It’s not just the World Bank which believes that the health of baby boys matters less than girls. Here’s the World Health Organisation:

• “While women and men share many similar health challenges, the differences are such that the health of women deserves particular attention.”
• “Every year some nine million children under five years, including 4.3 million girls [48% of the total], die from conditions that are largely preventable and treatable… Globally, girls are not more likely to die under the age of five years than boys are. In fact, girls may have a certain advantage.”
• “The health and development of… children is a prime concern for all societies. The health and wellbeing of young girls is of particular concern because of their future reproductive roles and the clear intergenerational effects that poor maternal health has on the health and development prospects of their children.”

So… boys die more than girls, and are sicker. The overwhelming majority of these deaths (95+%) could be prevented easily and cheaply. But the health a boy is worth less than that of a girl, because mothers will go on to play a greater role in the lives of their children than fathers.

I still think this is a morally repugnant argument, especially when WHO (like the Bank) can find no evidence of sexual discrimination in child or healthcare. There’s “no overall systematic bias against either boys or girls” in access to immunization, for example. Furthermore, “boys are more likely to suffer from severe malnutrition (stunting) than girls are.”

But let’s explore WHO’s instrumentalist approach a little further. It’s widely accepted, of course, that more educated women have healthier families. Their own health as children presumably has an impact on their ability to stay in school and learn, and thus on the role they’ll play as mothers.

But causation runs the other way, as well. As children become healthier, families tend to choose to have fewer children, and to invest more in them. This has a huge impact on the health of women and on the lives they lead. The health of all children has instrumental benefit, therefore.  If anything, parents may be especially sensitive to male infant mortality, given the preference of many to have at least one son.

Also, as wealth is the most important determinant of health, men’s role as breadwinners – they make up 60% of the global workforce – cannot be totally ignored. There may be greater return on investment in the health of a young girl (although I haven’t seen research proving this), but a boy’s expected lifetime earnings, and the impact these will have on his children, remain important.

What is galling is how threadbare the evidence base is – even after years of ‘mainstreaming’ gender into health. The WHO has run an awful lot of gender workshops in recent years, but its network on Gender, Women, and Health (interesting name), displays remarkably little curiosity as to why women are healthier than men. The anodyne verdict –“probably due to a combination of… genetic and behavioural facts” – is backed up with just four references to the academic literature.

In its research into men and boys, it simply indulges in the usual lazy speculation about men’s risk-taking and failure to take care of themselves, before turning attention to strategies to “encourage men to take responsibility for advocating agendas of gender equality, including policy initiatives for women’s rights.”

“What gets measured gets done,” says WHO’s Director-General, Margaret Chan, explaining why she commissioned a report to “gather a baseline of data about the health of women and girls throughout the life-course, in different parts of the world, and in different groups within countries.”

Perhaps it’s time for her to do the same for the other – sicker – sex.

The 2012 World Development Report has a stat that the World Bank is mighty proud of. I’ll let Bank President, Robert Zoellick tell the story:

Imagine if a city of almost four million people disappeared every year. A Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Yokohama. It would be hard to miss.

 Yet it goes largely unnoticed that almost four million girls and women “go missing” each year in developing countries.

It’s a shocking statistic. For comparison, AIDS and TB each kill around 1.7 million people a year – malaria a million. So why are so many women missing? What’s happening to them? And what does the Bank want to do about it?

Burrow into the report and the total drops a bit – to 3.882 million. A third of the ‘missing’ are from China, 30% from Sub-Saharan Africa, and 22% from India. The two big rising powers and the countries of the world’s poorest region clearly have some questions to answer.

The initial analysis follows a well-trodden path. According to the Bank, the largest group, 37%, are ‘missing at birth’. This is largely a problem for China and India (95% of missing baby girls). Many parents in these countries want sons rather than daughters, and are prepared to use ultrasound and abortion to make sure they get them.

It’s when we move onto infant mortality that the WDR gets into trouble. 617,000 of the missing (16% of the total) are girls who die before the age of 5, it reports. These girls die in much larger numbers than their brothers because they are neglected by their parents and are starved of healthcare by the prejudiced societies into which they have the misfortune to be born. Right?

Well no, not at all, as it happens.

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Brand identity is important for a high-profile global agency. Your logo tells your stakeholders who you are, what you stand for, and where you’re going. It’s about your values. Your story. Your people.

So it’s unfortunate that the new brand for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – launched yesterday amid much fanfare, and with just over a month to go until the Durban climate summit…

…bears a remarkable similarity to that of … er … Comedy Central.

D’oh! (H/t Jeff Hatcher.)

It’s UN day!  I always forget it.  Ban Ki-moon remembered and celebrated by giving a speech to a group of ninth-graders at a school in New York.  He got off to a flying start:

I heard the last time you were all here was for Movie Night. I hope I am not quite as scary as “Night of the Living Dead.”

Nobody would accuse the Secretary-General of being scary.  But he can do corny:

The UN is 4 U – and you can be 4 the UN.

Indeed.

At a time when many European governments insist in avoiding major economic reforms, the Vatican has bigger ideas:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.

“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.

It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

Sort of like… the Catholic Church.

Whatever else the Occupy protests (over 900 at the last count), have done, they have propelled the issue of inequality on to the front pages and into the political mainstream.  The idea of the ‘99%’ is brilliantly simple, pulling together every group and every person who has a nagging sense that they are losing out in the global economic race while others pull ahead out of sight.  

The case the protestors are putting basically an ethical one.  A world where the majority of the benefits of growth go to the few while the costs of failure, whether in the form of bank bailouts, of redundancies, or of cuts to public services are borne by the many is not, it seems, one that an increasing number of people want to live in any more. 

 If that fails to convince, there are other more prosaic reasons to care about inequality too. Inequality, at least at high levels, does matter to growth, to poverty, and to stability.  Here are five good reasons, drawing from recent economic research, for politicians to care about – and act on – inequality.

 One, inequality contributed to the financial crisis.  Debate rages about how much.  But it does seem clear that when real wages for the middle and working classes aren’t rising, as they weren’t in America for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and when aspirations are rising rapidly, partly because of the impact of the lifestyles of the super-rich whose incomes are heading North at a rapid rate, and when credit is cheap (thanks to the mega-profits being made in China due partly to low wages and growing inequality there), then an unsustainable credit bubble is only the click of a Wall Street button away. 

Two, (some) inequality is bad for economic growth.  This is one that economists have been arguing about for years.  But it’s clear that some inequalities – in access to education, to credit, to land in agricultural societies – are bad for growth, since they mean that the skills, energy and ideas of a large part of the population are being underused.  As growth becomes more about human capital and less about land and machines, this will only become truer. Inequality can also make growth less sustainable (in an economic sense), and make episodes of growth shorter than in more equal societies. (more…)

Oh dear. From today’s Observer (for non-Brits, that’s the Sunday edition of the Guardian):

The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet’s resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.

That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, the forthcoming UNFPA State of World Population report that’s cited in the article simply uses the 2010 revision of the main UN population database (which you can find here). The 2100 figure of 15bn (actually, 16 bn if you did maths GCSE and know how to round 15.8bn to the nearest billion) is the top end estimate.

The medium variant? You guessed it, 10 billion: in other words, the “previous UN estimate” referred to in the Guardian piece. Nothing that a 5 minute fact check wouldn’t immediately have revealed, but hey, let’s not let details get in the way of a good headline.

Always amazes me that a paper with such outstanding foreign affairs coverage is so bad on environment – John Vidal’s dreadful Copenhagen reporting being the example par excellence.

A while ago, there used to be a magazine called Whole Earth Review. Not all that many people remember it now, but at the time it brought together some of the most cutting edge thinkers around. It was an offshot from the seminal Whole Earth Catalog, which ran from 1968 to 1972, and which had been set up by Stewart Brand – who also founded Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. Among Whole Earth Review’s early editors were Kevin Kelly, who would go on to set up a magazine called Wired,  and Howard Rheingold, who would years later identify the phenomenon of smart mobs.

The Whole Earth Review emerged, in other words, out of conversations between people who had a habit of being a long way ahead of their time. (All of the Review’s back issues are online, by the way – go read.) And in the winter of 1989, an especially interesting issue of the Review came out. Its subject: “the global teenager”.

Before you ask, no, the Review didn’t predict the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or the London riots; not exactly, anyway (although there is an article on a certain technology, “gradually becoming accessible to the general public”, called Usenet – which noted with interest how “Chinese students in North America used it to organise support for the pro-democracy movement back home”).

Instead, it did something arguably more interesting and important: it jumped, feet first, in to what the global youth bulge would mean for the world. Not just in consumption patterns, or the need for investment in education or job creation or whatever, but at a much more subtle, interesting and fundamental level.

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This arresting question was raised at every stop on a recent visit to four European capitals to present the findings of the World Resources 2010-2011: Decision Making in a Changing Climate, which was jointly launched this week by the World Resources Institute, UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank.

The question came variably from journalists, think tankers, academics and government officials. Invariably, the US record on the issue was contrasted with China’s apparent boldness and resolve in embracing a low-carbon future. But it’s not just the US. Across the ‘free world’ governments appear to be shirking in front of the formidable challenges and difficult decisions that climate change throws up, backpedaling on earlier pledges and commitments as economic and financial turmoil knocks climate change in to the long grass, politically.

Is there something about democracies then that make them singularly ill-equipped to adapt to the vagaries of a changing climate? Could it be, for example, that the political myopia enforced by electoral cycles makes it inherently difficult for democracies to address long term issues? While the question is thought-provoking and in tune with the current mood of self-questioning and soul searching in the West, I wonder if anyone asking the question was seriously suggesting democracy be sacrificed on the altar of climate change adaptation. A recent Eurobarometer survey carried out in June 2011, indicates that public sentiment would in fact favour a higher prioritization of climate change than was the case the last time the poll was taken in 2009.

A reading of this World Resources Report 2011 suggests that the more important, useful (and interesting) question to pose is whether – regardless the political system in place – the decision-making process can be improved to make for more effective adaptations to a changing climate. A clear message from the report is that good decisions – i.e. those that are responsive, proactive, flexible, durable and robust to a range of climate outcomes – are the ones that are opened up to the public and grounded in participatory processes that are unmistakably democratic in character. Given the deep uncertainties and long time horizons characteristic of decisions relevant to climate change adaptation, effective public engagement is all the more critical to ensure legitimacy and durability of policy decisions. And public participation is important in another important regard: in ensuring that public values and interests are reflected in decisions about what constitutes acceptable levels of risk. On this point, see also Voice and Choice – an excellent report which delves deeper into the benefits of public participation in decision-making.

The findings of the World Resources Report 2010-11 are on the whole intuitive. The report is well worth a read in particular for the case studies of adaptation decision-making at the national level in the developing world which are particularly rich and illustrative of the inventiveness and initiative of governments of all political shades in adapting to a changing climate.

President Obama has announced that American troops will pull out of Iraq by the year’s end.  Why?

The United States had earlier agreed to exit Iraq by the end of the year and leave 3,000 to 5,000 troops in Iraq as trainers, with some members of Congress advocating the retention of a reduced fighting force as well. But Pentagon lawyers insisted that the Iraqi Parliament grant immunity from legal prosecution to the troops if they were to remain. In recent weeks American negotiators in Baghdad concluded that it would be impossible to obtain that immunity, essentially scuttling any chance of a substantial troop presence here next year.

I can understand the Pentagon’s position.  But what if a country’s troops enjoyed immunity from prosecution while operating on domestic soil?  That, as Sushant K. Singh points out in a WSJ op-ed today, is the case for Indian forces who operate in Kashmir under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Enacted by India’s parliament in 1958 to facilitate a counterinsurgency in northeastern India, the law allows the army greater scope to operate in those areas state governments declare to be “disturbed.” It gives armed forces the power to shoot to kill in law-enforcement situations, to arrest without warrant and to detain people without time limits. The act also forbids prosecution of soldiers without approval from the central government, which in practice is rarely granted. It was extended to Kashmir in 1990, after the Pakistan-backed insurgency overwhelmed local police.

Every national government needs legal cover to fight insurgencies, but the devil in AFSPA lies in its particular draconian details. Not surprisingly, the continued application of this law to Kashmir has been a massive political problem.

Meant to protect soldiers who may kill a civilian by mistake during an operation, the act has ended up blocking all state-level attempts to prosecute soldiers for alleged charges of rape and murder. Separatists point to the law as an example of Delhi’s “imperialist designs” to occupy Kashmir. India’s reputation abroad suffers for its use of a law which arguably violates its international human rights obligations. But for the army’s insistence that it can’t do counterinsurgency without AFSPA, the law would have certainly been repealed by now.

But now, as Sushant has emphasized before, things are looking up in Indian-controlled Kashmir.  The number of militants on the loose has dropped, and terrorist incidents have declined.  The protests that shook the region last year have not been repeated.   Now Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s admired Chief Minister, wants to end the application of AFSPA in the most stable districts of Kashmir.   There’s a good case for this:

Scaling back AFSPA’s application would bolster the standing of pro-India leaders in the state, allowing them to seize the political space in separatist strongholds. By taking away their strongest rallying cry, more separatists will be forced to seek negotiations with New Delhi, so that they can join the political mainstream.

This political change could have security implications. Many Kashmiris, egged on by separatists, resent the army and New Delhi as “occupying” forces. In the long term, insurgents can keep surviving in Kashmir only as long as some locals assist them. Here, a normal political situation can reassure locals and help the security forces. Encouraged by the security turnaround, New Delhi is already considering withdrawing 10,000 central security forces this year—that will reduce the sense of “siege” some Kashmiris feel.

President Obama has said that he wants “normal” relations with Iraq after U.S. forces depart.  It’s good to see that India is in a position to establish normal relations with some long-troubled parts of itself.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the launch of the new Foresight report on Migration and Global Environmental Change, a study commissioned and led by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington.  Drawing on the best available science and analysis from other disciplines, the project aimed to develop a picture of how international and internal migration patterns might be affected by global environmental changes between now and 2060, and the implications of these developments for policymakers.

It is a substantial report, and looks like important reading for those working on migration, climate change and many other related issues.  It is also full of crunchy data and pretty charts, which always helps.   Some of the top-line conclusions are unsurprising.  It states that environmental change has a clear impact on migration through its influence on the web of political, economic and social drivers that lead people to move, and that this impact will only increase in the future as the world becomes more populated and as natural hazards proliferate.  It also argues that the complex interaction of drivers will lead to different migration outcomes, and that well-planned and coordinated policy responses will reduce the risks of humanitarian emergencies and displacement.  So far, so predictable.

However, some of its findings and recommendations are more counterintuitive, and should be studied carefully by policymakers.  Three in particular jumped out at me. (more…)

On Wednesday ODI was host to Tony Blair, giving a speech on ‘leadership’ and the work of his Africa Governance Initiative. 

There were, of course, predictable howls of protest from people furious that ODI gave a platform to the man who sent troops into Iraq. My view, for what it’s worth, is that Iraq was terrible  but that Blair also did many good things: huge investments in the health service and education, the minimum wage, the Human Rights Act, the creation of DFID, the increases in aid.  I’m unwilling to get into a game of trying to trade these off against each other, and Iraq doesn’t cancel out the good stuff as far as I am concerned.  But anyway. 

Blair talked about the importance of effective leadership – his main argument (very much informed by his own time in government, he said) was that ‘without a strong centre, nothing gets done’.  I found this quite a refreshing challenge to the usual focus in the development canon on processes of governance and democracy.  Ideal processes won’t necessarily turn out leaders who can actually act (one might cite the American constitution and Obama’s current trials as exhibit A here), while some leaders can do considerable amounts of good while presiding over very far from ideal processes (some might argue that Kagame falls into this category – I find it very hard to judge).

One wouldn’t want to push this too far.  Being able to participate in a political process that you trust to deliver, and not being subject to opression and fear while you do so, is a good thing in itself.  But it was a useful reminder that people matter in history, and that having people who can get things done, and who want to do the right things, is a crucial part of making progress happen.  As a part of effective leadership, my former colleagues at ActionAid and Christian Aid will be pleased to know that he put a great focus on the importance of governments being able to raise their own money through tax, and the huge importance of getting investment deals right so that governments benefit. 

Rightly, most of development is focused on what happens in societies and economies at large.  But I found it quite useful to be reminded that what happens at the top of governments can be about making good stuff happen, and we should not always just focus on governments when they start doing things wrong.

Is ‘aid exit’ or ‘catalytic aid’ a new development strategy for poor countries?

You might think so judging by comments buzzing around about ‘catalytic aid’ or ‘aid to end aid’ from leaders of some of the world’s poorest countries – for example, the President of Rwanda in the FT a while ago (here) and more recently President of Liberia (here) and not a low income country (yet), the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron visiting Nigeria recently (see here) said:

…we can spend aid in a catalytic way to unleash the dynamism of African economies…

…kickstarting growth and development…

…and ultimately helping Africa move off aid altogether.

Added to this are the recent related report from international NGO, ActionAid on ending aid dependency which notes:

…the proportion of government spending that comes from aid and over the last decade it has fallen on average by a third in the poorest countries. In Ghana aid dependency fell from 47% to 27%, in Mozambique from 74% to 58% and in Vietnam from 22% to 13%. Although aid levels increased, economic growth and the countries’ ability to mobilise their own resources increased faster…

Reading all this you might say hey, what happened to the 0.7 thing? So, what does it all mean for foreign aid and poor countries development strategies?

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Think you have a tough job? Then you haven’t thought about the confusing lives that defence planners lead…

1900 If you are a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you are British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy, France.

1910 You are now allied with France, and the enemy is now Germany.

1920 Britain and its allies have won World War I, but now the British find themselves engaged in a naval race with their former allies, the United States and Japan.

1930 For the British, naval limitation treaties are in place, the Great Depression has started, and defense planning for the next five years assumes a “ten year” rule – no war in ten years. British planners posit the main threats to the Empire as the Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy are either friendly or no threat.

1936 A British planner now posits three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a resurgent Germany, while little help can be expected from the United States.

1940 The collapse of France in June leaves Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with Germany and Italy, with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. The United States has only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.

1950 The United States is now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age has dawned, and a “police action” begins in June in Korea that will kill over 36,500 Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire brings an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict is China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.

1960 Politicians in the United States are focusing on a missile gap that does not genuinely exist; massive retaliation will soon give way to flexible response, while a small insurgency in South Vietnam hardly draws American attention.

1970 The United States is beginning to withdraw from Vietnam, its military forces in shambles. The Soviet Union has just crushed incipient rebellion in the Warsaw Pact. Détente between the Soviets and Americans has begun, while the Chinese are waiting in the wings to create an informal alliance with the United States.

1980 The Soviets have just invaded Afghanistan, while a theocratic revolution in Iran has overthrown the Shah’s regime. “Desert One” – an attempt to free American hostages in Iran – ends in a humiliating failure, another indication of what pundits are calling “the hollow force.” America is the greatest creditor nation the world has ever seen.

1990 The Soviet Union collapses. The supposedly hollow force shreds the vaunted Iraqi Army in less than 100 hours. The United States has become the world’s greatest debtor nation. Very few outside of the Department of Defense and the academic community use the Internet.

2000 Warsaw is the capital of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nation. Terrorism is emerging as America’s greatest threat. Biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, HD energy, etc. are advancing so fast they are beyond forecasting.

2010 Take the above and plan accordingly.

Extracted from The Joint Operating Environment 2010, published by US Joint Forces Command.

What has he done to deserve this?