The African Successes post has generated a vigorous exchange of ideas. I appreciate receiving your comments on the study, your suggestions for success stories, and your views on development approaches that have worked and those that have not.
Many of you felt, as I do, that we need to highlight Africa’s recent successes. Your responses voiced strong support for a focus on education, knowledge and dissemination, health, private-sector development, agriculture (irrigation and fertilizer), community-level development, governance, infrastructure, and information and communication technology.
Ces dernières années, de nombreux pays africains ont commencé à faire preuve d’un dynamisme remarquable.
Le taux de croissance enregistré au Mozambique est fulgurant, affichant une moyenne annuelle de 8 % sur plus de dix ans. Le Kenya est devenu l'un des plus importants fournisseurs mondiaux de fleurs coupées. Le service M-Pesa, qui permet d’effectuer des transferts d’argent à partir d’un téléphone mobile, rencontre un succès grandissant tandis que le programme KickStart aide les petits agriculteurs à irriguer leurs cultures à moindre coût. Le tourisme rwandais fleurit depuis qu’il s’est axé sur la vie des gorilles et dans la ville de Lagos au Nigéria, les nouvelles infrastructures du BRT (réseau de transport rapide par bus) facilite un développement urbain plus efficace. En deux mots, l’Afrique est en train de vivre une réelle transformation.
Unlike other diseases in Africa (malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, etc.), which mainly affect the young and the old, HIV/AIDS takes its toll on prime-age adults during the most productive years of their lives. The death of an adult family member can have large consequences for the surviving family. Given prevailing social norms in many African societies, the burden may likely be heaviest for women.
Most studies focus on the consequences for orphaned children – their schooling and health. We know less about how older adults are impacted. In our study, we track individuals and their households in northwest Tanzania, an area of high HIV prevalence in the 1990s, over a 13-year period.
We find that, when a family member dies, women (even old women) end up working more on the farm; men do too, but not as much. Having an asset such as goats enables them to work less.
Last Friday, the World Bank released its Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) of low-income countries. While the assessments are mainly used to determine the allocation of concessional IDA resources to poor countries, they can also provide a useful picture of the evolution of policies and institutions in Africa, as a recent note by my colleagues Delfin Go and Vijdan Korman shows. They find that:
Over the past eight years, African countries’ performance is about average compared with East Asia and South Asia.
Within Africa, Cape Verde, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana have consistently had strong CPIA scores, while Zimbabwe, Comoros, Central African Republic and Eritrea seem to be stuck at the low end of the scale.
Over the past five years, the biggest improvements in CPIA scores were registered by Ghana, Rwanda, Zambia and Mozambique, while Eritrea, Chad and Zimbabwe experienced the largest deterioration. Seven of Africa’s nine oil exporters (Angola and Nigeria were the exceptions) saw their CPIA scores decline.
For Africa as a whole, most of the improvement in policies and institutions was in the category called “economic management”—essentially macroeconomic and fiscal policies. The average scores on the other dimensions—structural policies, equity and social inclusion, and public management—stagnated. While some countries showed improvements along these other dimensions, an equal number of countries saw their scores go down.
There is no question that the global financial and economic crisis is affecting Africa’s economic performance. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook forecasts a GDP growth rate for Africa of 3.5 percent, which is 1.6 percentage points lower than the previous forecast, and 1.9 percentage points below the 2008 growth rate. The growth forecast for primary commodity exporters is even lower; Angola, for instance, is projecting nominal GDP to be 17 percent lower in 2009 compared to 2008. A growth slowdown in Africa can have serious long-term consequences. In light of these developments and evidence, and given that the United States, Western Europe and China are all considering a major fiscal expansion (of the order of trillions of dollars), a natural question to ask is: “Should African countries also introduce a fiscal stimulus?”
Poor people are poor because markets fail them and governments fail them. That markets fail them is well-known. Failures in capital markets mean that young people cannot get loans to finance their education; imperfect or nonexistent insurance markets mean that poor people will not get decent health care if left to unfettered markets; economies of scale as well as the simple fact that basic services such as water are necessities mean that markets will not ensure that poor people will get the services they need to survive. As Roy Radner, a former professor of mine once put it, “When you allocate resources by market prices, you discriminate against poor people.”
To overcome these failures—that is, to protect the poor—governments step in. They finance and provide primary education and basic health care; they subsidize water and electricity so poor people can afford these services. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned government interventions lead to failures of their own. In Ugandan public schools, teachers are absent 27 percent of the time; health workers in primary health centers are absent 37 percent of the time. Only one percent of the money allocated to non-salary spending in Chad reached the health clinics. These “government failures” are sometimes as pernicious as the market failures they were intended to correct. They are also difficult to overcome because various interest groups who benefit from the status quo may resist reform.
Chris Blattman is right to question my enthusiasm for information as the solution to seemingly intractable development problems. (By the way, thanks for the complimentary plug for AfricaCan, Chris). Information by itself is not useful unless people can do something with it. And we’re talking about poor people, who typically have very little power. But if enough poor people have access to the same information, they may be able to mobilize and enforce better performance from service providers or public officials. This is the reasoning behind the work on citizen report cards, public expenditure tracking surveys, community monitoring, and the like.
A recent note by Stuti Khemani explores why community monitoring of health care in Uganda appeared to work so well, while a similar program for schools in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India didn’t. She suggests three reasons: differences in the level of NGO activism in the two countries; differences between health and education; and the political economy of service delivery (teachers unions are very powerful in UP). The latter is particularly troubling because another rationale for information campaigns is when reforms in service delivery are blocked for political reasons. What then can we do?
Unlike other diseases in Africa (malaria, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, etc.), which mainly affect the young and the old, HIV/AIDS takes its toll on prime-age adults during the most productive years of their lives. The death of an adult family member can have large consequences for the surviving family. Given prevailing social norms in many African societies, the burden may likely be heaviest for women.
Last Friday, the World Bank released its 