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Ethan Zuckerman has had a chance to reflect on the TEDGlobal conference, and has posted his thoughts. I am most interested in the suggestions for reshaping aid to Africa, which he gleaned from the various critiques and defences offered during the conference:
- Build infrastructure that enables African businesses. This includes roads, railroads, ports, airports, and critically, power generating facilities.
- Encourage trade between African states and between African states and the rest of the world, in part by dismantling tariff barriers and unfair subsidies.
- If you aid governments directly, do so in a way that they use the money to support entrepreneurship, not to enrich “the hippo generation”. Look for ways to support the energetic, young “cheetah” generation.
- Public health, including maternal health and “ordinary” healthcare has to be a major priority going forward, not just AIDS and malaria care.
- Education is critical. A large percentage of the speakers at the conference were brilliant young Africans who’d had the opportunity to study abroad - it’s critical that great opportunities to learn develop on the continent.
- Value your diasporans, not just as investors, but as ambassadors and generators of new ideas.
- Image matters, not just to outside partners but to Africans who are mischaracterized as struggling and weak. Rebranding the continent - or individual countries - has to be part of the continent-wide change.
As he notes, these are not radical suggestions - it's implementing them that's challenging. For example, changing the way that the donors who fund aid projects think about the purpose of aid and measure the quality of aid projects. The meeting that I facilitated last month was about health programming in the South, and the consensus among the advisors at the meeting was that a holistic approach to public health is essential. One of the major obstacles to implementing a holistic health approach is donor funding that is targeted exclusively at specific diseases, such as HIV/AIDS. malaria and tuberculosis. This disease-specific focus tends to underplay the development of good community health that reduces the impact of these, and other diseases. It also tends to allow for very little community definition of what project success looks like, since donors tend to rely on indicators established by "technical experts" to tell them whether a project is successful or not. Getting donors to accept the validity of community-level goals and expertise when lots of money is on the line and there's a lot of pressure to demonstrate that a project is successful is a challenge, to say the least. Shifting this mindset is going to take a lot of advocacy, and some donors who are bold enough to take a chance on new approaches. Hopefully, the ideas spreading out of TEDGlobal will help spur advocates and donors to work to effectively address the critiques of how aid is delivered to Africa.
Ethan Zuckerman is currently blogging from the TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Kenya. TED brings together thinkers and innovators for annual conferences in California, and biannual global conferences in different locations around the world.
Zuckerman believes that the organizers of the conference have an ambitious agenda:
Emeka wants to convince you that, as John Perry Barlow once wrote, everything you know about Africa is wrong. You’ll be hard pressed to find voices here mourning the “failure” of Africa - you’ll find many more talking about potential, both tapped and untapped. Leaning on his work on Timbuktu Chronicles, Emeka has found a set of business innovators who will represent the core of the speakers list, complemented by scientists, politicians and musicians, the vast majority of whom live and work on the continent. I suspect that the overall message of the event will challenge the preconceptions of all participants, African and non-African.
The conference is already fulfilling this expectation, with Euvin Naidoo's reminder that "Africa" is not a monolith:
One major source of our ignorance about Africa is the tendency to forget that the continent is 53 separate countries. “To say ‘invest in Africa’ is meaningless.” You can make money and lose money in Africa. But it’s worth noting that companies like Bain Capital are coming into South Africa and purchasing retail companies - that’s a bet on the emergence of the middle class. Nigeria must be taken seriously - it’s going to be one of the ten largest economies in the world by 2020, and we’re already seeing Nigerian companies capable of raising money through Eurobonds, securities with no government backing.And Nigeria currently produces as much oil as Venezuela or Kuwait. There are 135 million people in Nigeria, and 700 ATMs - that’s an opportunity, for serving tens of millions of unbanked people.
Limited understanding of African countries and African people is furthered by the images and stories, largely negative, that pervade Northern culture:
Andrew Dosunmu, a filmmaker and photographer from Nigeria, starts his talk by telling us about encountering Joseph Conrad for the first time. He was a student in the UK, and he wondered about this Africa he was discovering for the first time, the Heart of Darkness that was so different from the Nigeria he grew up in, a place of life and vitality. As he looked aroung the UK, he found himself “confronting images that the Europeans were able to use to colonize Africa, grotesque images.”
The era of formal colonization is over, but the selective use of stories about "the reality" of Africa is not:
[Carol] Pineau is concerned about the long-term psychological damage of poor coverage of the continent. She reminds us that colonialism tried to ensure that colonies were never able to compete with their conquerors. She argues that the images of Africa are a form of this colonialism, and they perpetuate uncomfortable trends. “Aid has never, ever developed a nation,” she argues.
One of the problems is that we rarely take African voices seriously - she points to reports of snow on the peaks of Kilimanjaro. British geographic societies wouldn’t believe reports of snow on the mountain’s peak until a British explorer had been there. The same thing happesn today, she tells us, in coverage of relief work. The people actually giving food and medical aid are Africans, but the people interviewed on camera are the “white saviors.”
This challenge to the perception of aid as beneficial is elaborated more strongly by Andrew Mwenda:
“The media tells nothing but the truth [about Africa] but not the whole truth”. The stories covered - despair, civil war, famine - are not the only reality. Actually, they’re the smallest reality. These stories create a misframing of Africa, and lead us to the long solutions. By giving food to the hungry and medicine for the sick, Africa is stripped of self reliance and of hope.
.........
Aked point blank whether he opposes all aid by Chris Anderson, Mwenda makes an important distinction - he thinks it shouldn’t be given to governments and should be given directly to indigenous groups and entrepeneurs.
And this is just a selection of tidbits from the first session. There's a lot more coming over the next few days, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from the conference speakers.
I hope that at least some further speakers will engage with Mwenda's critique of aid and propose ways in which aid could be delivered more effectively. My feeling about aid, which has unquestionably been shaped by my Northern upbringing and education as well as my involvement in Northern-based international development, is that Northern countries have benefited from a long history of exploiting Southern countries and therefore owe Southern countries assistance in overcoming this pattern of underdevelopment. I'm interested to see whether other speakers share this perception.
Today, in honor of the fourth International Day of UN Peacekeepers, Refugees International is calling on US Congress to make good its funding commitments to UN peacekeeping activities. The US does not contribute troop units to UN peacekeeping missions, currently owes $500 million in arrears to the UN peacekeeping budget, and stands to accrue $500 million more in the next year. This, despite the fact that the US has voted to approve or expand most of the existing UN peacekeeping operations and the White House Office of Management and Budget has given US peacekeeping contributions a high effectiveness rating in terms of cost-efficient use of funds and achievement of U.S. goals. And while I do have my questions and concerns about the UN and its peacekeeping operations, I also believe that in most cases, it's the body best positioned to address complex conflict situations, from conflict resolution to rebuilding. So I signed the Better World Campaign's Price of Peace petition to Congress. Check out this fact sheet, and the rest of the site, and if you agree that UN peacekeeping is important to security and stability in the world, sign the petition.
There was an interesting editorial column in the Baltimore Sun this weekend about the development consequences of the U.S. government policy prohibiting assistance to the Palestinian Authority:
Since Hamas won the January 2006 parliamentary elections, the United States and its allies have withheld millions in foreign aid that financed the workings of government. As a result, Palestinian workers have gone unpaid, the economy is devastated, nearly half of Palestinians don't have enough food to feed their families or are at risk of food shortages. The United Nations estimates that 68 percent of Palestinians live in poverty.
Food aid does reach Palestinians despite the Israeli security barricade, checkpoints and closures. But relief agencies that want to improve other aspects of Palestinian life find it difficult because of the American "no contact" policy with the PA.
How do you provide medical supplies to a community health clinic overseen by the PA's health ministry? Or repair a road, establish a PTA in a public school, maintain a village well?
...
The U.S.-led boycott may have accomplished one goal, crippling the Hamas government, but at the cost of another - stamping out terrorism. It has sustained Hamas' military wing, which last week claimed credit for more than 80 rocket attacks into southern Israel. And Gaza, among the most densely populated places in the world, resembled a war zone as factional fighting resumed, leaving dozens dead and drawing retaliatory fire by the Israeli military.
"Threading the Needle", Ann LoLardo, 19 May 2007
It's a schadenfreude spree . . .
One of the things I learned about at the meeting I facilitated is the US government's "F Process," which is consolidating the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department. This move is intended to bring greater coherence to US foreign policy. (I wrote a bit about it here, when plans were announced last year.) This process is changing the funding environment for international development. (For an interesting perspective on the impact of internal changes, see this speech by the US Ambassador to Cambodia - I can't decide whether it's amusing or lame. I guess a lot depends how it was delivered.)
For example, the government wants to fund projects that intend to improve governance and democracy. So a funding proposal from an education project that works to strengthen national curricula and school systems would probably be more favorably received by the government than one for a project that targets communities in a more limited area. This is important information to know if you're creating proposals for government funding. The discussion was somewhat overshadowed, however, by news that the Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, Randall Tobias, had suddenly resigned the week before, creating some question about how the details of the "F Process" might change under new leadership.
Why the sudden resignation? This is where the hypocrisy gets awfully rich. See, back in 2005 (even before the F Process began), the government decided that a coherent policy approach to human trafficking required organizations receiving US government funding for anti-trafficking or anti-HIV efforts to affirm, in writing, that they have an organizational commitment or policy stating that the organization does not promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution. But the language is kind of fuzzy about what promoting, supporting and advocating entail. It seems fairly obvious, for example, that an organization that supports the unionization of people working in prostitution need not apply for funding. But what about an organization that works to increase HIV awareness and protection for people working in prostitution without condemning that work or actively trying to remove people from prostitution? That's not so clear. And in analyzing the policy, Susan Cohen saw a broad-based and coercive anti-prostitution campaign in the making:
NGOs must oppose prostitution and sex trafficking (but no other kind of trafficking) whether they promote condom use among sex workers or whether they work only in hospitals to prevent HIV transmission from pregnant women to newborns. In other words, in order to join the U.S. anti-HIV/AIDS effort, all NGOs must formally enlist in the U.S. government's antiprostitution campaign.
What does seem pretty clear, at least to me, is that patronizing a service that sells sex would at least be "supporting" prostitution, if not promoting or advocating it. Right? So it's pretty appalling that the person who is ultimately in charge of enforcing this policy - that would be the Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance, Ambassador Randall Tobias - turned up on the list of clients of "D.C. Madam" Deborah Palfrey. Tobias claims that no sex took place, only massages, and that he stopped using Palfrey's service in favor of one "with Central Americans." (It makes me feel extra squeamish when I try to figure out why Tobias would highlight the regional origins of his masseuses, and what the media emphasizing this quote are trying to do - that's getting into a knot of sexual and racial politics that I don't have the space to unpick properly in this post.) Anybody buying his story?
And in other notable resignations, Paul Wolfowitz has announced his resignation after his questionable actions in obtaining a job and pay raise for his partner, who had to leave active service at the World Bank when Wolfowitz was appointed to head it. Wolfowitz's hobby horse during his leadership of the World Bank was an anti-corruption campaign in which he tried to stop Bank aid to some impoverished countries because he argued that their deeply corrupt governments, not poverty, were the countries' biggest obstacle to development. Ironic that a conflict of interest case would bring down a staunch advocate of corruption.
Of course, the World Bank, massive bureaucracy that it is, is hardly a model of perfect systems and highly effective governance - even the panel reviewing Wolfowitz's case acknowledged that the guidance he was given was less than perfectly clear. And had Wolfowitz had a different agenda, and the United States a different foreign policy stance, it's possible that his claims that he was operating in good faith might have been accepted. But, as the New York Times points out, "Mr. Wolfowitz created an impression that at critical moments he was putting American foreign policy interests first," an approach that did not sit well with the Bank's governing board. And if you're going to pursue an unpopular approach with entrenched interests in a powerful institution, you'd best be sure your conduct is above reproach.
I find it grimly amusing that two Bush appointees have gone down within weeks of each other for shady behavior contradictory to the policies they espoused in their professional lives. Beyond that, though, I think these resignations point to the difficulty of dealing with complex problems with narrowly-focused approaches. Wolfowitz getting tripped up demonstrates just how easy it is to engage in corrupt behavior, particularly in the absence of strong systems and structures to provide guidance and accountability. And Tobias's situation points up the difficulty in effecting the broad-based behavioral changes that would have to be behind any effort to end the sale of sexual services. When the man who is ultimately responsible for enforcing a policy requiring organizations overseas to not support prostitution is purchasing sexual services himself, it seems clear to me that policy language alone is not going to get at the changes in attitudes and behaviors that would be needed to undermine all the various factors that support prostitution as a social institution. I don't hold out a lot of hope for change at either the World Bank or USAID, really, but I do rather enjoy seeing policies I think are shortsighted contribute to the downfall of their proponents.