Archive for the ‘development’ Category

Review: Tim Harford - The Logic of Life

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I’m a fan of Tim Harford, aka the Undercover Economist, and author of a very interesting blog at the FT. He is an excellent example of the division of labour, one of his favourite things, successfully hoovering up dull economics papers and rolling out readable prose. His second book, The Logic of Life, is not really about Africa. It is mostly about how cities are great, and how people who live in the country are carbon-hungry subsidy-hounds. It’s really good.

The undercover Africanist

But there are a couple of relevant sections, including a useful discussion of post-colonial African agriculture drawn from Bates’ Markets and States in Tropical Africa. Harford also discusses disease and development. He argues that malaria control is of secondary economic importance to AIDS control because, while malaria mostly affects children, AIDS primarily affects economically more productive adults. (He’s not totally heartless, just an economist.) He also argues that disease control is itself secondary to, and follows from, the establishment of institutions that incentivise economic innovation and wealth creation.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

I think he might be wrong about malaria. This is mostly guesswork on my part. But, judging by the notes, it was also mostly guesswork by Harford - so wild conjecture is allowed (and fun of course).

Even if we just consider malaria in younger children - the least economically productive demographic - the disease has a spillover impact on household economics. First, children don’t suffer an illness alone: they are nursed, probably by a more economically-productive family member. Serious treatment probably involves a time-consuming trip to a non-local medical facility. Sickness in the young therefore removes important child labour from the household economy, and the labour of healthy adults. Second, the high likelihood of a child dying creates a rational incentive to have more children. Pregnancy, childbirth and post-natal care reduce the availability and productivity of female household labour for lengthy periods. High childhood mortality reduces the eventual economic payoff for this sacrifice. And, third, medical facilities spend an inordinate amount of time on childbirth or treating childhood malaria, skewing medical provision away from temporarily-sick, but otherwise economically-productive adults.

AIDS and malaria

Harford goes on to argue - correctly I suspect - that AIDS is a more significant direct economic problem than malaria. But in areas with a high incidence of both diseases, AIDS and malaria may be linked. AIDS has already reduced the stock of econimcally productive adults and created a scary number of child-headed households: their economic viability is thus under great pressure from childhood malaria. And, in adult-headed households, child mortality may increase AIDS infection rates. First, the replacement of childhood malaria victims by (un)knowingly HIV-positive parents, perhaps with a new partner, is a rational choice with socially harmful consequences. And second, pregnancy does not just reduce the domestic and agricultural productivity of women, it may also temporarily remove their sexual labour from the household. Bored and impatient fathers thus have an increased incentive to find another sexual partner, and the corollary increased risk of contracting and passing on AIDS.

Disease and development

Harford ultimately argues that disease has been controlled elsewhere after economic growth, and that growth was secured by establishing institutions that preserved and encouraged the creation of economic wealth. True enough, I expect. But it is also true that the technology to control malaria already exists, and where these technologies are imperfect, the incentive to innovate certainly exists. African history has been marked by efforts to control, direct and increase labour power (if not always productivity). So if African governments need to create or reform economic institutions then a good place to start might be anti-malarial projects that protect and encourage such ‘wealth in people’.

Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World:
Buy from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

Posted in african history, aids, development, disease, economics, malaria, tim harford | No Comments »

What is tradition? Ritual mutilation and traditional ignorance at the UN.

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Some jargon

‘Embodied power’ is an important concept for my research on the history of childhood in colonial Africa. This pretentious academic jargon simply means the physical markings on the body that are used to display citizenship, to mark the transition through age grades, or to complete puberty rites. In Africa this means things like scarification, circumcision, clitoridectomy and other forms of ritual mutilation. Most of these operations are performed by adults on children, or on children who are becoming adults, so ritual mutilation is vital to a historical understanding of generational power.

Embodied power now: the UNPFA and the trouble with aid workers

Ritual mutilation is still a live issue. In Ghana, you can get 5-10 years for practising female genital mutilation. Sounds fair. The 6th February was catchily declared the International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation by the United Nations Population Fund. It’s hard to fault their good intentions. But the UNFPA also claim that genital mutilation is “deeply entrenched in social and cultural tradition”.1 The word tradition is always bad news.

Traditions might be old and they might be entrenched. But they might be very young and not entrenched at all. Cultural practices have historical roots, and history springs up all over the place. To be fair, the UNFPA website does ask “Where does the practice come from?”. But, to return to being unfair, this is answered with meaningless waffle and a meek admission that its origins are “unclear”.2 The social causes are apparently the economic weakness of women and the desire to control female sexuality. Well, duh. But why now, why here and since when?

The UNFPA, in short, has no idea what it is trying to combat. Shouldn’t it try and find out? Well, no, probably not.

For western development and aid workers - as for colonial officials - detailed local knowledge is unnecessary and annoying: it makes your job more difficult.3 You don’t need to know much about the roots of the problem at all. You need to know how to arrange a conference, how to extract funding from governments, how to write a glossy report - and which paved streets in Accra are too narrow for your air-con SUV. In fact, knowing too much might make your job irrelevant. Maybe your mate who works for the imaginary UN Road Building Initiative has more influence over clitoridectomy than you do, so it’s probably best not to find out. And, ultimately, if your development or advocacy group is successful - and understanding the problem makes this more likely - then you put yourself out of a job.

Not that I’m cynical.

Embodied power in history: a Xhosa example

But if the UNPFA did get its act together, what might it find? I think they’d find that clitoridectomy etc are not ‘traditional’, but contingent on local historical dynamics.

Let’s ignore clitoridectomy and consider a South African example of embodied power: the Xhosa ‘custom’ of ingqithi, the exarticulation of the last joint of a finger. It was a marker of citizenship, control and belonging; children normally had the operation at about three years old, but it could be delayed until as late as eighteen if the child lived away from the village. So far, so anthropological. But the statistical study of this practice also allows the problem to be approached from a historical perspective.4

In 1964, a Transkei mission-hospital doctor surveyed all visiting patients to see if they practised this ‘tradition’, and made two unsurprising findings: that incidence of ingqithi was smaller among both educated and Christian patients. But he also noted the age of his patients so it is possible to track the probable date of the operation and any chronological trends. Surprisingly, there is not a linear decline of this custom. There is a clear peak of ingqithi in the interwar years, approximately 50% higher than in the decades before WWI and after WWII. European cultural values were clearly not simply destroying an indigenous tradition – ‘tradition’ was itself a historical product and dynamic.

One useful route for histories of African childhood would be to trace the driving forces behind the desire, among young and old alike, to control children’s bodies and identities. For the Transkei, for example, this might involve studying Xhosa relationships to encroaching mission and independent Christianities, but also the increased incidence (not always with parental blessing) of migratory child labour to Natal. We can also speculate on the impact of ingqithi on productivity: if you have 9-and-a-bit fingers, are you still able to perform nimble-fingered tasks with industrial machinery, or are you only good for hoeing?

References:
1. Interview with UNFPA director.
2. “The practice of FGM/FGC has been followed by many different peoples and societies across the ages and the continents”. UNPFA FAQs on FGM.
3. On the similarities between aid workers and colonial officials see this review by Justin Willis.
4. All statistics are from Jansen, G., ‘Some observations about ritual mutilation in a Transkei mission hospital, with special reference to the ingqithi-custom’, African Studies, 25, 2 (1966), pp73-9.

Posted in UNFPA, african history, aid, development, ghana, history of childhood, south africa, the body, xhosa | No Comments »

Review: Robert Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

“The rest of the world can now do very little for Africa…”

I rather enjoyed Calderisi’s short, readable and stimulating book about aid and development in Africa. Written by an ex-World Bank high-flyer, it deals with the post-1970 years: a period of almost unmitigated failure for Africa. Calderisi vividly illustrates the scale of African economic underperformance: of all the sub-Saharan countries, only Ghana and Uganda have now regained the same real income levels they had in 1970 – the rest have become poorer; and South Korea, poorer than Ghana in 1960, has now become an aid donor to Africa.[151, 156] Calderisi also addresses the political controversy surrounding the remedial economic liberalisation policies of the World Bank and IMF: he argues that this was not the cause of economic woes but a reaction to a more profound economic trend.

For the general reader, a reassessment of the cause and effects of structural adjustment is the most useful – and underdeveloped – aspect of the book. Calderisi argues that internationally directed liberalisation was primarily the result of a massive evaporation of African export markets from the 1970s onwards. In the face of growing international competition from other developing countries, Africa lost $70bn a year: “there was not enough money in the world - let alone in the World Bank - to fill this gap”. [18] He is right to emphasise this missing half of the debate on late-twentieth century Africa: but it is a shame there isn’t more detail on the affected products and sectors, and a detailed analysis of where the lost business went. What, if anything, could Africa have done to staunch the bleeding?

The idea that World Bank and IMF reforms are the cause of African poverty is, however, firmly entrenched in the left/liberal-ish mindset: SAPs were once memorably described to me as a “rolling clusterfuck” across the Ghanaian economy, a metaphor that I have stolen and applied ever since. If Calderisi is to be more persuasive then his argument needs to be more empirically detailed and anecdotally powerful: a counterweight to the emotive personal tales of neglect, suffering and privatisation that currently dominate public perception.

Calderisi is very strong on the unrealities and inefficiencies of many African economies, often caused by the absurdity of subsidising (modern, prestigious) industry at the expense of (dull, backward) agriculture. Forcing farmers in Cote d’Ivoire to use locally produced sacks and state-owned shipping services, for example, protects hundreds of industrial jobs, but imposes a ruinous cost on hundreds of thousands of agricultural producers.[146] He is also strong on corruption. I’ve often thought that elite African politics attracts the same type of people as privatized utilities/monopolies do in the West: why do something well, when you can do something badly and still make a great deal of money? Calderisi’s anecdotal style confirms this view.

The solution, or part of it, is to drastically cut back aid, and make it strictly conditional on good governance and human rights. But is it all doom and gloom? Well, no. His description of new accountability practices in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project is interesting, although the jury is still out on their effectiveness.[177-95] Calderisi also praises the actions of five “serious” African governments: Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Mali. These countries should be given an unconditional blank cheque, and allowed to get on with it.[209-10] Sadly, in the rush to condemn the rest of Africa, Calderisi rather ignores what these governments have done right.

This review has focused on the ideas behind the book, but much of the enjoyment comes from the anecdotal style, and the accounts of everyday life as a World Bank-er in Africa. Many of Calderisi’s stories are eye-opening and optimistic, if partial. He is an engaging writer, and I rattled through the book in one sitting. The one big weakness is an ill-advised attempt to pinpoint an “African” culture that encourages and embeds corruption and bad governance: ideologies are important, but this continent-wide dismissal was pretty unconvincing. That reservation aside, the book is well worth a read, and may alter a few opinions.

Robert Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa:
Buy from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

Posted in abidjan, african history, cote d'ivoire, development | No Comments »