The data revolution: what's behind the barricades?

A modified version of this post first appeared on the Giving What We Can blog.

A bed net is distributed in the forest and no one is there to track its delivery and use. Does it contribute to reducing the incidence of malaria?

This question gets to the heart of a key issue in development policy: data. And with the much-heralded ‘data revolution’ demanded by the UN High-Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda, it seems to be rising up the list of priorities for governments and multilateral institutions. In this post I want to take a look at this ‘data revolution’ and why data are important for tackling global poverty.

Why do we care about data?

But first, the ‘so what?’ question. Why is data important? The first reason comes from an efficiency argument: you need to gather data to judge whether an intervention is having the effects it was supposed to have, and thus whether it is a success. What we really mean when we talk of investing in data collection is investing in effective school systems, in well-run hospitals or in successful nutrition programmes. That much is familiar. But this can alsocontribute to the democratic political process, by equipping people with the information they require to hold their leaders accountable.

Claire Melamed, of the Overseas Development Institute, makes a further, ‘equity’ argument for gathering data: we tend to have least information about the people who are most marginalised (e.g. slum dwellers, women, the disabled), which leads them to receive less attention in terms of policy responses.If we had more information about these groups we would provide better services for them. These are three compelling reasons for caring about data or evidence.

What are the current problems associated with data collection in developing countries?

The problem is that the current state of data collection in many developing countries is extremely poor - so much so that Morten Jerven has written an entire book about the poverty of GDP statistics in Africa. And here we are not talking about minor mistakes: for example, when Nigeria’s GDP was re-based, the new estimate showed a 90% increase. And to give another example, the High-Level Panel’s briefing document on the data revolution states that every year around 50 million births go unregistered.

The ‘data revolution’?

Given this situation, some sort of ‘revolution’ seems appropriate. But the term ‘data revolution,’ officially comprising ‘two main objectives’ and ‘four components’, is a slippery one. As Claire Melamed discusses on a Development Drums podcast on the subject, it holds different meanings for different people.

For some it means bringing ‘big data’ into the mainstream of measurement and policy. This could mean using mobile phone data to track refugee movements, or satellite imagery of trees to measure rates of deforestation.

For others, it means strengthening capacity in traditional government statistics agencies: training more statisticians, getting computer systems to work, etc. Perhaps, then, the ‘data revolution’ is simply an aspirational term, pushing policymakers to prioritise “more data, better data, disaggregated data, frequent data,” as Amanda Glassman of the Center for Global Development expresses it in the same podcast. It has certainly succeeded in drawing political attention.

A compact for data

For Glassman, one of the key issues is addressing the fundamental problem of incentives underlying the poor data. Administrative, government-collected data remain low-quality in many countries partly because of donor actions: they have demanded accurate household surveys to be able to evaluate their programmes, and to track indicators of their interest (e.g. the Millennium Development Goals). This has produced a system of little coherence and with certain types of information prioritised over others, for example at the national level at the expense of more data disaggregated into population groups.

Faced with this situation, one concrete proposal for donors is to engage in funding compacts with recipient-country governments to achieve certain standards on data, following the payment by results strategy discussed in an earlier blog, and with civil society oversight. This could perhaps be nested within what the High-Level Panel calls a ‘Global Partnership for Development Data’, which would also help set common global standards for data reporting, reducing fragmentation and double-collecting.

Visible, user-friendly and practical data

What else can be done here and now to improve the data we collect? Melamed identifies some such steps, for example ensuring that data are made available, particularly by publicly-funded bodies such as the UN, and also linking existing data together to create a baseline for 2015 by which we can judge progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals. These are both linked to the further point that the final packaging of data must be ‘actionable data’ i.e. visible, user-friendly and practical. The UK Department for International Development leads the way on this matter with its Development Tracker.

Whichever particular proposal you favour - making better use of ‘big data’ for development, forming ‘data compacts’ to improve statistics agencies in developing countries, standardising the way data are reported, or any other initiative - the key point is to take advantage of the current political moment to create a list of specific actions which can be taken forward even after attention has moved on from the data revolution (which it will), balancing the need to strengthen existing systems with the potential advantage to be gained from tapping into new and exciting data projects.

When the world is complex, how should we think and act?

“...it is not as simple or easy as we would prefer; neither is the world we are trying to manage...”

Warning: more thoughts on complexity. To some extent covering the same ground here (apologies), but more from a philosophy of science perspective, which has been at the same time interesting and thoroughly boring, unless you find the differences between genetically modified potatoes and genetically modified corn to be a significant one.

Complexity books: good covers. Credit: Amazon

Sandra Mitchell, in ‘Unsimple Truths,’ argues for a new approach to science which takes into account the world’s “tractable, understandable, evolved, and dynamic complexity”. Because if the world is complex, then our approach to representing and explaining it should be too. Her expanded, complexity-informed epistemology of science is therefore 1) pluralistic, accepting multiple explanations and models at a variety of levels of analysis, thus allowing for emergent properties when ‘the whole is more than the sum of the parts’; 2) pragmatic, recognising that whenever we represent nature it’s always for some purpose and so can be done in different, equally-valid ways and 3) dynamic, in that our knowledge of the causal structures of the world evolves as that world evolves. The latter of which is a novel thought to me, at least in that form. So the “greedy reductionist strategy” epitomised by the Newtonian physics and universal, exceptionless laws we love to hate, isn’t always wrong, but is when you try to explain everything using it.

Mitchell conveniently pulls out some implications for public policy: she, like Ramalingam and Beinhocker, takes aim at ‘predict-and-act’ models of policymaking which rely, essentially, on predicting the future, or at least assigning vaguely accurate probabilities to different outcomes. The problem is that “uncertainty about the probabilities of outcomes is pervasive, multiplicative, and often non-linear in complex systems” [such as climate change, mental health disorders, the macroeconomy etc.]. In such cases, we need to replace the ‘predict’ with models of “multiple alternative futures” and the ‘act’ part with adaptive management.

The first part of that involves mapping out multiple scenarios of the future, even if the likelihood of one or another is unknown, and comparing policies by how robust they are to the uncertainties in each scenario. This method captures the information we have about the future better than any single estimate. The second part essentially means picking an approach, then monitoring the results of that approach in the short term and modifying it based on the findings. “[A] dynamic, iterative, feedback-rich strategy for decision making that matches the dynamic, feedback-dependent reality of complex systems”.

If not, you end up with the climate change situation as is currently: the inability to come to an agreement on a single quantitative assessment of the probability of various outcomes (2 degrees warming? 10 degrees warming?) undermines any scientific contribution to public policy decisions. The inevitable uncertainty of the issue challenges the credibility of any scientific claim, leaving us to rely on ignorance and intuition: if you’re optimistic you can content yourself with the knowledge that technology will save the day; if you’re pessimistic you can content yourself with the fatalistic observation that we are already screwed.

So more flexibility in our approach to science, more scenarios, more computer modelling, more feedback, more tinkering, more informed actions, more successful policies. Only thus can we manage our “dynamically changing, complicated, complex, and chaotic but understandable universe”.

Donating in the face of corruption

This post first appeared on the Giving What We Can blog.

Corruption exists in developing countries. Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer indicates that in a list of 23 countries, including those among the world’s poorest such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, almost every second person reported paying a bribe for a public service. In two of these, Sierra Leone and Liberia, this figure was over 75%, while individual high profile cases are never far from the headlines.

This gives rise to justifiable concerns when donating to charities working in developing countries where reported corruption is high, and governance and institutions are weak. Won’t our money, or the goods it buys, just be stolen? Faced with this challenge, how should a prospective donor respond?

Corruption is common in many countries across the world. Source: Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2013

First, what do we mean by corruption, and why don’t we like it? Here I’m not referring to ‘grand corruption’, large-scale looting by those taking advantage of their position in public office (e.g. Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu and others); what’s most relevant for Giving What We Can is ‘petty corruption’ in the form of theft of inputs or money designated for improving the lives of the poor by individuals or organisations.

This is clearly a bad thing: the poorest are totally deprived of the benefits of an intervention, and the donation that funds it is wasted. This sort of graft can also undermine confidence in the organisation concerned, and, on a macro level, the “psyche and moral fiber” of local society, according to some.

Corruption deprives the poorest of the benefits of an intervention. Credit: futureatlas.com

One response might be to avoiding donating altogether, which certainly ensures zero corruption in the use of your donations. But it also ensures zero impact; ideally we want to find some way of giving responsibly and still contributing to the alleviation of poverty.

Alternatively, you might demand a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to corruption from organisations you support. In fact, this has been the attitude of World Bank president Jim Kim, who in December 2013 declared corruption to be “public enemy number one,” adding, “we will never tolerate corruption, and I pledge to do all in our power to build upon our strong fight against it.”

Certainly, from a practical point of view, it’s a good idea to ensure that the charity you are giving to is aware of the risks of theft and corruption and has processes in place to avoid them. For example, the Against Malaria Foundation has a detailed risk register and places a high priority on ensuring nets are indeed distributed to beneficiaries through rigorous receipt mechanisms, data reporting post-distribution and independent monitoring. It also claims to work only with reputable distribution partners.

Likewise, the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative ensures that all transfers are checked and accounted for against a budget agreed jointly with the local Ministry of Health, regularly commissions audits of country programmes, and establishes close partnerships with those with whom they work in country (as well as having the advantage of distributing a drug with little to no market value). These sorts of procedures, in line with MANGO’s guide to financial management for NGOs, can help to give a donor confidence in the integrity of a charity’s operations.

However extending this to a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude is misguided for a number of reasons.

First, because you can never be certain of eliminating corruption. If corruption is actually an unfortunate fact of life in all societies to a certain extent (witness ample examples of corruption in ‘developed’ countries like the UK, such as LIBOR, and in Europe, where the cost of corruption may be up to £99bn), then it is fruitless to try to avoid it entirely. To paraphrase William Savedoff in a blog post for the Center for Global Development, corruption is not going away anytime soon. In this context, a genuine ‘zero tolerance’ attitude is impractical: the standards would be so high as to render any work on the ground impossible.

Second, formal corruption controls have had limited success historically according to the evidence. It makes sense: if, as Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development (whose argument is about public sector corruption but is still relevant for our purposes) you recognise that corruption is “almost always a symptom of a broader problem of weak systems of control, entrenched patronage, insider rents and privileges,” then it follows that stringent formal reporting requirements imposed from outside aren’t likely to be totally successful in avoiding the problem.

Third, a single-minded focus on corruption potentially overstates the threat it poses, and is itself a waste of resources. Above I mentioned that corruption is present in all societies. But that does not mean it is always present: because corruption stories in nonprofits make a good story, they often garner disproportionate press attention, giving the false sense that all charities inevitably suffer immense losses from corruption.

Savedoff discusses this very problem, arguing that, given our ignorance of how representative corruption cases are, stories of corruption in aid organisations are more likely to reflect better reporting of allegations than an actual greater fraud or corruption risk. Likewise but more generally, Olken and Pande, in their 2012 paper, find that “estimated levels of corruption are remarkably heterogeneous [in low-income countries]”.

Given this uncertainty, Professor Alan Fenwick, director of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, sees “prejudices and fears of corruption and wastage” as a distraction and obstacle to SCI’s work. Corruption is a key concern when working in certain societies, but some organisations may find it less of a problem than others. Witness the Against Malaria Foundation, which, fortunately, has experienced no material loss of nets through theft”.

This leads to an alternative point of view: as Savedoff points out, ‘how much money is wasted?’ might not even be the right question when we think about aid interventions. Rather, if our aim is to improve school attendance through deworming, for example, the first question should be ‘does the money that gets through have the desired impact?’ This chimes with the increasing interest in cash-on delivery and payment by results approaches to aid in larger-scale bilateral programs, where payment is made by funders to a recipient government or organisation only after there has been confirmed progress towards an agreed-upon goal.

Translating this philosophy to charitable giving at the individual level, it means we should look at the good done by an organisation as the principal measure of whether we should support them. This also has the advantage of working to minimise corruption in practice; if we make our donations conditional on an organisation’s achieving certain outcomes, then there is less scope for diverting money away from beneficiaries as this will result in reduced achievement of these outcomes. In essence, minimising corruption follows on from an emphasis on results.

Recognising that, when donating to charities, effectiveness comes first is not to say corruption should not also be tackled head on separately. And here, it is to developed country governments and companies that we must direct our attention. Global Financial Integrity (GFI) finds that for each $1 developing nations receive in foreign aid, $7 in illicit money flows abroad, depriving millions of public services. GFI research suggests, further, that about 45% of illicit flows end up in offshore financial centres, and 55% in developed countries, demonstrating rich countries’ complicity in this. No matter how much effort is put into making aid as effective as possible, without simultaneously addressing this crippling outflow of resources the net effect of rich countries on poor countries will continue to be negative. For those concerned about corruption, then, organisations working to combat it through increased financial transparency like Global Financial Integrity, Tax Justice Network, andTransparency International are good places to start informing yourself.


Each year a huge amount of money flows out of developing countries illegally. Credit: Global Financial Integrity

Returning, then, to the issue of corruption and charitable giving, what can we conclude? When faced with corruption, still give, but give smarter: seek out those organisations with credible mechanisms in place to avoid corruption, and, more importantly, which can demonstrate the biggest ‘bang for the buck’. Meanwhile for those who are particularly concerned about corruption, a promising start to an intervention is investigating illicit outflows from developing countries.

A trip to Ruhiira and the Millennium Villages Project: undoing (?) and redoing (?) cynicism

I felt awkward waiting at the Millennium Villages Project offices in Mbarara on a Monday morning, waiting to join the UN convoy on its way to Ruhiira: they were here because they had things to do, me because I was a white person who’d read a book by Jeff Sachs and wanted to see his brainchild development project in the flesh. Although we were mostly ignored to be honest, as the MVP staff milled around and chatted over mandazi and chai. It turns out they receive visits about three days a week so I shouldn’t have been surprised. We arrived at the Ruhiira office, cold and slightly bewildered, while the most of the convoy passengers piled into a small room for their weekly meeting.

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), in a nutshell, is a development project run in (initially) 10 sites in 10 countries in Africa. The strategy is ‘integrated rural development,’ or doing many things (health, livelihoods, agriculture, sanitation etc.) at once, with the aim of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). And not only to achieve the MDGs, but to unleash a cycle of self-sustaining economic growth: Sachs’ idea is that undeveloped areas suffer from one or more of a number of ‘traps’ and once you get them out of these traps, they can ‘climb the ladder of development’ on their own. Out of the trap, up the ladder, you’re sorted.

Snakes and ladders for maternal health

Obviously, Sachs has come in for a lot of criticism over MVP, most recently sparked by Nina Munk’s ‘The Idealist’. A cursory listen to a podcast about the book (no time for reading) quickly shows where she stands on Sachs/MVP with phrases like “this was neither sustainable nor was it scalable,” “the terrible tragedy of this project...” “Jeff Sachs... cruelly disappointed and harmed the people he supposedly set out to help”. Her basic point was that the project didn’t bring lasting, sustainable change. Clearly if you throw money at a community, there’s likely to be some return, and maybe even a very good return, but Sachs grand, top-down plan failed, and those returns won’t be there for the grandchildren of the people of Ruhiira. Jeff Sachs, on a later podcast, rebutted all of the above, and in doing so showed why people call him manipulative and arrogant. Listen just to hear academics argue like schoolkids. Anyway, all this was in my head when we arrived.

So, was this a locally-integrated, locally-owned and sustainable initiative? Or was it a classic uber-development project, UN 4x4s, logframes, distortion and the rest? Well there were no expats, at least, but those working there that we met didn’t seem to be from this part of Uganda: Shaquilla, head of communications, was from the east of the country, and had previously worked for UNDP in Kampala for example. References to the Ruhiira district as ‘the field,’ giving figures in dollars not Ugandan shillings and the stereotypical orange ‘African’ sun on the background to the introductory presentation were also jarring. More worrying than symbolic things are claims that partnerships of local artisans with Tommy Hilfiger or farmers with the World Food Programme are signs of organic, locally-driven development, or a model that can be scaled up. When in fact it's massive external distortion. On the other, locally-owned, hand, when we asked Lawrence, responsible for education, what was the first thing MVP did when going into new schools, he answered ‘asking the community what they wanted changed’; on the agriculture side, we were also told that local tree-growers had ignored MVP’s advice about growing leguminous trees to replenish the soils and had gone for eucalyptus instead, for more cash return. There’s also a community radio providing an outlet for views and concerns.

The Ruhiira project office

When I was there though, these debates about sustainability left me cold. During the presentation we were given, we heard the following facts, among others: proportion of population below extreme poverty line ($1/day) reduced from 58% in 2006 to 10 % in 2011; access to clean water increased from 8% to 42%; prevalence of malaria reduced from 17% to less than 1%; health staff increased from 10 personnel to 60 staff including 2 medical doctors and 20 midwives. I could go on. Away from the stats, we visited Robert, a farmer: with MVP’s support he now has biogas production, cross-breed cattle, a silage pit for the cattle, and coffee and banana plantations. He’s also been promised a cooler at a 50% subsidy so that the cooperative he’s a part of can start selling milk on a larger scale. You kind of see where Sachs exasperation with the mauling he gets from the ‘development bubble’ comes from: ‘look! These people here are doing much better/are not dead because of this project!’ Surely all the rest is just cynicism?

Biogas pit: where cow dung becomes energy

But the question is not whether outsiders with loads of money can make things better (they obviously can), it’s whether they can help local people make things better for themselves in the long term. And when James, head of agriculture, remarks that there’s been a massive population influx to the area caused directly by the project, you have your doubts as to whether the ‘success’ being enjoyed currently isn’t going to fade away or even reverse when the money dries up. MVP is currently ‘handing over’ to local government to continue the work, and the government is implementing new MVP pilots in other parts of Uganda. But if the project only works as long as money is being pumped in, government take-up doesn’t really mean anything apart from that it’s been persuaded to divert budget from wherever it was formerly directing it to where Jeff Sachs has suggested it be directed to.

But ambivalence, yes, as suggested by the number of sentences starting with ‘but’ in this post. When we left Ruhiira trading centre, we passed concrete buildings, power lines and water tanks that people really appreciated and which didn’t exist before MVP. Robert’s wife told us that for her, “MVP is of great importance”. Who am I, a middle-class kid from London, to say any different?

Further reading/listening:

Nina Munk on her book 'The Idealist', on EconTalk and on Development Drums

Jeff Sachs defending MVP on EconTalk
MVP website

Criticism of MVP's evaluation strategy by Michael Clemens

FACTS! Or why I should have studied engineering

So one of my abiding worries with my degree (basically Politics and Spanish) is that I fear that I will finish it without actually knowing anything new in any tangible sense. No matter how many times I tell myself "it's the transferable skills Charlie! The transferable skills!" the fact that I'm basically no better off knowledge-wise than a person who has the Guardian as their internet homepage is slightly disconcerting. One of the things I do to combat this anguish is to learn 'facts'. Here are some of the facts on topics about global development/poverty/health/inequity which I have accumulated, along with (often not original) sources. Some are 'classics'; others will perhaps surprise. In any case, in no particular order, enjoy:

1. Worldwide, maternal and child mortality both nearly halved between 1990 and 2012.
(Development Progress)

2. The global cost of containing violence or dealing with its consequences reached a staggering $9.5 trillion (11% of global GDP) in 2012.
(UN Dispatch)

3. Close to half of all international migrants settle in the developing world, including 10 percent in Africa.
(Washington Post)

4. Globally, deaths from tobacco use each year exceed the number of deaths from HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria combined.
(Center for Global Development)

5. It is estimated that women in the Global South spend a cumulative 200 million hours a day collecting water.
(Think Africa Press)

6. An estimated $18.5 trillion is stashed in offshore tax havens. That’s $3 trillion more than the gross domestic product of the United States.
(Oxfam, Working for the Few)

7. One study finds that potatoes may have been responsible for 12% of the global increase in population between 1700 and 1900.
(Banerjee and Duflo, Poor Economics)

8. The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts therefore to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion, over a period over which the UK has run an overall budget deficit (both EEA and non-EEA).
(Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration)

9. The Uganda Demographic and Health Survey found that 39 per cent, more than one in three, women and girls aged 15-49 had experienced sexual violence during their lifetime.
(Amnesty)

10. From 1980 to 2008 in USA, the bottom 90% of taxpayers saw their inflation-adjusted pre-tax incomes grow for total increase of 1.9%. For the top 1%, it increased 2.35 times.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

11. To ‘top up’ the incomes of the 800m people worldwide living on less than $1 day would require the adults of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, USA to give $0.15 a day.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

12. Between 2005 and 2009, the typical African American in the USA lost 53% of her wealth.
(Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality)

13. World GDP per capita doubled to $180 between 15 000 years ago and 1750 AD, then in the following 250 years increased 37-fold.
(Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth)

14. 72% of the world's poor live in middle income countries.
(Owen Barder)

15. 59% of the variance in people's income can be explained by the country in which they live.
(Michael Clemens on Development Drums) 

A nice fact-based video on progress in global health from Development Progress; Video credit: Development Progress

ps. there's no such thing as an objective fact

The first time I went to Kampala the third time I was there.

Kampala through the eyes of a tourist can be ‘done’ in one day. A ‘special-hire’ taxi takes you from the imposing Gaddafi mosque, to the museum, to the Kasubi tombs, and can drop you in some nice restaurant in Kololo in time for a dinner of ostrich curry and grilled crocodile imported from South Africa. That’s all very nice.

Kampala

Kampala through the eyes of those who live and work there is, inevitably, another city. Felix is the contact who has brought us here, to make some media appearances on behalf of our organisation. He got his first job at ten, founded an events management company at the age of fourteen, has worked for the government, in another life was a DJ, and now finds himself a civil society activist more-or-less under the wing of a leading Ugandan philanthropist. From our mzungu-dominated hostel, where loud pop music oppresses those eating breakfast and Sunday is mudwrestling day, he leads us through 

Kampala’s rush-hour of snaking taxi-buses and swarming taxi-bikes. London has far more inhabitants than Kampala, but here it seems that more of those inhabitants find themselves in the same place at the same time. It’s overwhelming. Through this density of street-vendors, commuters, high-rise blocks and small identikit businesses, we reach the industrial area all-concrete, all-broad streets, and comparatively empty. This is where the media studios can be found. 

Snaking taxi-buses

Robert is our host on the show. He speaks English with a soothing, honeyed accent, a mixture of educated Ugandan and BBC World Service. And he talks with a disarming, welcoming familiarity, dropping in reminiscences of his time in south-west London and lamentations about the teaching style in Ugandan schools. It’s like a conversation with an old friend. He’s the exception, though, in this environment dominated by young, energetic media professionals. The next show to be filmed is on social media, and the 24-year old producer Irene, in ripped jeans and converse, is running around trying to locate a Mac charger whilst shouting her Twitter handle at me. Our turn is over, though, and Felix leads us out and on.

The next stop is the offices of the civil society organisation, aimed at inspiring and empowering Ugandans. The office is luxurious - dark polished wood and leather seats - and the partitions are in an Oriental style; we are told that it was a Chinese company that did the renovations. While we wait for the organisation’s head to finish a meeting, we are shown pictures of events, of massed crowds, tree-planting ceremonies and panels of speakers. Certificates on the wall give further proof of success. When we are finally shown in, John is a whirlwind; leisurely seated, one leg over the other, he unleashes a wave of charisma and forthright opinions about anything we care to mention or not mention, which stuns us into awed and appreciative silence. He speaks with such passion that I don’t want him to stop, as the whole of Africa’s problems are laid out and solved in a matter of minutes. There is a lot of wisdom there – “if you want anything out of Africa, you must involve Africans... if you are not impacting the lives of people then you should go on holiday”- and whether or not you agree with all that he says, you have to respect this man, who is made “bitter, and hungry and angry” by the state of his country, and has contributed a large part of the fortune he has amassed to doing something about it. Abruptly, our interview is over, and we file out, clinging to his business card and recoiling from the force. We continue our journey with Felix.

His manner now is informal and confident, self-assured, throwing in jokes here and there and indulging in directness that verges on bluntness with these people he barely knows. This is his city and he leads us, halting traffic with his hand and informing us about the buildings we pass. We reach the enterprise fair, which is slightly limp in the light rain. There are stove-manufacturers here, ‘Uganda’s first chocolate-makers,’ spice-sellers, and a woman much-celebrated for making jewellery and accessories out of drinking straws. The soundtrack is pop, interspersed with comments from the eccentric MC – “Go and eat lunch, I want to see happy, smiling faces... Microfinance, the next song is yours”. His slight absurdity leaks into reality with the appearance of a solitary camel, which strolls through the stalls. Just when we turn to leave, the dancers arrive, hips detached from the rest of their bodies as they shake. Felix’s invitation to us to join in is politely declined.

Gratuitous camel at the SME fair

We wander back towards the mosque, which we do intend to visit (we are tourists, not natives of Kampala), back through the many layers of the city. Our guide and the language barrier insulate us from the slight intimidation I have felt before here. He does translate the occasional comment, though, and they range from the outright offensive to the strangely epic: “there are many white people roaming around”. We negotiate the taxi park and climb the Old Kampala hill, reaching the mosque with Felix’s shoes and suaveness intact. It’s here we part, the visitors dropped delicately back into the role of bazungu tourists, where perhaps we belong.

Names have been changed.

“Over there is like here, neither better nor worse”

For someone who is spending a fair amount of time outside his own society, and has to deal with the romanticising and/or exaggeration of difference, in my own mind and in the minds of others, Tayeb Salih, in his enigmatic novel ‘Season of Migration to the North,’ has some nice antidotes.

 

The narrator comes back from seven years in England, to his native Sudan. He’s asked about the people ‘there,’ and remarks to himself,

“...that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak”.

Or,

“[o]ver there is like here, neither better nor worse.”

It’s a sentiment I sympathise with. Finally, for those who want to believe Africa is a ‘hopeless continent’ or alternatively that it is ‘rising’, Salih replies:

“[j]ust because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean?”

Colonialism, sexuality, violence, destruction, poetry, hope, hopelessness: it’s a good read.