February 2009

OLPC is looking for college students to take on summer internships setting up XO laptops in Africa. Chris Blattman is not impressed:

One thing is for sure, this kind of internship strains my patience. $10,000 for 10 weeks of work delivering laptops? (1) That's 100 laptops right there; (2) $10,000 goes a LONG way in Rwanda; and (3) this strikes me as a job an African would benefit from doing.

One of the enterprises that IFC has been working with in Cambodia is WING, a subsidiary of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ). In late January, WING launched a mobile payments business that targets unbanked customers. Last week, I had the opportunity to visit WING’s offices, meet their team, participate in their rollout, and travel to remote areas to visit agent locations. I was impressed by the high energy and creativity of WING’s staff, their incredible progress in a relatively short period of time, their willingness to adapt to new lessons quickly, and the unique aspects of their solution. 

WING’s USSD-based service will allow customers to save, make purchases, transfer money to both WING and non-WING users, and perform a range of other financial services – all through mobile phones. Since WING account numbers do not have to be tied to a customer’s mobile phone number, the service is also available to people who do not own phones. In a country like Cambodia, this feature is extremely important because a large percentage of the population still does not own mobile phones but have easy access via family and friends.

Prior to designing their product, WING performed extensive market research to ensure that they understood the target market and its financial needs. The resultant service was developed in response to those findings. Product development occurred over a 9-month period during which the company performed iterative testing and redesign, mapping their solution closer and closer to the needs of the market.

I promised in the previous post on this topic to offer a way of taking internal political processes seriously as we seek to strengthen media systems around the world. As many of you will know, one major preoccupation of CommGAP's is to seek a deeper understanding of how to tackle some of the people-related or adaptive challenges that often bedevil efforts to improve governance systems in developing countries.  Therefore, the starting point of this perspective is the conviction that if you want to strengthen the media system in Gugu Republic as one of the fundamental institutions of that country, your effort  is like any other attempt to reform governance systems.

Rarely do we come across a video that is visually beautiful, intellectually stimulating and emotionally inspiring.  “One childhood” is a documentary about how schools and schoolteachers in Eritrea are part of the campaign to improve children’s health.  Based on the actual findings of two thorough technical evaluations that showed the wide coverage and effectiveness of the Eritrea programs, the film tells the story of how school health is now being delivered in the mountains of Eritrea, in the arid lands of the Red Sea coast and in urban Asmara.  Available on YouTube, where it has been seen by 14,000 people in a month—probably 13,980 more than read the two technical reports—the film has won the CINE Golden Eagle award.  It can also be viewed here.

Truth in advertising:  The film’s executive producer, Don Bundy, is a colleague and may be a distant cousin of mine [don’t ask!].

Eldis offers a number of ways to engage on Climate Adaptation, including the Community Based Adapatation Exchange (CBA-X) and the The Linking Climate Adaptation (LCA) Network. 

I wanted to remind you that the application deadline for the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship are fast approaching - March 3, 2009.  In case you're not yet ready to apply, there is a second deadline on August 12.

[Originally posted at the Development Marketplace Blog]

Photo © Planinternationalty

We hear that climate changes – ongoing and those to come – are hitting the poor the hardest and the soonest. So what can we do about that?

Well, adapting to climate change is such an abstract and wide-reaching concept I find it sometimes hard to nail down. How do you actually adapt, especially if you are poor and struggling to put food on the table and send your children to school? I find myself wondering what are the ideas that can help poor people cope with harsh weather?

For most of us, when a disaster happens in a far away place, we only get brief glimpses of the immediate aftermath and subsequent recovery efforts – often only through news media or occasionally close-by bloggers. During four years of reconstruction after the devastating tsunami that hit the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2004, few have seen the rebuilding process like those who are part of the recovery efforts.

The Multi-Donor Fund (MDF), which is managed by the World Bank with contributions and guidance from 15 other international donor partners, continues to work on the ground in Aceh and Nias. The reconstruction has been extremely successful, with more than 100,000 new houses constructed, more than 90,000 hectares of agricultural land restored and 2,500 kilometers of road built. In late 2008, the MDF held a photo competition for people involved with projects or agencies related to reconstruction. The resulting pictures are not professionally created, but they give a beautifully close and comprehensive view of the rebuilding of Aceh.

(Hover your mouse over "Notes" to see information about each photo)

Many of the pictures were featured in the Multi-Donor Fund 2008 Progress Report, which can be found at the MDF website. You can also see the photos at our Flickr page.

Finding routes out of poverty remains a key issue for households and policy makers alike. A long term vision of development in Africa and elsewhere suggests that poverty reduction is associated with intergenerational mobility out of rural areas and agriculture, and into urban non-agricultural settings. To respond to new economic opportunities, people must be geographically mobile. Constraints to their movement may in fact impede economic growth.

In a recent working paper, we studied the link between physical movement and economic growth, by re-surveying 4,400 people in 2004 from the Kagera region of Tanzania who were first surveyed in 1991. We found that the returns to within-country migration are very high: consumption growth among migrants was 36 percentage points higher than among those who remained in their baseline villages.

Is this growth gap because the migrants are somehow ‘different’, perhaps more productive, than those who stay? The evidence says no, it isn’t. Moreover, while moving out of agriculture and out of remote areas is a winning strategy, we found that migration leads to economic growth for those who don’t change sectors, and, surprisingly, even for those who move to more remote areas!  Just the act of moving – presumably in part a response to economic opportunities – is important.

So why don’t more people move if economic returns to geographic mobility are so high? A number of crucial social constraints might be at work. For example, younger people with weaker household ties, unmarried and male, have more freedom to take advantage of opportunities. What is acceptable or safe for a young man might be unacceptable and jeopardize marriage possibilities for a young woman. Heads of households or their spouses also find it harder to move.

En Afrique, l’administration des douanes joue un rôle de tout premier plan dans le développement économique et social puisque les droits et taxes collectées par les douanes représentent bien souvent au moins 30% des recettes du budget national (hors pays pétroliers). Dans le même temps, c’est l’une des administrations les plus décriées étant bien souvent décrites comme le symbole même de la corruption et un terrible frein au commerce.

World economic growth in 2009 is expected to decline to its slowest rate since the Great Depression. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, the latest IMF’s World Economic Outlook projects the region to grow by 3.25% this year, down from 5.4% in 2008. Many economists are now expecting the crisis to hit Africa harder and longer than was previously projected. Not only will the crisis impact human development and economic indicators, but Africa’s governance and conflicts may be affected as well. Although the channels through which economic collapses affect governance and conflicts are often country-specific, institutions in poor countries tend to be so strained that ethnic tensions and confrontational politics can get worse when competition for scarce resources increases.

Empirical evidence on growth accelerations and collapses in Africa between 1975 and 2005 suggests that governance and conflict indicators are substantially affected by growth volatility. Table 1 presents differences between sample averages during growth accelerations and collapses for key governance and conflict indicators. The World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) score, a broad measure of policy and institutional performance, is lower during decelerations. Correlation coefficients (not reported) between the probability of growth acceleration and deceleration and CPIA indicator confirm that countries that experience more economic collapses have lower CPIA scores.