November 2011

Smart Cities for Dummies

I grimace when I see those ads to ‘Build a Smarter Planet’. It seems to me the planet was working pretty well before we started messing with it. But ‘Build a Smarter City’ – now that’s something I can get behind. Cities are humanity’s grandest creation. They reflect us, sometimes smart, sometimes not. Cities reflect our civilizations, and when working well cities are the most efficient way to help the poor, the fortunate and unfortunate, and the environment. And without a doubt every city in the world would benefit from smarter design and smarter management.

Coffee House, New Delhi, India There’s a bit of smoke and mirrors on some of today’s smart city claims. Selling more IT and sophisticated algorithms might help a few of the very fortunate cities. Building a smart-city suburb next to a very unsustainable city can yield important lessons but can also be a useful distraction. Being really smart about cities is improving basic service delivery to the 1 billion urban-poor now going without clean water, or the 2 billion without sanitation. And we need big-time smarts as we build cities over the next twenty years for an additional 2 billion residents – this time locking in energy savings and a high quality of life for all.

Officially recorded remittance flows to developing countries are estimated to have reached $351 billion in 2011, up 8 percent over 2010 (See brief).

For the first time since the global financial crisis, remittance flows to all six developing regions rose in 2011. Growth of remittances in 2011 exceeded our earlier expectations in four regions, especially in Europe and Central Asia (due to higher outward flows from Russia that benefited from high oil prices) and Sub-Saharan Africa (due to strong south-south flows and weaker currencies in some countries that attracted larger remittances). By contrast, growth in remittance flows to Latin America and Caribbean was lower than previously expected, due to continuing weakness in the U.S. economy and Spain. Flows to Middle East and Africa were also impacted by the “Arab Spring”.

Timeline: AIDS at 30

Today is the most mixed World AIDS Day in our 30-year fight against this devastating disease.

AIDS continues to reverse decades of human progress, particularly in Africa. As of 2010, 30 million people have died of AIDS-related causes, and another 34 million are living with HIV. And with HIV/AIDS funding flat-lining, we’re all facing the challenge of doing more with less.

But after a decade of concerted global effort and remarkable successes in treatment and prevention, there’s cause for hope: More countries are seeing HIV decline, and we’ve witnessed incredible scientific breakthroughs that are changing the course of the epidemic. This week, we announced that India, with the support of the World Bank and other partners, is averting 3 million HIV infections, thanks to targeted prevention interventions.

Available in: Français, ภาษาไทย

When I think of HIV/AIDs, symbols pop into my mind: the red looped ribbon and the free condom. They’re actually a good representation of what Thailand is doing best to combat the epidemic- massive information campaigns and the 100% Condom Program which saw the dramatic decline of HIV/AIDS among sex workers.

However, those symbols faded in my mind after I visited an old, impoverished part of Bangkok and met the people who currently are the most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS- the injection drug users.

HIV/AIDS and other blood-borne diseases are transmitted when needles are shared. Under influence, many users are also likely to have unprotected sex. There are programs called ‘harm reduction’ where drug users are provided with clean needles, syringes, and condoms to avoid transmission. Condom distribution is easy but needles are another issue.

Just last week, I attended a presentation on negotiation by Chris Voss, CEO of Black Swan, at Georgetown University. It was particularly interesting because Chris was also one of the top hostage negotiators for the FBI.

Negotiation is increasingly important because with the spread of globalization, we are constantly colliding with others who may or may not share our cultural mores, and to be successful in our jobs, whether it is working with parties on governance and accountability, consulting with civil society, or communicating around a project, we have to understand how to negotiate globally.

Earlier this month in Doha at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, well known simply as BRAC, was chosen as the first winner of the WISE Prize for Education.

The International Health Partnership (IHP+) has done an exceptional job the last three years in bringing together countries, donors, international financial institutions, civil society, the United Nations, and many other partners to agree on how, concretely, we would implement the principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

As many of those gathered here in Busan, I feel very excited about the chance we have to collectively shape the way in which development is practiced.

As a counterpoint to grim forecasts coming out of Europe, I am hopeful that we can anticipate an Asian century where China will grow dynamically for another 20 years. Yet there are caveats to this optimistic scenario: Success in China will require a process of continual transformation and the wherewithal to tackle what I describe as a triple imbalance at the national level. I expound on this and other points in a BBC viewpoint piece published on November 23.

We support countries’ efforts to improve the lives of millions of people—but we often accompany this support by burdening countries with many different reporting, fiduciary, monitoring, evaluation, and other systems. Five years ago, we didn’t have a venue to discuss, or know, what good harmonization and alignment could look like, and we hadn’t agreed to common fiduciary, monitoring, and evaluation systems.

But today, in large part to our shared efforts in the context of IHP+ and country leadership, we’ve agreed on a joint assessment of country health strategies, a common financial management approach, and on some aspects of monitoring and evaluation. And we have outstanding country examples such as Nepal.

Why, then, isn’t this happening at a speed compatible with the urgency of the task? If we have examples and agreements, what’s stopping us?

We are planning to initiate a Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Global Development. Please send your comments and suggestions on the consultation draft to migrationteam@worldbank.org.

The Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Global Development will be a global public good. It will seek to highlight the benefits and challenges of migration for sending and receiving communities as well as for migrants. The Knowledge Partnership will:

(i) provide an open, multidisciplinary platform to debate, discuss and exchange knowledge on migration issues;

(ii) generate a menu of policy choices based on evidence and peer-review, and

(iii) will assist sending and receiving countries in implementing a few pilot policy operations and capacity building efforts to evaluate and mainstream a few policy choices.

I have some good and some not so good news about aid. First, the good news. The aid landscape has seen three important changes during the last decade that have had a transformative, positive effect on the very nature of aid.

One of these changes has been the increased focus on the quality of aid—especially on the results being achieved on the ground. The World Bank and IDA, the Bank’s fund for the poorest, have placed a premium on having a real impact in the work we support, and the results show.

An old black and white photograph taken in 1944 at the Conference in Bretton Woods that gave birth to the World Bank and the IMF shows a roundtable of men in grey suits meeting to design the future multilateral system.

The history of political thought has been, in a sense, a tussle between two ideas regarding who should govern: the idea that experts should rule and the idea that the people should rule themselves. It has been a never-ending tussle, and just when you think the idea that the people can and should rule has won, we see established democracies tossing out elected governments and installing rule by technocrats. The issue is important for this blog for a simple reason: in international development, the belief that experts know best and should shape public policy in developing countries is as difficult to kick as an addiction to cocaine.

So, let’s be clear: while the allurement of technocratic competence in a crisis is understandable it remains just a trifle absurd to suppose that technocratic competence can replace democratic politics rather than being its humble servant. Experts have a huge role in a crisis, financial or otherwise, but to believe that finding a path out of a crisis is the sole business of experts is not only wrong but naïve. For, the response to a crisis is inherently and inescapably political. And this is true on at least two levels.