by David Steven | Nov 29, 2008 | South Asia
Poor old Karachi. Pakistan’s economy is yet again on the slide – with an IMF bailout threatening more hard times ahead (3 million job losses predicted). Mumbai’s attackers are said to have come from Pakistan’s business and media capital. And now… more riots.
For the latest, follow #Karachi on Twitter, where the topic is trending heavily. Media reports are scanty – but four people are reported dead, many more injured… This is not likely to be associated to the Mumbai attacks (see background), but it sure won’t help!
Update – Grim, grim reports of much worse riots in Nigeria too…
by Alex Evans | Nov 6, 2008 | Africa
Fantastic:
This morning, at the airport in Brussels, I was chatting with a retired Scottish aid worker. He told about his friend who got on a flight in Lagos to find it completely full…plus one. One person was standing in the aisle with no seat. The flight attendants went through and checked that everyone had a boarding pass, which they did. (Apparently someone had a forged pass; welcome to Lagos.) The staff then made an announcement that everyone was going to de-plane and that they were going to check everyone’s boarding pass carefully.
As soon as the first person stepped off the plane, the staff slammed and locked the airplane door, despite the person’s cries and banging on the door. Problem solved.
Via Chris Blattman.
by Mark Weston | Nov 5, 2008 | Africa, Economics and development
How many malaria cases does Nigeria have every year? And how many deaths? You would think the obvious place to find out would be the World Health Organisation’s website, which has a whole section dedicated to the Roll Back Malaria Program. What you are met with when you get there, however, is a blizzard of different numbers. The Nigeria Country Profile in the 2005 World Malaria Report says there were 2.6 million reported malaria cases in 2003, a similar figure to the previous three years (in a country where malaria is endemic you’d expect incidence to remain roughly similar year on year). Sounds OK so far then. Despite nearly half of those infected being aged under 5, however (and therefore, you would think, weak and at high risk of death from such a dangerous disease), there were only 5,343 reported malaria deaths in 2003.
Perhaps Nigerian children are unusually robust, and therefore better equipped than kids in other countries to fend off a disease that (reportedly) kills hundreds of thousands of their peers each year worldwide. Alas, probably not, or at least not according to data posted elsewhere on the WHO site. The “country info” on Nigeria claims that there were 5.3 million reported malaria cases in Nigeria in 2007 – double the number four years earlier, and 10,000 reported deaths. OK, maybe an extra battalion or two of foreign mosquitoes has been called in by their fully sated Nigerian cousins to join in the bloodfest, or maybe reporting has improved or become more sensitive (not the same thing) over the past four years.
But then, on the same page, we are told that malaria accounts for “approximately 300,000 annual deaths.” So not the 10,000 “reported” deaths a few inches down the page, nor the 5,000 reported in the country profile, but 300,000. You might think the difference lies in the low figures being “reported” and the high ones extrapolated, but on closer inspection, the 5.2m cases in 2007 are described as “probable and confirmed”, and the 2.6m in 2003 “probable or clinically diagnosed.” Can’t tell the difference? Nor me.
Even if it is extrapolated, WHO has guessed that 10,000 reported deaths means 300,000 actual deaths – a thirtyfold difference. But if you do the same multiplication for the number of cases, you’d get 159 million cases – more than one bout of malaria per Nigerian per year, and nearly 50 million more even than the government (which is seeking aid to fight the disease so has an interest in inflating the numbers) claims on the World Bank website. It’s also almost triple the estimate of annual malaria cases in – wait for it – WHO’s latest country profile, released in 2008, which puts the number of cases at 57m and the number of deaths at, er, 225,000.
After all this, needless to say, I am no nearer to answering my two initial questions.
Update: It’s not just on malaria that the data are shaky, of course. David railed at even worse incompetence by UNAIDS a year ago.
by David Steven | Aug 4, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
Never mind feral cities, Nigeria has feral universities. From the Economist:
A young man whispers a confession: as a university student, he killed six or seven of his peers. He cannot be sure of the number, since his shots were fired in gun battles. He intimidated professors, burned their cars, and helped kidnap—briefly—their children to force them to give good marks to certain students. He did it all as a member of a campus cult. When he renounced his membership, he got death threats and moved to another city, where he lives today.
Read the whole thing before it disappears behind some kind of subscription wall…
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
