November 2009

Days after climate adaptation projects aiding and led by Indigenous Peoples won nine awards at the DM2009 competition (Nov. 10-13), the worldwide indigenous community took a major step toward becoming a key player in the international climate change debate.

First Peoples Worldwide, with the help of the World Bank's Social Development Department, is setting up an Indigenous Peoples Climate Action Fund in part "to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous Peoples’ communities to influence decision-making and to engage in dialogue on climate change at the national and international level."

The US$10 million Fund will also finance small-scale adaptation projects in indigenous communities, and then seek to scale them "across communties, regions, and countries" -- the ultimate goal of many of DM2009's early-stage finalist projects.  The new Fund aims to use indigenous communities' traditional knowledge to launch projects that will buffer the poor and vulnerable against the impacts of destructive weather, conserve their sensitive environments, and improve faltering local indigenous economies.

At a Nov. 18 roundtable in Washington announcing the Fund, World Bank President Robert E. Zoellick offered several examples of how the knowledge and experience of Indigenous Peoples are proving successful in blunting the worst of climate change.  In parts of Africa, he said, plantings of Red bush tea can survive the drier climate.  In Vietnam, plantings of dense mangroves protect the coastline from the waves of tropical storms.

Just as Asian economies started to recover from the global recession, policymakers and markets have started to worry about unwarranted asset price increases. While the worries are global, especially in the case of stock markets, the risks of asset prices bubbles seem particularly high in Asia, where abundant liquidity is driving up prices of all sorts of assets, from Hong Kong and Singapore real estate to Chinese art.

Where is the liquidity coming from? Capital inflows have received a lot of attention lately. Financial capital is flowing into Asia, attracted by the continent’s relatively good economic prospects. More important, for most economies, is a dramatic easing of domestic monetary conditions since late 2008 that has fueled domestic liquidity.

In part, the easing of monetary conditions in Asia was deliberate, a policy response to sharp weaker growth. However, some of the easing of monetary conditions was not deliberate. Economies with an exchange rate somewhat or completely fixed to the US dollar and fairly open capital markets are “importing” the loose US monetary policy. In some economies, those imported monetary conditions sit oddly with domestic economic conditions. In many Asian economies, spare capacity is much smaller than in the US and cyclical unemployment much lower.

Aleem Walji is the new Innovation Practice Manger at the World Bank Institute, which includes the secretariat for the Development Marketplace consortium and other innovation platforms.  He is former Head of Global Development Initiatives at Google.  The peripatetic Walji sat down for this mini-interview as DM2009 was winding up:

Q. Development Marketplace stresses innovation, both in projects it seeks and how they're evaluated.  Why is innovation so important?

A. The need for solutions, and fast, is urgent.  Business as usual is simply not sufficient.  We’ve got to look at new ways of doing things -- things that have worked in one part of the world that may work in another part of the world, or are entirely new.  We put out a call to the world, particularly the developing world, to say what are your ideas, what are you doing, what can you do? How can we support you, adapting to a rapidly changing climate? This competition was to shine a light on those ideas.

Q.  We hear a lot about scale.  What does it really mean?

A. Scale is a term often used and misused.  When I think about scale I think about a pathway to reach the maximum number of people possible.  It doesn’t necessarily mean an organization has to become extremely large for an idea to scale.  It could mean that an idea is adopted by a small organization but relevant and replicated by other groups in other parts of the world. When I think of the Development Marketplace, we want to get to the point where we can connect early-stage ideas to the people, money, and partners who can help see ideas through to execution and grow them to their optimal levels. 

Q. What factors are important for success? 

A. In many ways we’re really betting on leadership, we’re betting on people who we think are going to deliver an outcome, and are going to be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances.  The projects will change, they will adapt, they will grow.  What we’re really talking about is how do we position our winners to be able to benefit from our support, then really leverage it, along with partners.  We want to be connectors in an ecosystem.  We want to be connectors in a cycle of growth and scale.

Q.  Most of the DM2009 projects came from NGOs and academic institutions.  There weren’t very many from entrepreneurs...

A.  This is a little bit of concern to me.  When you look at the viability of any project it has to have a pathway to sustainability, and commercialization is one pathway. When there are ideas that can be commercialized and have revenue models that can be sustained, that is a very positive sign.  For those that don’t, there have to be other paths to viability like public-private partnerships for example.  For those that don’t have one or the other, I worry how they will sustain themselves.  That's where partnerships becomes key and our role in creating an "enabling ecosystem" of seed funders, debt financiers, equity players, and capacity builders is very important.
 

Many of the objections to my blog post, “Another reason why aid to Africa must increase”  centered around corruption.  “I disagree.  Africa needs to get rid of corruption…” said one commentator, while another said, “Aid to African countries must follow country steps in good governance, democracy, fighting corruption, etc.”

I think we can agree on the following two facts:

• There is considerable corruption in Africa.  The recently-released Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 finds 10 African countries in the bottom decile (with Somalia at the very bottom of the list).  Of the 47 African countries reviewed, 31 scored less than 3 out of 10, “indicating that corruption is perceived as rampant.”  Another data source, World Governance Indicators, reaches a similar conclusion.
• Corruption undermines economic growth and poverty reduction.

But even with these two facts, it doesn’t necessarily follow that aid should be cut off from countries with high corruption. 

I asked New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman to come see our "100 ideas to save the planet" at last week's DM2009 competition.  His response was he was on his way to the Amazon, where climate change is accelerating the despoiling of that vast ecosystem and driving its indigenous communities into more povery.  A number of DM200 finalist projects from Latin American would attack those ravages.

In his column today, Friedman says bluntly: "My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny."

For more, here's the column.

Often the best way to communicate information about some distant event, issue or trend is to embed the news in a story that focuses on the experience of an individual.  Human incidents get the public’s attention—audiences identify with and react emotionally to stories about people.

Yet in the development sector, often the real news that needs to be told is not the human anecdotes but the statistics that have been collected.  But how can a non-technical audience understand a bunch of numbers?  How can the public see not only a trend, but a pattern, discover not just scale, but relationships?

The field of data visualization is exploding in importance as new technologies and software help government agencies speak to their constituencies,  multilateral organizations to their member states, NGOs to their donors, media outlets to their viewers and readers.  It now takes seconds to sift through reams of information and identify elusive patterns, locate important outliers, or confirm gut instincts.  The connections that can be made are only limited by the creativity and insights of those who have access to the information.  
 

Updates to monthly remittances data

• Remittances to Guatemala declined 10.9% y-o-y in October. Year-to-date decline is 9.9%.
• Remittances to El Salvador declined 7.1% y-o-y in October. Year-to-date decline is 10%.
• Remittances to Jamaica declined 17.3% y-o-y in September. Year-to-date decline is 15.5%.
• Remittances to Nicaragua declined 8.4% y-o-y in September. Year-to-date decline is 6.3%.
• Remittances to Pakistan grew 62.7% y-o-y in October. Year-to-date growth is 26.7%.
• Remittances to Nepal grew 2% y-o-y in September. Year-to-date growth is 14.2%.
• Remittances to the Philippines grew 8.6% y-o-y in September. Year-to-date growth is 4.2%.

Remittances to Latin America and Caribbean are falling:

Photo © iStockphoto.com

In September, a diverse group of scientists—among them the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen—presented in the journal Nature a new framework to analyze sustainable development at a global scale. This framework recognizes that humans have now become the main driver of global environmental change, and that our impact on the planet is growing stronger.

We are affecting every one of the major natural processes which are important for our own welfare, wrecking the ability of earth systems to regulate themselves, and buffer disturbances. In fact, our actions may be shifting earth processes to a completely new state that is a far cry from the extraordinarily stable conditions (in the entire history of planet earth) that allowed the development of human civilization since 10,000 BC. In the words of Paul Crutzen and colleagues, we have entered a new geologic era, the “Anthropocene”.

Our pressure on the planet appears more and more troubling as our understanding of earth processes improves. There is increasing evidence that many earth systems and biophysical phenomena do not change in a linear fashion, but rather experience abrupt changes when thresholds are crossed.

If you haven’t already taken the time to do some development-related Googling after last week’s announcement that World Bank statistics are now available through the ubiquitous search engine’s public data tool, I’d suggest exploring the exciting new feature. Now, anyone can easily access 17 World Development Indicators by searching for them in Google. Give it a try by searching for the GDP of China or CO2 emissions of Indonesia or exports of Thailand – or another country and any of these indicators.

When you click on the search result, an interactive chart page shows you how the data have changed over time and allows you to compare to other countries (or the world). (You can also embed the chart, like the one below.) For example, take a look at how the GDP growth rate of China compares to Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in the last 50 years.

To further explore the data, check out another nifty tool, also launched last week by the World Bank. DataFinder lets you research more about these development indicators and see how they look on an interactive map. Read more about DataFinder here.