their business model. Instead of being owned by shareholders, who extract a slice of the profits, all these co-operatives hand over any gains they make to their customers and staff.
Before the credit crunch, co-ops were easily dismissed as worthy but irrelevant. But the crisis, and the failure of many developed economies to generate a sustainable recovery, have raised public interest in alternative ways of doing business. In total, co-operatives worldwide now have a billion members.
"There's more of a spring in our step now," says Ed Mayo, general secretary of trade body Co-operatives UK. "We have emerged from the crisis still holding trust." Dame Pauline Green, who leads the International Co-operative Alliance, told the delegates last week: "We know that co-operative banks, and credit unions, have not collapsed; they are not in receipt of taxpayer bailouts. Our arguments have begun to find traction with global decision-makers on the back of the sustainability and resilience of our financial model over the past five years."
Mayo has been appointed by David Cameron as a mutuals ambassador, to spread the word: and he says the argument is a much broader one than whether co-operatives are more ethical than their rapacious corporate rivals.
"There's a big story here: not just about responding to the credit crunch, but how the UK economy could be more productive and inclusive if it moves significantly towards a co-operative model," he says.

Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About

Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About

The Big Picture

Economists have been stumped by the past dozen years.
The Dotcom collapse was an early warning that economists, as a class, were not clued in. Sure a handful recognized that there were budding problems — think Bob Shiller — but he was notable as an exception.
Then we had the entire debacles of 2000s – derivative implosion, housing collapse, credit crisis, market crash — and we found that the vast majority of economists are academic theorists who were completely blindsided by events in the real world. And those were the good ones, as opposed to the biased hacks whose goals have nothing to do with discerning objective reality.
We need to admit that Economists, as a profession, are stumbling around in the dark.
To quote  Edward Hadas, "Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns."
Hadas identifies six questions which professionals should stop pretending they can answer:

1) What creates retail inflation?
2) How do financial asset prices affect the real economy?
3) Do big fiscal deficits damage the economy?
4) What does quantitative easing actually do?
5) How much leverage is too much?
6) How to deleverage without damaging the economy?

If economists cannot explain the basic workings of the economy, perhaps we should be relying on them much less for policy advice . . .

Source:
Admit economic ignorance
By Edward Hadas
Reuters, October 31, 2012
http://blogs.reuters.com/edward-hadas/2012/10/31/admit-economic-ignorance/
Previously:
To Find the Answers, Look Beyond Economics . . . (May 8th, 2011)
Letter from Chicago: F  (January 5th, 2010)
How Economists Got It Wrong (September 6th, 2009)
Read It Here First: "What Good Are Economists?" (April 25th, 2009)
RIP Chicago School of Economics: 1976-2008 (December 23rd, 2008)
The Illusory World of Economic Forecasting (September 19th, 2006)
Mystery of the Awful Economists, part 2 (April 2005)
Mystery of the Awful Economists (Part III) (April 2005)
2004: A test of Supply Side economics (December 27th, 2003)

Just Do It

Just Do It

SSIR Opinion & Analysis

By Liana Downey & Megan Golden
When it comes to measuring impact, perfect is often the enemy of good. Nonprofits and governments often aim too high and struggle to get started as a result.
Most organizations understand that by measuring impact they can identify problems, improve their programs, and attract funders, but many organizations still are not doing it.
In our work with nonprofits and governments around the world, we've heard leaders articulate a number of barriers to impact measurement. Three of the most common ones are:

• It's hard to get reliable data on our impact.
• We won't know if our program caused any changes.
• We don't have the resources to measure our impact.

The most important first step in overcoming these barriers is to put the ideal of perfection aside and just get started using existing tools.

Getting accurate data on impact

Program managers face two challenges: choosing a number to indicate their impact and getting accurate data on program participants. If your program aims to reduce crime or improve educational outcomes, for example, you may feel that arrest rates or standardized test scores do not really capture the impact your program has on the people you serve. And while it may be easiest to get the data by asking participants what their school grades are or whether they have been arrested, government databases may be a more reliable source.
There is often a trade-off between the ease of getting information and its reliability. Choose a data source that is reliable enough to enable you to make decisions. For recidivism, this information will likely have to come from the government, and you will need to sign an agreement to get the data from the relevant agency. If you are assessing drug use, you can get the information from participants using a validated assessment tool, such as the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN).

Knowing if your program is making a difference

If 60 percent of your program's participants score well on maternal health indicators, how do you know whether that is a positive result? Even if you find out that your participants score higher on reading tests after completing your program than before, can your program take credit for that? How would they have done without your program? Having a randomly selected control group is ideal but expensive, and it requires that the program randomly deny services to some beneficiaries. You need to have a baseline of performance to compare against, even if it is imperfect. Your ideal comparison will consist of people who look like your participants and who are going through the same system at the same time, but who are not getting your service. This might be people who didn't get into the program because of capacity. If you can't get that, you sometimes can look at data for the same population before the program began or data on people from a similar neighborhood. Where do you get this data?

• Published reports from government agencies (you may need to ask the agency to isolate people from your jurisdiction or your age group)
• Data from researchers who have studied the population
• A special data request to the relevant agency