A joke told to me by an unemployed Spanish friend today:

Three government ministers go on a tour of Europe. One is from Britain, one from France, and the other from Spain. In London, the British minister takes his European colleagues to see the new lighting system that has been put in place to illuminate Big Ben. ‘You see our new lighting system?’ the minister says proudly. ‘It uses all the latest technology – solar power, lasers etc, and tourists love it. We invested £500,000 in it.’

In Paris the French minister takes his colleagues to see the new irrigation system which is watering all the capital’s parks. ‘You see our new irrigation system?’ the minister beams. ‘It’s ultra-modern. It recycles all the water it sprays out, and works a treat. It cost us a million euros.’

Finally they go to Spain. The Spanish minister takes his colleagues to the countryside outside Madrid. ‘You see our new motorway over there?’ he says, pointing straight ahead. The French and British ministers peer into the distance. ‘No, we can’t see anything,’ they reply, confused. ‘Aaaahh,’ the Spanish minister says with a satisfied wink. He pats his trouser pocket: ‘That’s because it’s all in here.’

What future for international aid?

Just because something, like improving political systems, for example, is important to development, does that mean it’s the business of development organisations? I’m not sure.

Think about the events in the Middle East. The revolution in Egypt will, we hope, do more for development in that country than any amount of NGO programmes or official aid. And there was probably nothing that donors could or should have done to encourage it, or shape it. So even if we can all agree that political events will shape development, that really doesn’t mean that outsiders need to get involved.

What are donors actually good at? We had Charles Kenny of CGD presenting his new book ‘Getting Better’, at ODI recently. As the title suggests, it is a largely optimistic view of the world of development and poverty reduction. One of his arguments is that donors haven’t been very good at encouraging economic growth – basically no one really knows how to do it – and so they, and their resources, would be more usefully occupied working in areas where it’s clear how to make a difference – vaccination programmes, for example. 

Our understanding of what creates ‘development’ – or what enables people to live happier lives – seems to be becoming more complex as we understand more about what makes change happen.  But maybe the world of ‘aid’ needs to move in the opposite direction and be a bit more modest, or at least transparent, about what bits of this development can actually be helped along by what kinds of outside intervention. 

Can a donor really promote ‘empowerment’ or ‘good governance’ in any meaningful sense?  Are even things like ‘economic growth’ beyond the scope of international aid?  Maybe it’s better for outsiders just to concentrate on things that aid does well, like health and education and leave the really hard stuff to the experts – people who are living the reality of these things in the country concerned. 

This makes me wonder if it might be more honest and more useful, to separate out outside involvement in different aspects of change.  So maybe official development aid  should be a much simpler beast, less worried about economic growth or political change in the long term and instead focusing in on a few things that we know will make a difference to people’s lives right now – health, education, social protection, infrastructure. 

Probably promoting economic change over time is best left to those inside the country.  Maybe outsiders can help most by putting political energy into the negotiation and administration of global public goods, like global tax rules, or rules on intellectual property or attempts to limit the impact of climate change.  

And maybe politics should be more, well, political.  Should advocacy NGOs turn into more explicitly political solidarity movements (like those which supported the African liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps?), who take their cue from the actual politics of the country concerned, rather than more generalised ideas of ‘empowerment’ or ‘rights’? 

This is thinking in process for me. Does outside involvement in the economics, the politics and the welfare aspects of development need to be separated out like this?  Is it a sacrilegious turning back of the clock or a needed dose of realism?  Answers, please…..

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H/t to Jules.

Bravo to Philip Stephens for telling it like it is on HM Treasury in yesterday’s FT:

The inflationary bust of the early 1990s shredded the Treasury’s credibility in setting interest rates. Tony Blair’s incoming government promptly handed control to the Bank of England. The global financial crisis exposed the dire failures of the Treasury’s fiscal framework. David Cameron’s response has been to hand fiscal oversight to a new Office for Budget Responsibility.

These were scarcely votes of confidence. Most institutions would have asked themselves where they had gone wrong. Yet by the accounts of ministers and senior officials across Whitehall, the Treasury’s swagger is ever more pronounced. It does not do contrition.

Exactly. HMT is undeniably full of very smart people, but as anyone who has worked in government knows all too well, the sheer arrogance of the institution’s culture is breathaking – as its tendency to bully, hector and throw its weight around.

This isn’t just whingeing from someone who used to work in another part of Whitehall. This culture is a serious problem because it creates such ripe conditions for failure. Look at how the Treasury bullied the IMF into toning down warnings before the financial crisis about the UK’s vulnerability to financial risks – in effect, taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm.

To be sure, much of the blame here rests with ministers – especially, in the run-up to the financial crisis, Gordon Brown. But as Philip Stephens notes, “I struggle to recall the slightest hint of any official dissent from Sir Nicholas [Macpherson, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury] or his colleagues”.

Not so long ago there was a long public debate about how the Home Office was not “fit for purpose”, which eventually led to the department being broken up. It’s time we had a similar debate about the Treasury – a department whose dysfunctional culture has done all of us a great deal more damage than the Home Office ever did.

Prepare for some downbeat news:

People in the  UK understand and relate to global poverty no differently now than they did in  the 1980s. This is the case despite massive campaigns such as the Jubilee  2000 debt initiative and Make Poverty History; the widespread adoption and  mainstreaming of digital communication techniques and social networks; steady growth in NGO fundraising revenues; the entire Millennium Development Goal story; and the establishment of a Westminster consensus on core  elements of development policy.

By many measures we have made amazing strides forward in recent years, but the public have largely been left behind. The result is that we operate within social and, by extension, political conditions that are precarious in the immediate term and incommensurate to the challenges of poverty and climate change in the medium and long term.

This is the blunt intro to Finding Frames (pdf, 120 pages; see also this Guardian post), a new report by Andrew Darnton and Martin Kirk, on ways to renew the international development narrative in the UK. They have some blunt advice for NGOs, too, notably that they need to

“shift the balance of NGO public engagement activities away from ‘transactions’ and towards ‘transformations’, [which means] placing less emphasis on ‘£5 buys…’ appeals and simple campaigning actions, and more emphasis on providing supporters with opportunities to engage increasingly deeply over time through a ‘supporter journey’”.

I think this is a really important point. I suspect that a lot of people are currently stuck in a situation in which they

a) mind deeply about global issues like development and climate;

b) are rightly sceptical about what they can achieve through party politics and elections;

c) are equally sceptical about how much difference it will make if they engage with NGOs on the terms that NGOs offer (sign this petition, give us a tenner a month), again with good reason; but

d) don’t want to become Climate Camp style activists either.

My hunch is that the key to engaging these kinds of potential activist is to recognise that they actually want to go a lot further than they’re being asked to by NGOs or by governments. Three memes that I think might catch:

1. Even as pressure on government aid budgets starts to increase, I think we might see big increases in giving from the most committed activists. Look at this year’s Comic Relief haul – a record £74 million. Look at this guy. These may be tastes of what’s to come.

2. A major upgrade in tools for calculating the impact of your lifestyle – think ecological footprint calculators on steroids, that can grab data direct from online shopping orders and electronic utility billing, and that link up with social networks, leading to much greater transparency and gradually increasing peer pressure on people to reduce the global impact of their consumption choices as the climate and development impacts of current energy use patterns, diets and so on start to become clearer.

3. A shift towards activists expecting to have a role in designing and running campaigns, not just being petition fodder (c.f. my ActionAid report, which argues that  ”civil society organisations should embrace a change that is coming anyway, and put their members in charge of their organisations – using technology platforms to ask them regularly what to campaign on, where, how to do it, and how they want to be involved”).

Queueing in the 'women's section' of a Macdonalds

A country where a woman who has no man to speak for her literally doesn’t exist as far as the authorities are concerned – and can’t claim benefits, can’t get medical treatment, feels intimidated to even leave the house.  A country where women’s career choices are limited to teaching or, oddly, presenting radio phone-ins – and where they have to ask permission from their husband, father, or even their son, to go to work at all.  Where even if they are allowed to work, they have to find a man to drive them there and back since there’s no public transport and women aren’t allowed to drive.  Where fashion options are limited to chosing between black, navy or brown for the colour of the stifling, all-covering garment that all women have to wear or face arrest or beating. 

The BBC’s Newsnight last night aired an absolutely brilliant film from Sue Lloyd-Roberts about women in Saudi Arabia – the country where all these things are just facts of daily life.  It reminded me most of all of Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, set in a future USA where women’s rights have been eroded to the point that they are reduced to the possessions of wealthy men.  But it’s happening now, in a developed country with shopping malls (that women aren’t allowed to work in), radio phone-in shows (where teenagers seeking romance are advised ‘don’t bother’), and a chapter of the Hell’s Angels (whose members see nothing wrong with the country’s treatment of women). 

And where, depressingly, some women defend the status quo.  Sue Lloyd-Roberts asks one wealthy woman (the founder of an organisation called ‘My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me’, believe it or not) if she agrees that it’s not fair that women can’t drive since it means that women who can’t afford chauffeurs can’t go to work. The reply? “A woman who is so financially constrained that she has to work, will never be able to buy a car”.  Never mind that some of her less priviledged sisters are sitting in their homes, enduring illness, poverty and a total loss of dignity just because they are women. 

There are some inspiring examples of women trying to make a change – like the social worker in the film and, inevitably, some Saudi bloggers.  But it seems not many, not yet. 

I know you know this.  I knew it too.  But seeing it, seeing the little humiliations and deprivations that make up the reality of life for women in that country is a different thing.  It was truly horrifying. I hope that one day soon we will look back at films like this and be amazed, as we are now at the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid, that these things were able to exist in our world.

The Daily Mail is so cheerfully and consistently hypocritical that most of the time it just feels like too much bother to pick them up on it. But every now and then, a gem comes along that’s so delightful that you can’t help yourself.

The Mail’s coverage of Saturday’s TUC march is such a gem. Here’s the opening from a piece by James Chapman this morning:

Ed Miliband was under fire last night for addressing Saturday’s march and comparing the protesters’ cause to that of the suffragettes, and the anti-apartheid and U.S. civil rights movements.

The article continues in the same vein for another few hundred words, with various folk quoted expressing their outrage that Ed Miliband would dare to compare himself or his rag-tag band of scummy demonstrators in any way with the suffragettes and other noble battlers for human dignity.

What the Daily Mail omits to mention is that the term ‘suffragettes’ was coined by… the Daily Mail. What could explain such a strange moment of shyness on the paper’s part? Perhaps the fact that the Mail devised the term as a term of abuse (until members of the movement defiantly appropriated it)?

And if you think that’s ironic, then try this: the Mail invented the term to pour scorn on members of the Women’s Social and Political Union specifically because of their use of direct action - coining the term ‘suffragettes’ to distinguish them from the broader movement of ‘suffragists’.

So for the Mail now to pour scorn on Ed Miliband for sullying the memory of the suffragettes: well, that probably represents some kind of all time best for the Mail. Ladies and gentlemen - the Daily Mail. Providing progressives with endless entertainment since 1896.

A depressing piece in yesterday’s El País reports that Raymond McDaniel, CEO of the disgraced ratings agency Moody’s, who presided over the company’s devastating involvement in the financial crisis, took home $9.2 million in 2010, a 69% rise on the previous year. The justification for this? Apparently Mr McDaniel has “helped restore confidence in Moody’s ratings by improving knowledge of the role and function of ratings.”

The restoration of confidence was undeniably needed. After all, Mr McDaniels’s company it was that gave triple-A ratings to thousands of the sub-prime mortgage loans whose deterioration triggered the global recession. Triple-A, it should be noted, means a bond has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of defaulting – in Moody’s’ estimation, as Michael Lewis points out in The Big Short, the sub-prime loans were as safe as US Treasury bonds (83 per cent of the triple-A ratings his firm gave to mortgage bonds in 2006 were subsequently degraded). McDaniels’s company, too, was still awarding triple-A ratings to Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG shortly before – in part because they believed the ratings and invested heavily in sub-prime bonds – they all went bust and almost brought the whole financial system down with them. Mr McDaniels, as Lewis reports, told an investor in 2007: ‘I truly believe our ratings will be accurate.’

A restoration of confidence is also needed in light of the congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s damning verdict on the ratings industry, published in January. The rating agencies, the Commission concluded, ‘abysmally failed in their central mission to provide quality ratings on securities for the benefit of investors…The rating agencies placed market share and profit considerations above the quality and integrity of their ratings.’ The Commission selected Moody’s as its case study for bad practice in the industry.

The sheer ineptness of the companies is documented in embarrassing detail in The Big Short. In one of many examples of their incompetence, Lewis shows how they rated floating-rate mortgages, whereby borrowers would spend two years on a low, “teaser” rate before the rate rose sharply for the rest of the term, more highly than steadier fixed-rate loans. The ratings remained the same even when the interest payable on the loans soared: ‘The rating agencies simply assumed that the borrower would be just as likely to make his payments when the interest rate on the loan was 12 per cent as when it was 8 per cent.’

That floating-rate loans received higher ratings meant that more people were able to take them out – the proportion of US sub-prime mortgages with floating rates rose from 40 to 80 per cent in the five years to 2007. Buoyed by the lively trade in mortgage securities, lenders persuaded tens of thousands of people who could not afford it to saddle themselves with these loans. As Lewis notes, ‘sub-prime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default – few, if any, should be running the risk of their interest rate spiking up,’ but Moody’s couldn’t get the loan ratings out of the door quickly enough: the agency went from spending six weeks assessing the credit-rating of a single security to issuing thirty new triple-A ratings on mortgage bonds every day (the Commission called the company a “Triple-A factory”).

But it was not just stupidity that threatened the system; it was also a complete – and sometimes suspicious – lack of transparency. Another passage from The Big Short relates what happened when two investors, Danny and Vinny, went to meet a woman from Moody’s to ask how she went about rating sub-prime bonds:

The woman from Moody’s was surprisingly frank. She told [the investors] that even though she was responsible for evaluating subprime mortgage bonds, she wasn’t allowed by her bosses simply to downgrade the ones she thought deserved to be downgraded. She submitted a list of the bonds she wished to downgrade to her superiors and received back a list of what she was permitted to downgrade. “She said she’d submit a list of a hundred bonds and get back a list with twenty-five bonds on it, with no explanation of why,” said Danny.

…

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” said Vinny, hand on chin. “You have two bonds that seem identical. How is one of them Triple-A and the other one not?”

“I’m not the one who makes those decisions,” said the woman from Moody’s, but she was clearly uneasy.

“Here’s another thing I don’t understand,” said Vinny. “How could you rate any portion of a bond made up exclusively of subprime mortgages Triple-A?”

“That’s a very good question.”

It’s a question the ratings agencies prefer to duck. Ray McDaniel, of course, is not alone in benefiting from the mess he helped cause – most of the heads of the investment banks that conned or bullied the agencies into upgrading sub-prime ratings (Moody’s complied not just because it didn’t understand the complex bond packages but because of the threat that the banks would go to its rival, S&P, if the rating wasn’t high enough to sell the securities on to pension funds and insurance firms), or that bet on the dodgy bonds themselves, are still in their jobs, and still raking in obscene bonuses.

Those banks are again making profits, thanks to being bailed out by the US taxpayers they had already shafted once. Moody’s net annual profit, on the other hand – despite the alleged restoration of confidence in the company – was 10% lower in 2010 than it was in 2005 when McDaniels took the helm. During that time, according to El País, the salaries of top staff have doubled. Why there hasn’t been a revolt against these people (not least from the shareholders who are so obviously being taken for a ride) is a mystery, but as with the Middle Eastern dictators they resemble, who are finally being punished after years of pillaging their countries, the day of judgement is surely only deferred.

Continuing our recent international development futures theme on Global Dashboard (see Andy’s post on international NGOs last week, and also the podcast I did on global development challenges with Owen Barder and Malini Mehra on Development Drums) – here’s a new report (pdf, 42 pages) that I did for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between now and 2020.

ActionAid commissioned the report as an input to their new International Strategy for 2012 to 2016. They asked me to review a large range of futures studies, outlook reports, scenario planning exercises and so on, and from them distill a sense of what are the key questions for the development outlook over the decade ahead – and also to extract some key recommendations for what this changing context would mean for them as a global campaigning organisation. Putting it together was a lot of fun.

There’s a brief summary below of the eight uncertainties and ten recommendations for ActionAid, lifted from the executive summary; click here to download the full report.

(more…)

A man from the British government rang me up the other day and asked what I thought would happen in the next five years in West Africa (the advantage of being interested in an obscure subject: you don’t need to know that much for people to think you’re an expert). This is like asking someone to predict which lottery numbers will come up this week but, having prefaced all comments with the get-out clause that the only thing certain in such an unstable part of the world is uncertainty, I ventured a few guesses.

The first thing to note if you’re a Western government is that of the five really key countries in the region – Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Guinea (in order of importance based on the impact of what happens in them on other countries) – four have quite serious internal divisions to deal with. Nigeria faces rebellion in the Delta and increasing unrest in the middle belt and north; Senegal has the long-running Casamance rebellion; in the Ivory Coast there is a dramatic north-south divide which is threatening to explode (again) into war; and Guinea has the disaffected Forestiere region and simmering resentment among some sections of the large Fula community. In other words, four of the region’s five most important countries are bedevilled by internal instability. This complicates policy-making and means Western governments, businesses and civil society organisations taking an interest in the region cannot be sure who will be in charge next month, let alone five years down the line. You only need to look at the recent elections in these five countries to see how shaky are their foundations: few would have predicted that Guinea’s elections would go off peacefully, but they did; elections in Ghana, the beacon of good governance in the region, looked tense for a while before a result was called; and the Ivory Coast, which had enjoyed a few years of peace after a brutal civil conflict, now has two self-declared presidents who may soon declare war on each other. (more…)

More horizon scanning out this week – it’s a growth industry – from the Irish NGO, Trocaire (and some inputs from IDS).

This scan is a bit different – it’s one written for an international NGO audience with a timeline to 2020.

Lawrence Haddad’s blog summed up the 3 key points well in a post about the launch of the report:

The top 3 “burning questions” for INGOs are:

1. Advocacy: how do INGOs protect their independence and ability to speak out on issues that may be unpopular with important stakeholders? In other words, to what extent does funding compromise stance?

2. Downward accountability: How do INGOs ensure that they are as (or more) accountable to the people they reach as they are to the development partners that fund them?

3. Flexible and responsive: How can INGO’s experiment and innovate without falling victim to development fads?

His conclusion – NGOs: be less obsessed with ODA and focus on other government departments, focus more on global public goods that your own government can affect, such as climate, trade, and security regimes, and try to focus on transformative actions.

Sounds good to me – in short in a world of fewer poor countries and fewer countries needing or wanting resource transfers over time, looming on to the horizon are development assistance as development policy (aka ‘policy coherence’) and global public goods and how these will relate to any MDGs 2.0 – a second generation of the Millennium Development Goals - the UN poverty goals – if there is a second generation after 2015.

And for those with a view to looking further ahead  - there’s some thought provoking scenarios for  2030 from the Guardian’s Development blog…

“Language is one area of culture that Nicolas Sarkozy can’t dominate,” complains Hélène Cixous in the Guardian, “so he mangles it with a calculated barbarity… You’ve got to see what he does to language. He mauls it, he beats it, he pummels it, he dismembers it. Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent’s face.”

I hate to put Global Dashboard in the embarrassing position of defending the vertically-challenged French President, but seriously? This from Hélène Cixous? Author of some of the worst linguistic atrocities ever perpetuated?

Pure I, identical to I-self, does not exist. I is always in difference. I is the open set of the trances of an I by definition changing, mobile, because living-speaking-thinking-dreaming. This truth should moreover make us prudent and modest in our judgements and our definitions. The difference is in us, in me, difference plays me (my play). And it is numerous: since it plays with me in me between me and me or I and myself. A “myself” which is the most intimate first name of You. I will never say often enough that the difference is not one, that there is never without the other, and that the charm of difference (beginning with sexual difference) is that it passes… [continues ad nauseam]

Really, really, really: not fair.

As Mother Jones says, “You should, like, strongly consider applying to work for this guy:”

We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20^th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed  office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks.

Matthew Doig

Sarasota Herald-Tribune
1741 Main St.
Sarasota FL, 34236
(941) 361-4903
matthew.doig@heraldtribune.com

Uh-oh....

In an article in the Daily Mail today, Peter Mandelson takpes a pop at the Labour Government’s aid policy.  He says:

‘I’m not anti-aid, but if you ask me where I would put my money, it would go on trade rather than aid as a key to African economic development.’

Sigh.  One of the most unthinking cliches trotted out by people who want to sound knowledgable about development is to repeat the tired old mantra that ‘trade not aid’ is the secret to reducing poverty.  Sadly they’re just revealing how little they know - it’s a completely meaningless distinction. 

 Trade and aid are completely different things, and they’re not in opposition to each other. Companies trade, and governments give aid.  The roles can’t, and probably shouldn’t, be merged.  Aid can help trade – there’s no point in having the perfect trading system (something which Peter Mandelson conspicuously failed to deliver during his tenure as the EU’s trade commissioner), if you don’t have any roads to move stuff around the country, or people who can read, or people who are well enough to work.  Trade won’t help you then, but aid might.

Governments can’t, as Peter Mandelson seems to be suggesting they can, ‘put money into’ trade – unless he’s suggesting, in a most un-New Labour way, that the government set up state-owned companies to trade with Africa.  What they can do is to provide the sort of aid that can help economic development and therefore trade – a lot of which they’re already doing, like  investing in education or in health.  Given the uncertainties involved in the aid business, donors won’t always get it right.  But silly slogans like ‘trade not aid’, are even less likely to help.