What aid workers can learn from missionaries

They come into a country with a long-term commitment. They don’t just want immediate results; they want souls. Missionaries bring their families and children with them, and those children go to local schools. They live in houses that are nice by local standards, but not in the expat palaces your average foreigner lives in. They bring their stuff with them in suitcases, not container ships.

Missionaries don’t try to do any soul-saving at first, spending a minimum of six months learning local language and culture. Mormons are renowned for their language skills. And once they have learned it, they stick around, spending years or even decades in country. They devote themselves to work in one particular place.

Compare that to your average expatriate working in development, for a donor or implementing a project. The expat lives in a little bubble of fake-home, cushioned by consumable shipments, huge shipping allowances, and hardship pay. With air conditioning and heating to ensure they’re even in a different climate. And they stay in once place for approximately 35 seconds.

Good people don’t have time to get great, and average people don’t even have time to get good. Complicated programs suffer as a result, and funding is biased toward things that are easy to implement and understand. No one has time to learn local context.

Read the full post by Alanna at Blood and Milk. I'm inclined to agree.

It's worth saying, however, what aid work ought not to share with missionaries: the saving mission. Development ain't religion, and there are no souls and bodies to be saved. Unfortunately, that actually needs to be said. I think Alanna would agree.

Development blog clusters

Two of my four collaborators in Uganda have blogs. Two colleagues on my Liberia projects are twittering. Now this:

I am eating lunch on the patio of the Green Forest guesthouse in Weasua, Liberia, a dusty town in the north of the country. Mitch, Green Forest's caretaker, has just returned from his morning of manual labor. He holds out his empty hands and shrugs. Handsome, well-dressed, and congenitally optimistic, he smiles even as he delivers disappointing news. "No diamond today."

That is Rob Blair writing for HuffPo on our latest venture to the diamond region where we are researching ex-combatants. The full post is worth reading.

News flash: there are no angels and demons in politics

Liberia's lady President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has been banned from public office. Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released it's report yesterday, concluding that Sirleaf be barred from politics.

Sirleaf is the latest darling of the aid community (Museveni and Zenawi: remember when?). Said aid community is, for the most part, stunned. Even Kristof is at a rare loss for words.

Should they be so surprised?

Sirleaf openly supported at least two rebel movements -- Charles Taylor's attempt to overthrow President Doe in 1989, and LURD's invasion to oust Charles Taylor a decade later. The TRC is condemning these actions--not something you'd expect human rights advocates to disbelieve, let alone protest.

Of course, it's not clear that there is a Liberian over the age of six who hasn't supported one rebel group or another the past twenty years. If they were all banned from politics, there wouldn't be a local left to run the place.

Not that it matters. The TRC has no teeth. I don't know the legal details, but the idea that the Commission can bar the President from politics seems laughable. Oh, did I mention that the TRC judges (a) laughably bad at their job, and (b) have political interests themselves?

But was dear Ellen unjustly maligned? Please. The outside world paints Sirleaf as an angel and Charles Taylor as a demon. Black and white politics are easy to digest. But there are no angels or demons in politics anywhere, least of all Liberia. Ellen is not the noble cherub you think. Taylor is not the black devil you fear. The truth of the matter, as always, is more subtle.

The real pity? The TRC recommended prosecution of some of the more devilish-leaning Liberians (of which Ellen is not one). It's hard to believe her government can push these prosecutions while denouncing and dodging the ban against Ellen (as I am sure they will). Whether political or idealistic, the TRC's decision is dangerous and naive.

The fallout is hard to predict. Her reelection in 2011 just became more challenging. And that is scary.

All the things that Ellen promised to do, all the things that would prevent another dictator from assuming power and ethnic groups clashing again in war--from ending the imperial Presidency, to empowering the anti-corruption commission, to pushing land reform--remain undone. The country is fragile as ever, and no more safe from an autocrat or warlord than it was five or fifteen or fifty years ago.

Having failed to groom a successor or build her party beyond her own personality, she sees herself as the only hope for the country. She is correct, but only because of her own broken promises.

Shout out to all my... gas companies

It probably seemed a good idea at the time. But Russia's attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time -- after the new company was named Nigaz.

See The Guardian for the full, hapless, story.

Little big man

Omar Bongo, longtime President of Gabon, died last month. I've been meaning to blog this article from The East African for some weeks.

It takes a certain genius to stay in office 42 years in Africa. Early signs suggested he had the gift.

One day Bongo, who had got a temporary job in a telegraph office in Brazzaville, noticed a telegram from a French general with instructions about which leader was going to be made to win which election.

Bongo was shocked, and leaked the information to local newspapers in Brazzaville, which feasted on the story. He was arrested and charged with revealing professional secrets, but he was acquitted because, as a temporary worker, he had not signed any secrecy clauses.

After that, Bongo used his contacts in Freemasonry to get a job in army intelligence. Once in, he donned his uniform and went to police headquarters and asked for the files on all the subversives. He found his own, slipped it under his clothes, and walked out.

“They tried to find my file,” he said with amusement, “and they never did!”

The article is cut from Nicholas Shaxson's Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil. I liked the excerpt enough to order the book. It offers one of my favorite Bongo quotes: “Africa without France is a car without a driver,” he said. “France without Africa is a car without petrol.”

Beyond Bongo, Shaxson throws light on the the dark shadow of French and American oil interests in Africa:

Elf would become de Gaulle’s strong arm in Africa — a vast offshore slush fund for channelling money secretly around the world, helping bend foreign leaders to his will, and an effective weapon against American and British companies competing with the French industrial giants.

“De Gaulle wanted a company under full state control, his secular arm in the oil world, to affirm his African policies,” a subsequent head of Elf later explained.

“Elf is not just an oil company but a parallel diplomacy to control certain African states, above all at the key moment of decolonisation. Alongside exploration and production, opaque operations were organised, to keep certain countries stable.”

Critics of China's (dodgy) Africa resources ventures need not look long into the West's own past to see deeds much worse.

The one that got away

In honor of the anniversary of Congolese independence (June 30, 1960), I bring you along on a journey into my inner monologue, provisionally titled "Argh! Why is coverage of the Congo always so f***ed up? (Part XVIII)."

My Google news alert for the DRC spat this out for me the other day: "DR Congo: UN calls for urgent reform after women raped during attempted prison-break." Of course I clicked through, because nothing compliments a breakfast of ibuprofen and coffee like tales of sexual assault in the Congo.

Tragically, however, the linked UN News Centre article provided little in the way of information beyond "Some rapes occurred during a rape by rapists. Also the Congo has prisons."

A follow-up the next day added that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was "deeply distressed" by the rapes. Finally, a few days later, I was assured that the UN is totally on top of things and is, even as we speak, in the process of reforming the Congolese prison system so that the events vaguely described in earlier coverage don't happen again. Phew.

Via Kate at Wronging Rights. You can see why I'm disappointed Yale lost her to Columbia...

A development blog you're probably not reading (but should)

Anti-malarials and TRCs, how to sell coconuts and random graffitti. (These are a few of my favorite things.)

Myles Estey is (I gather) a journalist based in Liberia. His blog, The Esteyonage, is worth a look.

Does political violence affect your sex life?

Unfortunately, for poor women in western Kenya, the 2007 election crisis had tragic and unexpected impacts:

We find that women who supply transactional sex suffered even greater income downfalls than the general population during the height of the crisis, and were unable to maintain consumption. As a result, they started engaging in significantly more and higher risk sex than prior to the crisis. These effects persisted after the political crisis ended.

That is Pascaline Dupas and Jon Robinson in a new paper that traces the effects of political crisis on incomes, vulnerabilty, and transactional sex in Kenya.

Links I liked

1. I before E except after C? Not any more.

2. Duncan Green on the latest Paul Collier book.

3. Stiglitz on the crisis

4. Is Twittering a behavioral disorder?

5. Should the poor be tourist attractions? Read the full series on Bill Easterly's blog.

6. And speaking of Twitter and Bill Easterly, the tweet of the week goes to BilalSiddiqi:

Just noticed: Bill Easterly tweets more frequently than allafrica.com. Trying to think of appropriate White Man's Burden joke but no luck

Random field notes

The only periodicals stocked in the UN guesthouse in central Liberia? The National Enquirer.

Headline: Bush does cocaine, in White House.

There is a picture of him scratching his nose.

NGOs: Please stop training

NGOs love nothing like a good training. Or better yet: training of trainers. What better way to give services to 20,000 people? So much sexier than serving just 200.

I'm in central Liberia observing peace workshops. Local chiefs and elders are the first and last stop for justice of any kind in post-war Liberia. This NGO is educating leaders and the community on mediation skills and human rights.

The problem (as I've discovered today): 30 percent of the town has received peace training before.

What?!

These people don't have roads. Surely this can't be the best use of scarce aid resources?

I guess we'll find out. It's one of a handful of UN post-conflict interventons I am evaluating.

It's too soon to say, but my guess: the outcome will be a very interesting panel data set and a nail in the coffin of peace education.

The death of the (unorthodox) short story

Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future.

Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances.

Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N.

... Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little thought experiment with "jazz" and "the bossanova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revalatory story."

Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.

That is a favorite fiction writer, Michael Chabon, mourning the death of the horror, science fiction, or mystery short story in his collection of essays, Maps and Legends.

Links I liked

1. Was there statistical fraud in the Iranian election? See here and here for an answer.

2. My grey hairs may be protecting me from cancer

3. What to do in Darfur. Can it be? Can I agree with Kristof?

4. Tyler Cowen on politics and God

Made in Africa?

Monrovia is awash in $1 apples. Apples aren't grown here; word on the street is the fruit were American grown, shipped to China, delivered to the Chinese troops peacekeeping in Liberia, and finally sold on the black market.

This is globalization gone terribly, terribly awry. I mean, can't the Chinese peacekeepers eat (locally-grown) mangos and pineapples?

I would blame the UN procurement beast, but the private sector breeds mutant markets as well.

Two years ago, I bought my sister-in-law a sisal purse in Uganda. Christmas day in Ottawa, she opens the present with delight. "Where's this from?" she asks, as she peeks inside. No sooner than I have replied "Uganda", she spots the tag sewn inside the bag: "Made in Canada".

We live in a world where it is economically feasible to sew purses in Canada, ship them to Uganda, to be sold to Canadians who will fly them back to their home as gifts. If there was ever a sadder statement on the African private sector, I don't know it.

A new pro-poor policy for Liberia

11 year old Liberian plastic bag salesman: "Do you want the poor people to become rich?"

My research manager, Bryan: "Why, yes!"

"Then give me your car."

A Thinkavist Manifesto

The Rwanda genocide unfolded at the same time as the elections marking the transition to a post-apartheid South Africa—during the first half of 1994.

At a meeting of African intellectuals called in Arusha later that year to reflect on the lessons of Rwanda, I pointed out that if we had been told a decade earlier that there would be reconciliation in one country and genocide in another, none of us could have been expected to identify the locations correctly—for the simple reason that 1984 was the year of reconciliation in Rwanda and repression in the townships of South Africa.

Indeed, as subsequent events showed, there was nothing inevitable about either genocide in Rwanda or reconciliation in South Africa.

I’m only a few pages into Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviours and Survivors, but I’m immensely enjoying it already. Even the footnotes (see above) are interesting.

The book is Mamdani’s broadside against the tide of Darfur advocacy movements in the US. The academic in me loves Mamdani’s basic point: politics, like life, is complex. Boiling the Darfur conflict down to a slogan and popular campaign is at best naive, and is probably doing a disservice to peace and stability itself.

Mamdani suggests a different credo for activists:

In contrast to those that suggest that we act the minute the whistle blows, I suggest that, even before the whistle blows, we ceaselessly try to know the world in which we live—and act.

Even if we must act on imperfect knowledge, we must never act as if knowing is no longer relevant.

'Thinknactivist' seems a little too plodding a term. I'll call it the Thinkavist Manifesto.

Here's the problem: these Thinkavists exist (probably even in the Save Darfur movement) and a good many agitate and educate daily (see blogs here and here).

The problem as I see it: simple messages, credos for action, and the call to "save" Africans will always mobilize more attention and enthusiasm than "Well, on the one hand...". Are we Thinkavists doomed to obscurity by our monotony and evenhandedness?

Our turn to eat

Leaving John that day, I felt a deep tinge of melancholy. Working in Africa, I’d grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on willful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends’.

When visiting a former Congolese prime minister, sitting in a garden whose bougainvillea-fringed gardens stretched across acres of prime real estate, I knew better than to ask if his government salary had paid for all this lush beauty… And when I shared a beer with a Great Lakes intelligence officer I’d befriended in a presidential waiting room, I knew that one day I’d probably come across his name in a human rights report.

…Life was complicated. The moral choices needed to rise to the top were bleaker and more unforgiving in Africa than those faced by Westerners.

It was easy for me, born in a society which coddled the unlucky and compensated its failures, to wax self-righteous. I had never been asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, never had relatives beg me to compromise my principles for their sakes, never woken to the bitter realization that I was the only person stupid enough to play by the rules. If I was to continue to like these men and women – and I did like these men and women – it was sometimes necessary to focus on the foreground and willfully ignore the bigger picture.

That is Michela Wrong in It’s Our Turn to Eat, the tale of her friend John Githongo, anti-corruption crusader of Kenya. As it turns out, John did not disappoint; he wrecked his life and career and family in an effort to expose some of the most egregious corruption scams in his native land. In their first years in office, President Kibaki and his cronies would loot nearly as much money as entered Kenya in aid.

Wrong is among my favorite journalists writing on Africa (a favorite piece is here). Her new book is superb – part journalism, part diary, and part Le Carre novel. The academic in me wasn’t always pleased; her assessment of ethnic politics is thinly constructed (this syllabus might come in handy), and her portrait of Githongo can’t help but be influenced by a close friendship. But a more interesting and readable book on Africa is hard to find.

Kibaki and the ‘Mount Kenya Mafia’ emerge as the real villains of her story, but the World Bank and DfID come out second and third. A series of Bank country directors enjoyed an uncomfortably cozy relationship with the President, one exiting in semi-disgrace after the horrendous 2007 election. Wrong faults both donors for putting budget imperatives ahead of common sense.

The trouble with doubling foreign aid: ready or not, that money has to go out the door. Add an American desire to maintain an important ally against terror, and we get a state unaccountable to its donors and well as its citizens.

I don’t know the full Bank and DfID side of the story (readers: any insights?) but I’m sympathetic to Wrong’s point of view. Donors repeatedly tell African leaders to walk the talk on fighting corruption, but those same leaders know from experience that dallying has few consequences.

Leaders like Museveni and Kibaki are showered with money and praise irrespective of their toothless corruption campaigns. Exporting the Patriot Act seems to take precedence over pushing the transparency agenda. Unfortunately, it seems to take a violent debacle like Kenya’s 2011 election to wake up the snoozy aid agencies to reality. Let’s hope the same is not true of Uganda’s 2011 poll.

Where southerners fear to tread

I make my last trip down from Uganda's north to Kampala today, before heading back to Liberia on Wednesday.

I'm reminded of a trip south more than two years ago, shortly after the war ended and LRA rebels moved to cantonment sites in southern Sudan. The roads finally safe to travel without military escort, Jeannie and I took two weeks to drive a 4x4 from Kitgum down to the Rwandan border, visiting wildlife parks, mountain retreats, and lakeside villages on the way down.

As we crossed out of the conflict zone, we stopped for petrol. Southern Ugandans fear the north of their country, and hold all sorts of misconceptions. So we weren't surprised when the wide-eyed station attendant asked what we were doing driving out of the north. She'd never before seen two wazungu alone on the road.

We explained that we worked in Kitgum with war-affected youth, but were taking a short holiday. It was then our turn to look wide-eyed.

"Those poor people up there. How they have suffered," she replied. "I had no idea how bad it was, though, until I saw it last week on Oprah."

Now that is a national diconnect. Even today we have trouble finding drivers in Kampala who will brave a trip to the (now peaceful) north. As best I can tell, Uganda has surrendered reconstruction in the north to the hundreds of American missionaries and college students that flock to Gulu for internships. As we speak, I'm flanked by two 20-year olds updating their Facebook pictures.

It will be a long road to post-conflict development in Uganda...

Shame and war

The most significant question was: why did they want to join the IRA? The same simple reasons cropped up all the time: the Brits were killing our people; the army, police and legal system were biased against Catholics; they felt as Catholics that they were discriminated against generally in society and nothing was ever done about it. ALmost always they expressed personal experiences of harassment and intimidation from the Crown forces.

That is Eamon Collins, a onetime IRA intelligence agent, in Killing Rage. It's a memoir and meditation on why certain northern Irish Catholics turned to terror and violence. This is easily the most readable book on war I've encountered in some time. Collins gives an incredible insider's account of the IRA--a history, a guilty confessional, and a search for an explanation why so many people would turn to terror for a political cause.

I pulled the book from a new civil war syllabus from some Yale colleagues--Stathis Kalyvas and Paul Kenny. Economists and political scientists who study war fret over the 'participation problem'--why some would risk everything for a goal they may not live to see reached (especially a revolution from which they can reap benefits without actually fighting).

Collins would have us believe that shame, humiliation and injustice lead some to fight. The same argument has been made by Libby Wood in El Salvador. I find myself increasingly persuaded.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

The problem with 10-week field trips to Africa is that eventually you have to find yourself a barber--ideally one that has cut foriegn hair before. 

In Kampala, this should have been an easy task. There are foreigners galore living here, and to find the best spot, I asked one of the nicer hotels where they send their guests. 

Five hours later, I have been asked twice whether I am a Marine.

The process looked fine when my glasses were off. Oterwise I might have stopped the man sooner. But haircuts for the short-sighted is always a leap of faith. You don't really know what that brown blur looks like until you put your glasses back on.

If this isn't a good reason for contacts, I don't know what is.

The culture of fear (international bandit edition)

The NY Times' own Kristof offers us 15 tips for surviving bandits in poor countries. Among them is "carry a fake wallet" and (the tried and true favorite) "pretend you are Canadian".

While sometimes the article sounds like an excuse to recount the exploits of brave Kristof, I'd endorse all15 suggestions. I just have one problem: they undermine his ultimate ambition.

Kristof wants more students travelling to more dodgy places. So do I. But one emerges from the article thinking a bandit lurks around every developing country corner. 

How many more parents will now dissuade their son or daughter from the travel Kristof wants them to take? How many will go, but approach every local with an ounce of trepidation and a measure of fear? Americans have cultivated a culture of fear at home. Need we export it abroad too?

Here's a simple truth: just like home, car accidents not bandits are the bogeyman. Malaria might be the second major risk, for which we have easy solutions. Thieves and rapists are typically a distant danger.

This is not to say you shouldn't take precautions. But personally I try to remember that I have more risk of bandits in New York and New Haven than any of the countries I visit. (Note from experience: this point does not relieve spousal and parental anxiety about your international travel.) 

The essential point: foreign does not equal dangerous. Dwelling on the potential bandit round the next corner will make you miserable, paranoid, and make even a little prejudiced. 

Randomization in the tropics

Today we ran a very public randomization for our field experiment in Uganda. Village and parish leaders gathered for a presentation and meeting, and after introductions and some discussion, everyone lined up to take turns selecting villages into treatment and control. Despite some hiccups, a big success.

The trouble with randomized experiments, some fear, is the randomization. In some instances I'd agree. Here, the leaders we met seemed to be pleased that aid was finally being allocated transparently and fairly.

In this case the lottery was particularly easy. There is no permanent control group, merely a Phase 1 and Phase 2. The control villages will receive the program in 18 months time (a reasonable consolation). The NGO is running at max capacity just to fit in all the Phase 1 people, and the leaders seemed to like the fact that no favorites were played.

Even so, there were collective cries and laughs when one parish's villages would all get Phase 1, and another would get nearly all to Phase 2.  The only truly sorrowful cry came from the blogger/econometrician at the table, as he saw some of his statistical power drift away. 

Ah, to be able to block and randomize on a computer...

This town needs an urban planner

I've just reached Kampala after a week-long stay in the north of Uganda. I thought the traffic here was bad before, but it's gotten so bad that the street vendors now sell shoes. Picture it: they come to your window with three or four pair, and drivers have just enough time to try them all before the cars in front start moving again. It takes an hour to cross town. 

I miss the north already...

Who knew the UN wrote bad checks?

A UN agency that will remain unnamed wrote us a check for our services but asked us not to cash it until they managed to get cash in their account. The funds are already months overdue, the program and evaluation close to horribly compromised. 

Another financial institution is six months late paying my staff, in spite of a contract. I am advancing my RAs personal funds as we speak, just to keep them afloat. 

This is all bad enough, but imagine I were a small local NGO with no liquidity or ability to borrow. That describes half my colleagues in Uganda and Liberia--remarkable people with remarkable community organizations, strung out cashless by their irresponsible donors.

If we could move the debate from paying more aid to actually paying out the existing aid, I would be a happy man...

The games we play…

I’m in northern Uganda in part to check in on a post-conflict program evaluation. Two years ago I made some policy recommendations and, to my enduring surprise, someone listened. Soon I found myself evaluating a micro-enterprise program for ultra-poor war-affected women in northern Uganda.

From the start (I must admit) I was just half interested. The program was obviously important, as is understanding the poverty dynamics among the ultra-poor, but as a research project it seemed unpromising. My research collaborators and I wracked our brains for ways to build the contribution. What has emerged is, I hope, a slightly new breed of evaluation.

One difference is that we're trying to feed into the NGO program in real time. There are multiple phases, and with data collection on handheld computers we can clean and analyze the data as it's being collected; reports are ready weeks after the first phase to inform the next one. We're also training the NGO  to collect program data on their own handhelds as they follow up their beneficiaries, for their own interbal monitoring and evaluation.

Another is a focus on the political and social effects of economic assistance. We'll measure these directly, relating income gains to any empowerment in the household or participation in the community. But we're also going to see if we can spur collective action in these villages and displacement camps, largely by encouraging half of the participants to form community groups.

We’ve also beefed up our qualitative research. Along with two psychologist colleagues, three Ugandan research assistants will follow 32 women in 8 communities for 12 months, tracing routes out of poverty to empowerment over time. The volume of qualitative data is going to be enormous, but we have amazing budding ethnographers compiling and synthesizing the data from their countrywomen.

Since the project just wasn't complex enough, last month we decided to add behavioral games to the mix. A colleague from Yale and I are running a day of risk, time preference, public goods, and group cooperation games at baseline. The idea is to link these survey and behavioral experiments to actual business performance and poverty dynamics over time (not to mention the collective action).

I started out a game skeptic, but am finding myself converted. What seemed contrived and absurd is actually the most popular part of our survey. 

We always knew the 60-minute baseline survey was tedious. Turns out that playing games for real money is absurdly popular; our experiments team is like a roving casino, the most popular people in northern Uganda.

Reports and photos to follow, internet connmections permitting...