June 2008

The first Development Marketplace for the African Diaspora in Europe (D-MADE) ended in Brussels last week, awarding close to a million dollars for sixteen investment projects in Africa. The winning projects will be implemented in 11 African countries, including Mali (4), Cote d'Ivoire (2) Benin (2) and one each for Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

The winners were selected from a group of 68 finalists who presented projects that a 24-person jury deemed innovative, sustainable, replicable and based on sound business principles. The D-MADE initiative was launched in 2007 to allow entrepreneurs from the African Diaspora in Europe to participate in the development of their countries.

Talking to some of the students, many of which are preparing for the college entrance examination.

As I toured earthquake-devastated parts of Sichuan last week, what struck me most was the continuation of ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. 

Beichuan middle school was the site of one of the great tragedies of the earthquake.  The old building of the school collapsed completely and the new building pancaked, crushing the lower level.  About half of the 2,000+ students and teachers died.  Beichuan county seat has been completely abandoned.  The middle school has temporarily been relocated some miles away, on the campus of a training ground for a big appliance manufacturer.   The facility had some good classrooms to begin with, and new temporary ones were added quickly.  The students are living in tents on the grounds.

The students we talked to were remarkably composed.  One high school senior explained that she had been on the second floor of the new building, which collapsed onto the first floor, allowing her to escape.  The boy next to her said he remembered nothing because he was knocked unconscious and then pulled from the rubble.  He had only recently been released from hospital. 

As usual on Fridays, from  Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Inequality and the Labor Market

Specialization in work is thought to account for why gender inequality exists in the labor market. Tradition and custom dictate different jobs and/or types of work for men and women. In the industrialized world, certain professions, such as the nursing profession, are dominated by one sex, e.g. women (Anker, 1998). According to "Global Employment Trends, 2007", the sex segregationof occupations is changing, but slowly. Females are still overrepresented in the caring profession and in home-based workers. Changing these trends will rely on further and increased investment in women’s education and training. Furthermore, even when women migrate, they tend to be overrepresented among these stereotypical female occupations. The UNFPA in its study of global population estimate that there are 95 million female migrants, accounting for half of all migrants and contributing hugely to remittances. Migration for women takes place across all age groups and income groups. As migrants and women, they oftentimes face significant challenges in their chosen host country, especially if race, class and religion factors come into play. Oftentimes they lack the opportunities to migrate legally and safely and oftentimes they are unaware of their rights. The figure below shows the trends in female migration for three sample years between 1995 and 2005.

There seems to be a mania to take any new technology and apply it to the developing world, be it computers, solar panels, or, the next big thing, iPods. (Sorry, OLPC, you're no longer the cool new kid on the development block.) And the really next big thing is podcasting for the developing world. An article on scidev.net discusses one such initiative in Peru:

Practical Action has been working on podcasts for the Cajamarca region of northern Peru since 2006. A poor, rural area, most of the people there rely on agriculture for their livelihoods...Practical Action's local office in Peru surveyed local people about the type of information they needed to support their livelihoods - advice on grape cultivation or raising cattle for example. This information was then gathered from experts and recorded as digital audio files...

Approaching the mountains from the Chengdu plain along the main road to Beichuan County, red banners with large white characters expressing support for the earthquake victims and thanks to the rescuers, are strung across the road, as if creating an arbor for all to pass through.  Driving up this road doesn’t feel safe, even now, six weeks after the quake.  The steep slopes of the mountains on both sides of our vehicle loom above us.  Huge boulders are scattered everywhere on the mountain sides, landslides are all around, and I cannot stop thinking about the description given by a group of tourists of the moment the quake struck: “the mountains exploded as if hit by a megaton bomb”. 

Leigu Township is utterly devastated.  None of our team have ever seen anything like it.   Most of the town is rubble and the buildings that remain will have to be brought down; everything will have to be built again.  The smell of decomposing trash is in the air as we walk through the eerie quiet of ruined streets.  Photos do not do justice to this experience because they cannot express what it feels like to have such devastation all around.  If this were a war zone, I could believe it, but to think that this happened through a force of nature, and all this damage occurred in 80 seconds, is almost beyond my imagination.

Every morning last week I stumbled through the public foyer in the United Nations Headquarters on my way to work (which was speaking to spokespeople – a tall order).  It wasn’t until Friday that I stopped to take a look at the exhibition that I had largely rushed by, running a slalom course through visiting tourists all week. 

Transparency International has just released its annual corruption report, and this year's focus is on corruption in the water sector. Undoubtedly, the 398-page tome will draw a lot of attention to what Transparency International makes clear is a crisis:

In developing countries, about 80 per cent of health problems can be linked back to inadequate water and sanitation, claiming the lives of nearly 1.8 million children every year and leading to the loss of an estimated 443 million school days for the children who suffer from water-related ailments.

Checking out Mongabay.com, I came across a very cool application of Google Earth to see the levels of deforestation across the world, including short data sheets per country. So you can quickly see that Malaysia has lost over 6% of its forest cover between 1990 and 2005 (according to different data sources), while China has increased its own by 25% over the same period of time.

The nicer discovery, though, were the other maps the same developer, David Tryse, has been creating on environmental issues (check them all out in his website): the top 100 most Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) mammal and amphibian species, 34 biodiversity hotspots according to Conservation International, and protected area networks --or national parks-- worldwide, among others.

Note that the sources of data are rather varied. To view and explore the maps, you need to download Google Earth and install it in your computer, save the KML file/s provided for each map (KML is a file format used to display geographic data), and open them from Google Earth. At the bottom of that list of maps, you will find a link to download all files at once if you want, and you can also subscribe to updates for new maps that David may come up with.

The global economy may have slowed down in the last year, but that hasn't stopped the rich from getting richer. Merrill Lynch and Capgemini just released their 12th annual World Wealth Report, and the results are stunning. (Hat tip: FT) The wealth of the ultra-rich (those with assets of $30 million or more) grew 14.5 percent between 2006 and 2007. It seems the rich keep getting richer, no matter what the international financial environment looks like. No surprise there, really. The big surprise, at least for me, is how the geographical distribution of the rich is rapidly changing. 

Roumeen Islam is manager of the World Bank Institute's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division. She is an economist by training and, I might add, by conviction. But to anybody who cares seriously about the role of the mass media in development, Roumeen is much admired in a particular capacity: as someone who has made a sterling contribution to how the media is viewed within international development. Although media systems and their impact on development are not the only things that have preoccupied her - right now she is leading major work on international trade indicators, amongst others - she has done as much as anybody I know to put an institutional view of the media on the development agenda.

There's no doubt that access to clean water is a major problem in developing countries. According to the latest data from the World Development Indicators, only 56 percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa has access to an improved water source. Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, proposes what he calls a radical solution in a recent opinion piece in Forbes entitled Pay for It:

The solution for the poorer parts of the Third World is deregulation of the market for piped water, combined with the enforcement of property rights. Yes, I'm saying that Third World governments should consider letting private companies sell water at any price...And no, I don't mean a water concession with a price regulated by the government, I mean true laissez faire in water supply.