An artistic digression, if you will

Economic development aside, one of my many passions is photography. While partial to black and white images, I can't help but share this with you. Glenna Gordon is a photojournalist who keeps a blog out of Uganda called Scarlett Lion. She also keeps a professional website on which she has the most amazing collection African images I've seen in some time. Two of my recent favorites:


Development technology - the good, the bad, the...useful?

A big 'thank you' to Ethan Zuckerman for stirring my thinking on the advantages and disadvantages of  development technology this morning. Writing on Apple's introduction of the iPhone in Egypt (and the Egyptian government's subsequent suppression of the Maps application on the grounds that GPS is a military prerogative), Zuckerman asks:
whether technologies inherently help confront and change authoritarian regimes, or whether these regimes are more successful at adapting to and repressing speech via new technologies.
This is an interesting question with seemingly no clear answer. In China, for instance, the government has mastered the art of  permitting certain technologies while suppressing others. The result is a populace somewhat falsely empowered with a sense of information, making marginal progress in the way of reform, and a government that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. A similar analysis may be offered in the case of Russia, and Venezuela, to a degree.

Switching gears a bit, I began exploring the various information technologies (broadly speaking) emerging across Africa. Here,  the issue is perhaps not so much changing authoritarian regimes (though that certainly wouldn't hurt), but engendering sustainable development. A few interesting projects caught my eye:
  • A small NGO in Nairobi called ALIN (Arid Lands Information Network) is working to connect rural communities via community knowledge centers by running solar powered VSAT dishes
  • A web-based reporting tool  - Ushahidi (which means "testimony" in Swahili) - is allowing Africans caught up in political unrest to report incidents of killing, violence and displacement.  Its goal is to create a simple way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis situations. It has been recently used in the Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Wikiforets is a living dictionary and encyclopedia, bringing together French speaking Africans who can share their knowledge of the indigenous forests in West and Central Africa with the aim of conserving the forests in which people live or on which they are dependent
What's especially wonderful about these projects is that they are all local initiatives. A testament to the value of skills training, indeed. 

U.S. lagging in global development ranking


According to the Center for Global Development's 2008 Commitment to Development index (CDI), the United States ranks worse than nearly all of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in promoting global prosperity. The only countries that perform worse than the U.S. are Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Japan and South Korea:
























(Note: red - aid; blue - trade; orange - investment; purple - migration; green - environment; brown - security; yellow - technology). 
It will be most interesting to track how - if at all -  these figures shift in the face of America's economic slowdown.

Mobile money transfer service in Kenya

An interesting article in yesterday's FT speaks to the growing importance of telecoms as a tool for development in Africa:

The rise of the mobile phone as a bank account substitute in Africa was reinforced on Monday as Vodafone announced the launch of a cross-border mobile money transfer service between the UK and Kenya.

The service will allow remittances to be sent from selected Western Union branches in the UK to Safaricom subscribers in Kenya, who can then redeem the money or send it on to another mobile user. The maximum amount that can be transferred internationally is £200 ($296).

The service follows the success of M-PESA, amobile money transfer service in Kenya offered by Vodafone and Safaricom which has signed up over 4m customers since its launch in March 2007, and has been extended to Tanzania and Afghanistan.

M-PESA allows poor people without bank accounts to deposit, transfer and withdraw cash with their mobile phones. The service is often used by men who live and work in cities and send money to their wives and children in their home villages.

Good news on a Tuesday morning

Results of the latest malaria vaccine trials will be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, and from the looks of it, the news is good -- fantastic, in fact. "We are closer than ever before to having a malaria vaccine for use by children in Africa," says Christian Lucq, director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.
From, FP Passport

A Beijing bailout

NPR has an interesting piece on recent Chinese efforts to rescue small coastal export businesses who are hurting in light of the American slowdown in demand this holiday season: 

Official statistics show that thousands of factories in Guangdong province have gone bankrupt this year. In the latest flare-up of unrest, laid off toy factory workers protested in Dongguan on Nov. 25, flipping police cars and smashing company offices.

This has Beijing worried. It has decided to protect exports by increasing export tax rebates and halting the three-year-long appreciation of China's currency against the dollar. And local governments in the delta have used billions of dollars to bail out small and medium enterprises.

China's top economic planner, National Development and Reform Commission Director Zhang Ping, defended the bailouts at a recent press conference.

"Helping these companies get through their current difficulties is entirely necessary and appropriate," Zhang said. "Otherwise, if too many factories go bankrupt, it will lead to many workers losing their jobs, and could increase social tensions and unrest."

Ghana on its way to becoming a "mature democracy"

Polling closed in Ghana’s parliamentary and presidential elections yesterday afternoon, and early results are beginning to roll in, showing a very close presidential contest between Nana Akuffo Addo of the ruling NPP and Professor John Atta Mills of the NDC. Somewhat surprisingly, though, the election has received little mainstream media coverage, leading some to ask whether Ghana even exists.

The election carries particular importance in a continent marred by widespread corruption and corrupt elections (most recent examples include Kenya in December 2007 and Nigeria this past April). The success of the election could mean the rise of  "mature democracy" in a region where states so defined are a rarity. This, according to Joel Barkan, a senior associate at the Africa Program of the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington DC. While I would argue that his definition of "mature democracy" is rather narrow (he effectively defines a mature democracy as a country that has had two successful handovers from power from one legitimately elected leader to another), the analysis is nevertheless an interesting refresher of  a critical political science concept as it applies to Africa. You can read his analysis here. 

(For updated election results, see the Ghana Elections Twitter feed, which is being updated several times an hour)

Prank call to Zardari almost led to war

Oh my goodness. I'm amazed that this hasn't received more media attention:

A hoax telephone call almost sparked another war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan at the height of last month's terror attacks on Mumbai, officials and Western diplomats on both sides of the border said on Sunday.

Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani President, took a telephone call from a man pretending to be Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, on Friday, November 28, apparently without following the usual verification procedures, they said.

The hoax caller threatened to take military action against Pakistan in response to the then ongoing Mumbai attacks, which India has since blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), they said.

Mr Zardari responded by placing Pakistan's air force on high alert and telephoning Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, to ask her to intervene.

China backs Uganda's trade zone plan

From today's Business Daily:
Proposals for a vast trade zone near Lake Victoria in Uganda have won Chinese backing worth around $1.5 billion over the next three years.

It could be one of the region’s largest private investments though insiders say the zone is still a long way from getting off the ground.

The plans are for a free trade zone of 200 square miles, which would have a major impact on Uganda’s economy. 

Chinese money would fund a new port and logistics centre, an airport, roads and telecoms infrastructure, facilities for manufacturing companies and financial services, an agriculture training centre and residential and entertainment areas.

Microfinance appears to be working

Tim Hartford had an exceptionally good piece in Saturday's FT on just how: 

Karlan and Zinman wanted to know what value there might be in expanding access to credit. ZaFinCo was no dewy-eyed social business, but a hard-nosed, profit-minded company, charging 11.75 per cent per month on a four-month loan, or 200 per cent APR, much more than Compartamos was generally judged to have been charging.

Despite the high rates, the results were astonishing. "We expected to see some good effects and some bad," explained Karlan, who checked in with the experiment's participants six to 12 months after they had filed their initial loan applications. "But we basically only saw good effects."

Most strikingly, those "treated" by the experiment - that is, those for whom the computer requested a second chance at a loan - were much more likely to have kept their jobs than the control group. They were also much less likely to have dropped below the poverty line or to have gone hungry. All these outcomes were recorded well after the loan had been taken out and (usually) repaid, so this was not measuring a temporary debt-funded binge.

This seems mysterious. How can a loan at 200 per cent APR help people to stay out of poverty? One answer is that most people turned down for a 200 per cent APR loan would be able to get one at 300, 500 or over 1,000 per cent from an informal moneylender. More important is that these loans were not used to start businesses but to help people keep jobs that they already had. If a smart new blouse or a spare part for the family moped is what it takes to stay in work, then who is to say that an expensive loan isn't a wise investment?

The world's top oil companies

Petroleum Intelligence Weekly just released its annual ranking of the world's top oil companies, based on criteria such as reserves, refining capacity and sales. Several interesting findings emerge:
  • Four of the top five top oil companies are now state-owned: Saudi Aramco, Iran's NIOC, Venezuela's PDV, and China's CNPC
  • Saudi Aramco remains No.1, and China's CNPC has surpassed BP and Shell
  • Russia's Rosneft makes the biggest jump, from 24th to 16th
  • Majority state-owned national companies now make up 27 of 50
  • Three new firms moved into the top 50: Uzbekneftegas, China's CNOOC, and Kazmunaigas of Kazakhstan - all majority state-owned

Noteworthy….

Zimbabwe: from political crisis to cholera epidemic (from The Guardian)


Gates on foreign aid, education (from the WSJ)

How does geographic distance affect credit market access in Niger? (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper)

Call for governance in Somalia straight from the mouths of pirates.... well, sort of

"I started to hijack these fishing boats in 1998. I did not have any special training but was not afraid. For our first captured ship we got $300,000. With the money we bought AK-47s and small speedboats. I don't know exactly how many ships I have captured since then but I think it is about 60. Sometimes when we are going to hijack a ship we face rough winds, and some of us get sick and some die.

We give priority to ships from Europe because we get bigger ransoms. To get their attention we shoot near the ship. If it does not stop we use a rope ladder to get on board. We count the crew and find out their nationalities. After checking the cargo we ask the captain to phone the owner and say that have seized the ship and will keep it until the ransom is paid.

Our community thinks we are pirates getting illegal money. But we consider ourselves heroes running away from poverty. We don't see the hijacking as a criminal act but as a road tax because we have no central government to control our sea.

With foreign warships now on patrol we have difficulties. But we are getting new boats and weapons. We will not stop until we have a central government that can control our sea."

A Somali pirate, interviewed by Xan Rice of The Guardian. [HT: Africa Works].

Pirrrrates... and what to do about them

Somali pirates have been all over the news lately: they hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Kenya and steered it to the Somali port city, Eyl. The Saudi Arabian vessel - the Sirus Star - is the largest ever raided at sea. According to the FT, apart from the 25 sailors taken hostages, the vessel carried 2m barrels of oil worth about $100m, and accounting for one-quarter of Saudi daily output. Very impressive stuff, indeed. 

Yet this recent hijacking is not an isolated incident. There have been 95 attacks by Somali pirates on vessels this year alone (!), with 39 ships captured and 800 crew held. Events such as this are beginning to raise heightened concern among already worried international governments - many of whom rely on the Gulf of Aden for transport of key exports. In an attempt to combat such piracy, NATO has begun considering significantly extending its anti-piracy mission - Allied Provider - off Somalia.  Members of the international community from the left and right have likewise taken to weighing their options. The UK-based think tank, Chathahm House, has put out a paper examining several such options. You can find this paper here. 

Having had a bit of time to think about much of this, though, I've come to side with those who argue that the culprit of the problem - and the solution - is governance. While international law may take us so far in regulating the problem, lawyers are discovering that it might not take us as far as we would like. And even if it did, how do you impose law upon a lawless people? Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, and remains divided between several warring factions. Given the circumstances, it should come as no surprise that the country's people often resort to desperate acts to sustain themselves. Indeed, the majority of these pirates are Somali fisherman living on less than $1 a day; when given the opportunity to acquire a potential $25million (or thereabouts) they take their chances. I'm not sure I wouldn't, too.

So what's the solution to Somali piracy? Well, governance. Opportunities. Alternatives. How do we go about actualizing it? The international community has been trying to figure this one out for over a decade. A valuable first step is to begin paying attention to a country that has been neglected - by its own people and the international community. Every cloud has a silver lining: maybe with this hijacking will come some serious attempts at reform.

No more slacking

When I was a little girl I had the habit of starting diaries and then forgetting all about them. While sifting through the basement at my parents' house not too long ago, I counted twelve - twelve! - half begun and never finished diaries spanning about a five year period. I was mortified. Yet it would appear that since September(-ish) my childhood habit has reemerged with respect to this blog. But no more. Nope. I've made a pre-New Year's New Year resolution (seeing that I rarely keep the resolutions I make on New Year's proper, I figure this might be a sneaky way to avert the inevitable downfall...) to blog regularly. There are far too many fascinating things going on not to. 

As you can see, I've moved to a new site which will hopefully bring you much aesthetic pleasure and happy reading. As always, feel free to leave comments or drop me a line - it's always great to hear from you!

Welcome back & happy reading!

Apologies…

Sincere apologies for my recent absence. I have not abandoned you entirely and promise to return shortly. Indeed, there is much to discuss: from pirates, to Chinese mobile technology in Ethiopia, to Chinese aid assistance, to what the recent financial crisis means for African development, and China's (potential) role in the recent economic crisis.

Please hold tight just a little bit longer

A bientot,
aleksandra