Why do some projects work?

“Projects” are not very fashionable in development circles these days – least of all simple projects that do simple, practical things like fixing and building. It seems that for many people practical projects are more important, or perhaps just more real, than abstract ideas like governance, policy, gender equity, participation and empowerment. Post by Graeme MacRae, an New Zealand anthropologist who does research in Bali, Java and South India.

Climate change and development

The issue of climate change and development is starting to come together quite sharply. Two recent reports by Oxfam and CARE bring out the problem in its starkest reality. The reports look at the effects of climate change on human migration, and the difficulty of equitably achieving a sufficient cut in greenhouse gas emissions.

Let them keep their millions: should ‘development’ be refused in Madagascar?

Rio Tinto has invested 1.2 billion USD to implement a mineral sands project in southeastern Madagascar, in what is both a global biodiversity hotspot and one of Madagascar’s poorest and more isolated regions.

Africa up for grabs?

There has been a lot of interest in African land deals in the past few weeks. Amy Glass raised the case of Madagascar on this blog, and Gwynne Dyer in a syndicated article calls it a ‘neo-colonialist land grab’ noting the ‘new’ colonists now include a new set of powers including China India, South Korea and the Arab Gulf States. The scale of foreign companies entering the Africa land market is huge, and while all of these deals may not go through, the implications of the some that do go ahead have enormous implications for peasant agriculture on the continent.

Indian Travellers Tale 2: From ‘rags’ to respect

In the streets of any large city in India you will see small groups of women (and sometimes children) around garbage skips, going through them and collecting scraps of paper, tin, plastic, and cloth. These are the ‘rag pickers’, and in India’s pervasive caste system they sit fairly close to the bottom rung. They are a sub-group of Dalits (once known as sudra or untouchables) and are generally marginalised in society, kept to the most menial and unpleasant tasks.

But a remarkable thing has happened with the ragpickers of the city of Pune in Western India: the ragpickers are now a central part of the city’s new waste management system, and had a critical hand in its design. But let us go back to the beginning. Twenty years ago, a couple of people from the SNDT Women’s University in Pune started an ILO-supported project to provide adult literacy to the city’s ragpickers. Very early on, the ragpickers made it clear to them that it was not literacy they wanted but respect and the opportunity to have a safe work environment free from harassment from the police and city government officials. Thus Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP) was formed: the Pune Ragpickers’ Union.

Madagascar – Island up for grabs?

Madagascar has been in political turmoil these last few months, and there are no signs of improvement any time soon. Key to the recent downfall of former President Marc Ravolomanana was the announcement by South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics that they had leased 1.3 million hectares of land in the north of the island to grow corn and oil palms. According to officials of the former government, the agreement involved less than 4% of Madagascar’s largely unexploited arable land. Both parties cited considerable advantages for the country as a whole, including 6 billion USD in infrastructure development and 70,000 jobs. But what do deals like this really mean for the country’s rural poor, which make up almost 70% of the population?

Traveller’s Tale: Indian NGO development revisited

I remember many years back in the early 1980s, I came across an older journal article by a pair of brothers with the arresting name of Paddock. They wrote in the mid-1960s, saying that India was beyond redemption, and that the world should undertake triage and only provide emergency assistance. Similar things are often said about Africa in today’s discourse, including Dambisa Moyo’s argument (discussed on this blog) to cut aid all together. It is nearly ten years since I was last in Bangalore (in Karnataka state) in India. Now the question is: what is the relevance of aid agencies and NGOs in the context of a booming economy, at least in southern India, and Karnataka in particular? Ten years ago, the concrete and glass IT offices were on the edge of Bangalore, standing rather incongruously in farmland and paddy fields, and people commuted out from the city to them. Now these IT offices are all surrounded by luxury apartments and gated highrise suburbs for the IT elite.

Now where does this leave the ‘real’ India – the rural communities which still make up most of the population and most of the poverty? They have not been left out all together: the construction work on roads and the like is evident everywhere. The question is does this reach the most marginalised?

New World Bank book “re-hash of standard World Bank dogma”

I first heard of the “new and epic” World Bank book entitled ‘Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom-Up’ on Duncan Green’s (of Oxfam GB) blog, From Poverty to Power, where his enthusiasm (“I’ve got the book on order, but this is so good, I wanted to tell people about it right away”) sent us scurrying to the World Bank’s PovertyNet publications for a read of the 50-page overview, only to be bitterly disaapointed. Green suggests that “there are rich pickings in here for anyone interested in the reality of poverty and development, big challenges to our assumptions, and blessed relief from all the frustrating generalities about ‘the poor’, ‘developing countries’ and so on”. For me the ‘pickings’ were very lean indeed in this re-hash of standard World Bank dogma, at the expense of social justice and the human rights of the marginalised.

The book reports on a multinational study of the factors that enable people to move out of poverty, and follows the Voices of the Poor study the Bank undertook in 2002. This current study was undertaken across 15 countries and involved 9,000 household interviews, 1,500 focus groups, as well as other survey instruments. But rather than using existing poverty statistics, the Study took a community or village approach, and asked communities to identify who was poor, their characteristics, and how they moved into or out of poverty.

But a major issue with the conclusions contained in the overview is that there is no mention of gender, ethnicity, or other characteristics of minorities which lead to exclusion and marginalisation. By ignoring the evidence that inequality is widening as economies grow, and furthermore that the depth of poverty is worsening (an indicator of increased marginalisation), the Bank with its new report is glossing over the fundamental factors of poverty. [...]

Commentary on Dambisa Moyo’s book ‘Dead Aid’

Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid has received a lot of publicity over the last month and joins a long list of popular books attacking aid programs, and those organisations and groups that deliver it. This book is by an economist who has spent most of her working life with Goldmann Sachs the investment advisory service, and before that the World Bank. I emphasise that point as most of the commentary highlights her Zambian heritage, and it is used to give her more credibility than the many middle age white males who comment on aid to Africa – and I readily admit falling into that category. Of course there are also many black voices who comment on the aid policies to Africa but take a different line, and we can think of Nobel laureates Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, or former UN Supremo Kofi Annan, all of whom have lived and worked in Africa; or the Kenyan lawyer Binaifer Nowrojee who is a member of the Coalition for Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations, and writes extensively on gender and conflict in Africa contexts.

The line Ms Moyo takes is a familiar one, and that is the debt crisis in Africa is of Africa’s own doing and that ‘aid’ makes things worse. What is interesting is that the book comes out at the time the world is facing by far the worst global recession since the 1930s, and the solutions Ms Moyo is suggesting for Africa, are now generally been agreed as been part of the cause of the current crisis: that is, access to unfettered global exchange markets, and poor credit regulations – particularly in the US. One can argue that Goldman Sachs is probably more to do the problem than the solution.

That aside, this book’s rather passionate defence of the neoliberal approaches to development is rather selective in its view of aid and development. While it readily accepts the role of the re-building of Europe after the war and cites the Marshall Plan as a very positive example, Ms Moyo seems to be less supportive of the aid successes in the developing world of the last sixty years, and the role it had in many countries, some of which are in Africa. She also suggests that the Asian successes are to do with ‘free market policies’ and ‘outward orientation’. While we can agree with an outward orientation, one is hard pressed to find any Asian country, successful or otherwise, that practices free market policies. Much of the success is to do with a high level of government (and dare I say it ‘aid’) investment in strategic areas, and in planning. None of this is mentioned in Ms Moyo’s book. [...]

Shifts in New Zealand aid policy: a sign of things to come?

The New Zealand aid program has hit the headlines in the last week with an announcement by Foreign Minister Murray McCully of two reviews into the foreign aid program, and at the same time flagging a shift away from poverty reduction to economic development.