Sometimes it IS about the money

There’s widespread agreement that more aid and?more NGO donations are not a simplistic panacea to solve development problems. Judith Tendler ?35 years ago wrote about the paradoxical phenomenon of aid abundance, in which donor agencies have trouble finding enough ways spending the money they already have; it’s still true today.

Yet things look very different at the other end of the aid delivery system. During a July trip to northern Ghana, I talked to a community leader in a? small farming hamlet outside of Bolgatanga, Ghana about availability of bed nets. The nets are working to prevent malaria for those who sleep under them, he says, but the town does not have enough nets to go around. “Everybody cannot sleep under one net,” he says.

When you reach the end of the road, it IS about the money. More money that reaches the end of the road means more malaria nets, fewer cases of malaria, fewer tragic deaths. The debate has never been about THAT,? it is about WHETHER the money reaches the end of the road.

So it comes to how likely it is that different official aid agencies and NGOs are to make the money reach the end of the road. This is a bit different than whether different aid interventions “work” according to randomized evaluation (RE). Even if the interventions pass the RE test, how do you know that one hundred additional dollars given to?one particular?agency will translate into additional?interventions??

My visits in northern Ghana were with local volunteers from the international NGO Nets for Life . Their basic idea is to use the trustworthy network of the Anglican church, including??local bishops, priests, and church workers?to deliver the?life-saving bed nets. I have been involved with Nets for Life at both ends now: both in board meetings in New York and at the receiving end in northern Ghana. I can’t claim to have performed any kind of systematic evaluation of Nets for Life, and even if I had, it would hardly be cost effective to for every concerned individual to perform their own time-consuming and costly evaluation of every small NGO program.??We need a much better system for identifying who is doing better reaching the end of the road, where it IS about how much money the agency can raise.?

Until then, I have a very favorable opinion of Nets for Life, based on hearing about their mode of operation,?seeing them in action in the field in visits to their intended beneficiaries in northern Ghana,? and also based on?the impressive attitudes, knowledge and dedication of everyone I have met involved with Nets for Life.

So to bring closer the day when we know more about NGOs, get to know your NGO as well as you can, using every method possible,?and share the information you collect with other actual and potential donors to that NGO (which is what I am doing in this post).? Again, this is all to assess the essential question: do donations reach the end of the road?

If the answer is yes, then yes it really IS about the money.

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Police say teen takes about 20 children hostage in pre-school in eastern France

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What the New HDI tells us about Africa

by Francisco Rodríguez, Head of Research at the Human Development Report Office

In a post published last Thursday, Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi criticize the new formula for the Human Development Index (HDI) introduced in this year’s Human Development Report.? Borrowing on a recent paper by the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion, Easterly and Freschi argue that our decision to shift from an additive to a multiplicative mean makes Africa look much worse than it should.

The relevant question, of course, is not whether the index makes any particular region or country look better or worse but whether the methodological changes introduced in the new version of the HDI make sense.? If we reject the methodology, we should do it based on the soundness of its principles, not on whether or not we like its conclusions.

Why the HDI has a new functional form – and what it means

One of the key changes to the HDI functional form introduced in this year’s report was to shift from an arithmetic to a geometric mean, thus introducing imperfect substitutability into the index. Imperfect substitutability means that the less you have of something, the more you will benefit from improvements in that dimension. By contrast, perfect substitutability (which had characterized the index’s old formula) means that how much you care about one dimension has nothing to do with its initial value. The old perfect substitutability assumption had been extensively criticized, with good reason.

Easterly and Freschi misinterpret the rates of substitution in the HDI as saying something about the “value” of a life.? But the HDI is not a utility function, nor is it a social welfare function.? It is an index of capabilities. ?What the huge differences in trade-offs between health and income in the index tell us is actually something quite simple: that income contributes very little to furthering capabilities in rich countries.? Societies may and do value other things than their capabilities, so it is incorrect to read these numbers as “values” of anything.

For more on why it is incorrect to read “values” into the HDI, read the longer version of this article.

Does the new HDI make Sub-Saharan Africa look worse?

What is the net effect of the new functional form on the relative position of Africa vis-à-vis the rest of the world?? In the 2010 Human Development Report, Africa’s average HDI stands at .389, or 62.3 percent of the world HDI.? If we had applied the old functional form, then Africa’s HDI would have been 64.1 percent of the world average.? So does the new HDI make Africa look worse?? Yes, exactly 1.8 percentage points worse.? While one can of course try to make a big deal about that, as Easterly and Freschi do picking up on the former’s earlier complaints about the MDGs, it seems that nothing in the general picture of Africa’s relative progress vis-à-vis the rest of the world really changes from the new functional form.

Easterly and Freschi also object to the HDR’s measure of progress, which they claim is biased against Africa.? First of all, it is not clear that it would be a good thing if a measure of progress ranked Africa highly for the past forty years, a period that includes the disastrous 1980s.? But if they were right and our measure was incapable of capturing African progress, then we shouldn’t see Africa do well in any period.? However this is not the case. Indeed using the same measure of progress, Africa does remarkably well since 2000.? As? shown in Table 1 below, Africa has six of the top 10 performers in the world, including all the top five (Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique and Burundi). Odd results indeed for an index which by design is claimed to be biased against Africa.

For more on Africa’s human development progress, read the longer version of this article.

References

Desai, Meghnad (1991), ‘Human Development: concepts and measurement’, European Economic Review 35, p. 350–357.

Lind, Niels (2004), ‘Values Reflected in the Human Development Index‘, Social Indicators Research 66, p. 283-293.

Sagar, Ambuj and Adil Najam (1998), ‘The Human Development Index: A Critical Review’, Ecological Economics 25, no. 3, June, p. 249-264.

Sen, Amartya (1980), “Equality of what?”, in S.M. McMurrin (Ed.), Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNDP(2010) The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

?See, for example, Desai (1991), Sager and Najam (1998), Lind (2004).↑
?For the notion of capabilities and its relationship to the human development approach, see Sen (1980).↑

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Arizona school district sends letters home about overweight kids

Chubby elementary school children in Flagstaff, Ariz., have more than just bullies to worry about. If they’re too fat, their school will notify their parents.

Starting in the fall, students in the Flagstaff district will?be weighed and measured at school. Students who are found to be overweight, marginally overweight, or underweight will have a letter sent home to their parents,?which will include graphs showing a range of appropriate weights for a given age and height.

Barry Hess, the vice chairman for the Arizona Libertarian Party and former Libertarian Party Arizona gubernatorial candidate, describes the Flagstaff school district’s decision to send notes home as “absurd.”

“I’m surprised that parents aren’t coming out against this with pitchforks and saying, ’shut up, stop ruining our kids,’” Hess told The Daily Caller.

Hess could not believe that parents of children in the Flagstaff school district would accept this new policy.

“This is an attempt [by the school district] to take over everything except responsibility for the child,” Hess told TheDC. “This is not providing an education, and the district is completely overstepping its boundaries here. It’s none of the school’s business to try to tell parents what they have to do. They don’t even care about kids being overweight. The school district just cares about breaking down the resistance of parents to an unsubstantiated authority.”

A Flagstaff Unified School District human resources representative, who did not provide a name, said, “this is not really anything new, it’s not a policy, I’m not even sure it can be called a policy. Every child that shows something significant in testing will have a letter sent home.”

An Arizona Daily Star editorial on Nov. 16 suggested that this was, in fact, a new policy. “Beginning this fall the [Flagstaff] district will measure and weigh elementary-school children and send letters to parents whose children are overweight or heading that way,” the paper’s editorial read.

K. Alison Clarke-Stewart, a psychology and social behavior professor at the University of California, Irvine, expressed concern that letters of this nature could potentially harm the self esteem of children.

“The message to parents about their children’s weight should be accompanied by a cautionary note that they should NOT make their children feel worse about themselves. They should not start lecturing the child about being fat,” Clarke-Stewart wrote in an e-mail to TheDC.

If parents do receive a letter regarding their child’s weight, Clarke-Stewart recommended the obvious: the child’s parents would be wise to promote a healthy diet.

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Why is nobody worried about the Asian brain drain?

Aid-financed scholarships for African students to study in the US or Europe would be worth a lot more than a million “capacity-building” projects. The usual argument against such scholarships is fear of brain drain — that the African students would not return home.

So why is nobody worried about brain drain of the gigantic numbers of Asian students studying in the US?

Source: Institute of International Education

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Why is nobody worried about the Asian brain drain?

Aid-financed scholarships for African students to study in the US or Europe would be worth a lot more than a million “capacity-building” projects. The usual argument against such scholarships is fear of brain drain — that the African students would not return home.

So why is nobody worried about brain drain of the gigantic numbers of Asian students studying in the US?

Source: Institute of International Education

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Why doesn’t the other gender care about Gender?

Thirty years on, it is proving harder than many of us had hoped for gender and development policy and practice to move beyond familiar stereotypes – women as abject victims or splendid heroines, men as all-powerful perpetrators.

Axioms abound: ‘women are the poorest of the poor’, ‘women give more priority to others – men invest more resources in themselves’, ‘women live in a more sustainable way than men and cause less climate change’, ‘women are the antidote to the financial crisis’.

Representations of men are limited and limiting. The ready association of the words “men” and “masculinity” with brute force, brash competitiveness and brazen prerogative makes those on the receiving end of the exercise of masculine power decisively female.

These complaints about Gender promoting gender stereotypes come from the journal Contestations, in an article by the always thought-provoking Andrea Cornwall and Emily Esplen.? They call for moving beyond stereotypes and actually involving Men in the cause of better lives for Women. They wonder why they have few?male?takers for their recommended actions:

Why … do we see so few men actually taking up these actions – even the men around us who declare themselves sympathetic allies?

Along with lots of bad reasons that don’t reflect well on men, it could also reflect a few men put off by a cause that, according to the authors,?perpetrates the “all men are evil” stereotype.

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G20 relieved no longer has to pretend to care about poor

G20 representatives expressed universal relief today in Seoul, Korea that they no longer have to pretend to feel deep concern about global poverty. “Thank goodness for all the grave problems the rich countries face,” said one anonymous and technically fictitious official. “Now we can stick to things we actually care about.”

Another gave a representative view: “it’s been exhausting every year since Gleneagles in 2005, going through hours of discussion to come up with enough meaningless actions to show our deep empathy for the global poor.”

“Our statements always stressed the sufferings of those people,” he continued, “but we were suffering too, working far into the night and often missing gala dinners to negotiate the details of the promises that we never intended to keep.”

The New York Times also reports on this story using non-fictional sources.

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David Brooks illustrates how clueless Easterners can be without local knowledge about My Midwest

A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in the jungle in a region not their own.

Brooks’ Midwest is:

that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks is apparently unaware from his vantage point?on the Far Eastern Coastal Rim?that central New York is still in the East, not the Midwest. And there has never been a single Midwesterner in two centuries who ever thought they were in the same ?region as Arkansas.

The Midwest has lost a manufacturing empire but hasn’t yet found a role.

Um, Mr. Brooks, were you aware that the Midwest has a few farms? Actually some of the best farmland in the world? and that it produces gigantic agricultural exports for the whole world?

Describing the electoral losses of the Democrats, he says:

The old industry towns in the Midwest were the epicenter of the disaster.

Great insight, except for the fact that the only places Democrats won?in the Midwest?were in the old industry towns.? Mr. Brooks, you have just earned a one-month scenic tour to chat with the nonexistent?Republican House members in Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron,?and Toledo, Ohio;?Detroit and Flint, Michigan; South Bend and beautiful Gary, Indiana.

So just to sum up how far a columnist can get without local knowledge, Mr. Brooks has produced some interesting facts that were not facts about a Midwest that was not the Midwest.

If you need a local guide through those remote wastelands, Mr. Brooks, ?I am at your service.?I’d like to talk to you about?some of your other columns I really like about things you know about.

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OK let’s get really rigorous about using local knowledge on US regions

One great response to Friday’s post on David Brooks’ less-than-perfect-knowledge about the Midwest was a Discover Magazine blog post by Razib Khan that provided the following evidence-based map:

and for those who missed it in the comments section, here’s a story from my favorite news source:

“I long suspected something was there,” said Franklin Eldred, a Manhattan native and leader of the 200-man exploratory force. “I’d flown between New York and L.A. on business many times, and the unusually long duration of my flights seemed to indicate that some sort of large area was being traversed, an area of unknown composition.”

Though the Midwest territory is still largely unexplored, early reports describe a region as backwards as it is vast. “Many of the basic aspects of a civilized culture appear to be entirely absent,” said Gina Strauch, a Los Angeles-based anthropologist. “There is no theater to speak of, and their knowledge of posh restaurants is sketchy at best. Further, their agricentric lives seem to prevent them from pursuing high fashion to any degree, and, as a result, their mode of dress is largely restricted to sweatpants and sweatshirts

“We must remember that these people are not at all like us,” Conde Nast publisher and Manhattan socialite Lucille Randolph Snowdon said. “They are crude and provincial, bewildered by our tall buildings and our art galleries, our books and our coffee shops.”

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Story about the U.S. food aid will be any worse?

Hundreds of thousands of malnourished children receive poor quality and even harmful food aid due to the slow introduction of more nutritious alternatives, a medical charity organization has warned.

The United States continues to make a donation directly to mixtures of maize flour fortified relief organizations and wheat with soybeans that do not meet international standards agreed in the 1960s…

…older Corn-Soybean blend flavoured foods (CSBS) given US contained insufficient micronutrient antinutrients interfered with the absorption of the child, without dairy proteins which were important for growth and large, limit the intake by young children with small stomachs.

see the complete in the FT story.

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