Pointing to problems
Topic: Development
DamselFish puts a finger on some of the many issues with the practice of development that I've been struggling with as I try to figure out what I'm going to do after grad school.

One of the things that I hadn't done much thinking about when I was working in development was the way that governments use aid in their own interests. Sure, I was aware of regulations in USAID grant contracts about flying on US airlines when using grant funding to travel and buying US products, but I didn't really think it all through. This is just one of the ways that governments can use aid to pursue their best interests, and those interests are often understood to be maintaining the status quo in aid-receiving countries, or supporting 'improvements' that donor governments think they can predict the outcomes of. Since governments are major suppliers of aid funding, many NGOs are, therefore, complicit in furthering government aims.

Is this a bad thing? That's the question I haven't resolved yet. It's a situation that, as DamselFish points out, is highly unlikely to lead to radical social change. Most development initiatives function on the premise that Western-style democracy and capitalism are the standard to which all nations should aspire, ignoring the fact that these models are also products of particular historical and cultural developments, and as such, may well be difficult to transplant. Another problematic premise is that 'developing' societies can be brought up to a standard equal to 'developed' societies without the developed societies having to make any substantial sacrifices of their own in terms of power and resource advantages.

Does all of this negate the positive changes that development programs have made in people's lives, though? I've talked to a lot of microfinance clients who were very clear that participating in the program had made important changes in their lives, and who were grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in it. In the face of their testimony, I find it difficult to argue that the programs are not achieving good ends. Whether they're truly having the last impact that aid and development NGOs claim they're aiming for remains to be seen.

And now it has been announced that the Bush administration is forging much closer ties between the US government's aid agency, USAID, and the State Department. A new position, the Director of Foreign Assistance has been created, with the aims of aligning US government aid more closely with foreign policy, and aligning State Department and USAID assistance activities. The Director of Foreign Assistance will serve as the head of USAID and have a position in State equivalent to Deputy Secretary. Although the official word is that USAID's status as an independent government organization will remain unchanged, USAID employees (Washingon Post, may require registration*) don't seem to be entirely convinced.

Oxfam America, which is not a recipient of USAID funding, also has some concerns about the restructuring, which are politely put forth in this statement. Although I might argue that the line between the US political agenda and US humanitarian aid hasn't ever been that clearly drawn, I do agree with Oxfam's concern that blurring the boundaries of US humanitarian, political and military actions would complicate the work of NGOs, both foreign and local, and could place their staff at risk. Any immunity that aid organizations and their staff currently enjoy due to the perception that their activities are separate from the political actions of a particular government would evaporate, and even if violence isn't a risk, if local people are suspicious of aid organizations, it makes their work much less likely to achieve any sort of success.

The nominee to fill the position of Director of Foreign Assistance isn't meeting with universal acclaim either. Ambassador Randall Tobias currently serves in the State Department as Global AIDS Coordinator, a position he was nominated for despite a conspicuous absence of public health expertise in his bio. The title of "Ambassador" comes with the position. I'm not enthusiastic about the idea that USAID could be headed by someone who doesn't seem to have any experience working overseas. Advocates for Youth has expressed concerns about the impact his leadership could have on foreign assistance targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention.

Whether any of these concerns will bear fruit remains to be seen, obviously. One the one hand, I'm skeptical about measures that would make humanitarian and development aid blatant political tools, but on the other hand, I find myself wondering if this isn't just a clearer articulation of a situation that already exists.

TomPaine.com and US Newswire were sources for this post.

Update: More from DamselFish on this topic (although she declines to comment on the USAID situation), with good points about the nature of the national interest and NGOs' moral stances and their alignment with donor government interests and foreign policy.

The point I'd like to elaborate on is 'improvement', because of the link to indicators, which I've posted a bit about before. One of the problems with indicators is that data has to be quantified, 'rationalized' and standardized to a fairly high degree in order to demonstrate 'improvement' or 'deterioration' and to make comparisons across different areas. This tends to lead to the sidelining of the perceptions and values of local people. The improvements that local microfinance clients talked to me about were not ones that were captured in our global indicator reports, which were concerned with aggregate increases in loan sizes and amounts, repayment rates, and value of savings.

This disconnect between indicators and local impact can be remedied, to some extent, by involving beneficiaries in identifying the indicators that they find most meaningful in describing change in their lives, but then you start to run into the problem of how comparable context-specific data is across regions and countries, and the attitude that some take is 'what's the use of having the data if it's not comparable?' Comparable to what? And should anything be more important than what local people think are the benefits and disadvantages of the change in their lives? It might not be an 'objective' measure, but I think 'objective' indicators create the illusion that change is far more controllable and comprehensible than it actually is. Is it possible that the value of indicators is that we can reassure ourselves that we know what's going on? See, we've got the numbers and the timelines, and look at these pretty charts and graphs!

I've got plenty more to say on this topic, but it strikes me that this post is more than long enough already. I also just got invited to go to the beach, so I'll finish here and go pack my beach bag.



*In which case, you may want to use BugMeNot

Spam scams and sweatshops
Topic: Development
Like Barista, I can't believe that there are people who a) ever did, and b) still continue to fall for 419 scam e-mails. Can that many people really have missed out on both the adage that "if something seems too good to be true, it probably is" as well as all the publicity about 419 scams that has been published in recent years? I am fascinated by the fact that there is an entire industry, believed to be one of Nigeria's largest,* devoted this scam. Barista points to my heart's in accra for further discussion of the phenomenon. (Take this quiz if you want to find out which Nigerian spammer you are.)

my heart's in accra taught me something new, which is always exciting, particularly when it involves one of my favorite countries. I had no idea that Cambodia has a garment industry regulations that are exemplary in terms of the protection and benefits they provide to industry employees. Unfortunately, the Cambodian garment industry is now facing stiff competition from the Chinese garment industry, which does not offer its workers the same protections (to say the least). According to this article (link from Beth's Blog), the Gap is a major American retailer with a strong commitment to Cambodia, so you have a good chance of finding that label in their clothes, as well as those from Old Navy and Banana Republic. This article (also from Beth's Blog) names some other major companies and retailers that buy Cambodian-made goods. Not that I'm encouraging anyone to shop at the mall. But if you're going to, keep an eye out for the "Made in Cambodia" label.

An interesting connection between the stories is the problem of corruption in Cambodia and Nigeria. In Cambodia, bribes to corrupt officials increase costs, undercutting garment factory profits and putting workers' jobs at risk. In Nigeria, corruption creates an atmosphere in which the various 419 spam scams can flourish. Transparency International, discusses some of the many costs of corruption. Based on TI's 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index, Cambodia and Nigeria both face significant challenges in combating entrenched corruption, with both countries currently ranked very near the bottom of the index.


*From the paper 'The Nigerian "419" Advance Fee Scams: Prank or Peril?' by Harvey Glickman of Haverford College, which is a fascinating read in terms of contextualizing the phenomenon historically (the type of scam dates from the 16th century) and politically (unemployed techies, political corruption, criminal networks are just some of the factors contributing to the strength of the 419 industry in Nigeria).

I know I ought to be working
Topic: Development
It's all the Guardian's fault for publishing articles that make me go all thinky. In 'Not just for profit, or not just?', Salil Tripathi comments on the difficulties inherent in getting pharmaceutical companies to do research into health issues that are critical for poorer countries, since trying to profit from such drugs is a public relations nightmare for the companies. Tripathi is highly complimentary of Bill Gates's substantial donations to research on anti-malarial drugs, since he and Gates apparently agree that 'what we have to do is create the right incentives for the pharmaceutical companies'. The responsibility for providing these incentives, according to Gates and Tripathi, lies with philanthropists and governments, which can help absorb the risk of research into low-profit areas by providing research funding and/or committing to purchasing profitable quantities of drugs from pharmaceutical companies, and then supplying the drugs to poorer countries.

It's an interesting article, and put me in mind of discussions I had with former co-workers about the difficulties of providing anti-retroviral drugs to poor HIV-affected communities in Africa. The cost of getting the drugs is only part of the problem, and may actually be the most easily solved, using incentive mechanisms such as those described by Tripathi. At least, the cost issue might be solved initially by, say the US government purchasing a large quantity of anti-viral drugs and donating them to a poorer country. But then other challenges start to surface, for example, appropriate provision of the drugs, which have to be taken on a precise schedule because if they're taken incorrectly they lose effectiveness and may encourage drug-resistant forms of HIV to develop. Another difficulty is working out ways to provide sustainable long-term access to anti-viral medications, since grant funding usually has a term of about 5 years, and hopefully, the life of someone who is successfully taking anti-retrovirals will last many years beyond that. So its not just as simple as 'getting the drugs out there'.

I did find it frustrating, though, that the article was more about working around the current system than thinking about ways to change it. There's a sentence that hints at an issue that I think needs further exploration: 'Making a vaccine also takes time, but in general, there is more money to be made in curing diseases rather than in preventing them.' It seems to me that there's a fundamental flaw in a system that disincentives research into vaccines because there's more money to be made in treating diseases than in preventing them.

A dollar a day
Topic: Development
$365 a year with which to support yourself. It has been the standard for measuring absolute poverty since I started working in development. Since the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are in the news this week due to the UN summit, and one of the aims of the MDGs is to dramatically reduce the number of people living on $1 per day by 2015, it's now news that maybe this measure isn't quite as absolute as it's made out to be:

Critics say the $1-a-day measurement of poverty does not distinguish between the widely different experiences of the poor, which cannot be measured simply by looking at income.

"The ... fundamental question is whether such statistical propositions as the $1-a-day-life reflect any reality that real people live in," asked Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul in his recently published book "The End of Globalism."

"After all, people at $3 a day could be living a life of pure despair in a savage slum of Lagos, a life far worse than that at $1 a day in a stable slum like Klong Toey in Bangkok, where there is a societal structure," he wrote.

...

The World Bank says the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 1.1 billion in 2001 from 1.5 billion in 1981 -- a much trumpeted trend that mostly reflects the economic rise of China and India.

But it also says the number living on less than $2 a day increased to 2.7 billion in 2001 from 2.4 billion in 1981.

"The 1.6 billion people in the middle, between the $1 and $2 a day poverty lines, are still very poor and remain vulnerable to economic slowdowns," it said in a recent report.

So if the goal posts were moved, and $2 a day was the benchmark -- and it is the preferred measure of some analysts -- it would suggest that global poverty is in fact on the rise.

It seems a bit absurd, doesn't it, to quibble over the dollar amount at which the poverty line should be drawn, when trying to live on $3 per day sounds every bit as impossible as living on $1 a day. I'm with the "[c]ritics [who] contend that the goals themselves set an objective on poverty that obscures the complexity of the problem and that focusing on the $1-a-day measure can be misleading", but realistically, I don't expect this measure to be displaced by a more complex one any time soon. For one thing, it's relatively simple information to acquire and to compare across time. For another, it satisfies a psychological need to have clear lines drawn against which to measure progress (or the lack thereof). And, perhaps most tellingly, it situates "extreme poverty" squarely in the "developing" world, and doesn't shift the focus back to the ways that Western countries are failing to meet the needs of their own poor, as a more complex measure might.

The cost of low prices
Topic: Development
The BBC reports that "US retail giant Wal-Mart has been hit with a lawsuit that claims it ignores sweatshop conditions at many of its suppliers' factories around the world." I wish I had it in me to be gleefully happy that someone is finally attempting to stick it to Wal-Mart on their overseas labor practices, but the most I can manage is a "good for you" sort of feeling toward the people who have put this lawsuit together.

Wal-Mart is a symbolic target, really. I hope that by saying that, I don't sound dismissive of the efforts that the workers behind this lawsuit engaged in to file it, because I'm guessing that they're not thinking of it in symbolic terms. But looking at the larger picture, even if the plaintiffs go to court and win the case, it won't change the fact that essentially, almost any major American retailer is going to be implicated in supply relations with overseas suppliers who provide employment under exploitative circumstances. For example, when I was in Honduras in 1999 with a group from college, we visited a garment-making maquiladora in an export processing zone. This was one of the "good" ones -- clean, brightly lit, minimal crowding. And yet their workers were doing repetitive, potentially hazardous labor for wages that wouldn't allow them to afford the garments they were making, even if they were available for sale in Honduras. It wasn't a horror show, and I'm not saying that the workers might not have been glad to have the jobs, but it didn't make me feel good about the clothes that I had on my back.

It's really frustrating to me that the best that I can do, short of making my own clothes (and even then, how would I know what conditions the cloth was made under?), is to try to dance with the devil who's doing a lesser degree of damage. Everybody I know who's aware of the issues has their own strategy for coping with the situation (patronize particular retailers, buy secondhand, never pay full price for clothes), working within the constraints of limited time and money. Its not easy, though -- sometimes you just want to buy the cute shirt and not think about the exploitative systems behind its production.

So, even though I'm not as happy about the news as I might like to be, if this lawsuit makes a positive change in the lives of the workers on whose behalf it was filed, that would be one good outcome. Another would be if the case gets people thinking about the systems that Wal-Mart practices support, and whether they want to encourage the continuation of those practices by shopping there. Not that that's a simple issue either: Wal-Mart is a major employer, it may (now) be the only significant retail provider in some non-urban areas, and cheap goods are all that some people can really afford. It's not like Wal-Mart has created the system, it's just sort of the biggest, ugliest exploiter of it.

I've got no solutions. I don't even really have any suggestions, beyond saying: think about it, be aware of the issues, decide what level of participation in the system you can live with and what you can realistically do to minimize the harm that your spending habits might be causing. Just, you know, pay attention, decide what the best you can do is, and then try to stick to it.

Maybe some day the Blue Fairy will make this a real blog,
Topic: Development
with news taken from the headlines of the day. Until that happy day arrives, you get old news and more stuff about G8, because I just don't think that fast.

Prior to the start of G8, Salon.com published this list of things that Bush could do at G8 to demonstrate that he is serious about fighting poverty in Africa. The author makes some suggestions that sound good to me. Stopping with the lazy shorthand that lumps all the diverse countries and peoples contained in the continent under "Africa" could very well be a good thing, for instance. And recognizing that nations that aren't the most capable but also aren't the poorest get lost in the mix is important. But the author doesn't seem to have much doubt about the helpfulness or desirability of Western aid. And her suggestion for channelling more aid through NGOs suggests that she's either not aware or doesn't agree with critiques of NGOs, such as the question of who they're accountable to and whether there are appropriate systems in place for monitoring NGOs. I have a problem with the fact that there's no signficant acknowledgement in the article of the debates around the effectiveness of development aid and the practice of channelling aid through NGOs.

Economist James Shikwati, in an interview in Der Spiegel, absolutely rips into the concept and practice of aid, for both humanitarian and development purposes. I don't know enough about Africa to make any specific counterarguments, but I can't help but feel that there's some serious oversimplification going on in at least some of his arguments. For example, in his characterization of the Marshall Plan and the post-tsunami reconstruction in Thailand. But I found it an interesting read, nonetheless.

Clearly Shikwati must be disappointed in the outcome of the G8 summit: more aid, but no fair trade. Disappointed, but not surprised.

Update: Just found the following articles from BBC coverage of the TEDGlobal (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford: Technologies 'to aid the poor', which highlights the Grameen Bank's mobile phone program in Bangladesh, and Call for rethink in aid policy, which presents a succinct overview of problems with traditional development programs: short time frame, inappropriate technical assistance, distortions in the local economy.

Also from TEDGlobal coverage: It's here, it's queer, get used to it.

Adding up
Topic: Development
I literally just stumbled across this, so I haven't taken the time to really go through it and digest it, but my initial reaction is definitely warm and fuzzy. 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize is a website - and a forthcoming book - about work being done by women around the world to further the cause of peace, broadly defined as the enhancement of human development and security. The bio information on the individual women is very brief, but interesting, nonetheless (click "Browse" under "1000 PeaceWomen" to read through the available bios). Being a nerd, I'm looking forward to digging into the information about the project's methodology and results, since its the first attempt to document the development work of women, particularly women engaged in grassroots-level work, that I've heard of happening at this scale.

Loving the G8 coverage
Topic: Development
Suddenly everybody is interested in development! How exciting! I wonder what it says about my future career plans that the articles I like best are those that are critical of the development industry?

For instance, in Welcome to the aid business, Michael Holman takes Western NGOs to task for their relationships with governments and the media, and highlights the lack of accountability structures for NGOs operating in developing countries. Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie's article in the Times develops a point made in Holman's piece: that the governments of donor countries can and do use aid to gain influence over developing countries, while the gains to the recipient country (particularly its poorest), are often very small-scale.

Chikezie suggests that the G8 leaders would do well to listen to people from Africa, and Emily Wax's article in the Washington Post concurs. She highlights the issues of corruption and international trade and how they perpetuate a cycle of poverty in Africa.

Criticism of Western aid and development NGOs doesn't tell the whole story, of course. I'd hardly want to do the work if I thought it did. For one, if the alternative to NGOs and development agencies is to hand poverty relief over to multinational corporations, as George Monbiot alleges G8 leaders are doing, I'll take most NGOs any day. But I do think it's important to look at the dark side of development as well. Obviously, any time money and politics coincide, there's going to be more going on than what's apparent on the surface.

Update: From the Christian Science Monitor, a good story about what it takes for a family in Malawi to live on $1 per day

Good intentions aren't good enough
Topic: Development
Tsunami aid 'went to the richest'

"The unprecedented international response to the tragedy means that the immediate humanitarian demands could be fully funded. Failure to deliver assistance effectively to the poorest, or to plan properly for the future, reveals fundamental weaknesses in the system."