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.

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

Entrepreneurs won't save the world, but entrepreneurship will

23 Things

The entrepreneurial energy in a country like Kenya is overwhelming. You can illustrate it with stats: self-employment accounts for fully 66% of total employment in Kenya. You can illustrate it with stories: take one of the entrepreneurs we are working with at Balloon Kenya as an example. He tutors Masters students on research methods, and also writes business plans, manages three distinct tea plantations, grows wheat, and used to be in a dance group hired out for events. He’s 24 years old. It’s the dynamism of such inventive individuals that will create economic and social change, and pull Kenya forward.

Or maybe not.

The problem is that there is too much quail here in Kericho. A couple of years back there was a sudden boom and now, even in our small group of Balloon Kenya entrepreneurs, there are no less than five quail farmers. And these businesspeople are committed and enthusiastic, so much so that one individual wore a shirt imploring people to “Ask Me About Quail” to the bar we went to last Saturday. It’s a problem you see pretty much everywhere around Kericho town: as soon as something is shown to be profitable, people pile in, be it touting tea or shining shoes.

For Ha-Joon Chang, whose book ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism’ I’ve been reading, this is the “fallacy of composition”: the fact that some people can succeed with a particular business does not mean that everyone can. Now this wouldn’t be a problem if there were constant innovation in the development of new business lines. Number of quail farmers triples? Some move in to farming quail for export, or selectively breeding the quail for a better product, and we are back to quail harmony. But unfortunately this isn’t possible most of the time; as Ha-Joon notes,

“...there is only a limited range of (simple) businesses that the poor in developing countries can take on, given their limited skills, the narrow range of technologies available, and the limited amount of finance that they can mobilize...”

An individual can’t be productive on her own; productivity is collective, coming from the entire socio-economic system you are operating in. Societal institutions, scientific infrastructure, company law, the education system, the financial system, patent and copyright laws: these things are what make it happen. Since the Second World War, there’s been huge growth in the world economy, but it’s not because of individual pioneers like Gates or Edison, says Ha-Joon, it’s the work of the collective.

I’ve always found the idea of the ‘heroic entrepreneur,’ who makes something out of nothing, to be grating, I think because I’ve felt jealous that it wasn’t me. The reason I should find it grating is that the idea of the heroic entrepreneur is a myth, distracting us from the real task of ‘building institutions and organizations of collective entrepreneurship’ which is the real way for countries to escape poverty. Entrepreneurship, but not just by entrepreneurs.

As in many spheres of life, you can't succeed in entrepreneurship on your own

One of the entrepreneurs we work with wants to retire a multi-millionaire (in Kenyan shillings that is) at 40, having created a large, innovative business employing tens of people. He’s an avid reader of business books with titles like ‘Think, and Grow Rich’. Unfortunately, without the right environment, thinking is unlikely to be enough.

Culture shock: what is ‘development’ again?

Balloon Kenya encourages “entrepreneurial thinkers to imagine the solutions that will not only create new avenues for growth and prosperity, but also recast the course of human development”. After previous posts gushing about the freshness and coherence of the Balloon approach, the ‘d’-word appears and it all gets messy.
...

Balloon Kenya foregrounds the entrepreneur as a primary agent of social, economic and technological change, transforming the society around her. Here in Kericho, aid is dead, replaced by youthful exuberance and Business Model Canvasses. The talk is of empowerment, of young people undergoing transformative processes that give them the confidence to unleash the creative, innovative potential inside, and improve their own lives through doing so. Four weeks into the process, the stories of personal-level development are emerging, both from international participants, and from Kenyan entrepreneurs; hearing Everlyne remark “I have never thought about that” when working with us to come up with a tutoring business to operate alongside her small tea shop was quite momentous, even for a cynic. And the implicit point is that the benefits for the individual spill over to the surrounding environment (“...recast the course of human development...”).

This makes me jumpy. When we’re talking about the concrete case of the individual, the benefits are palpable, even if their sustainability is uncertain. Of course Balloon Kenya isn’t claiming to have all the answers; its approach to bringing about social good is inevitably partial. But the seductive slide, more or less present, into thinking that we have found a new model for societies to develop on a broad, macro scale is troubling.

Because “development, when you get down to it, is a political process”. As Guillermo Toro points out, whether you adopt the right-wing version of this (think Easterly) or the left-wing (i.e. From Poverty to Power) is less important than accepting the basic concept. Which means that encouraging enterprise carries ambiguous benefits, because the private sector emerges and evolves within the context determined by a number of groups, businesses, citizens, states and all. We’ve seen this at a macro-level recently in the criticism of the turn to the private sector of a number of development agencies.

Part of this unease is definitely about culture: coming from an NGO-, blogosphere-background, used to academic debates about power and institutions, an unapologetically pro-enterprise attitude grates, even if I often agree with the ideas. To be jolted out of your comfort zone is no bad thing: as the great Chris Blattman puts it “If you work in international politics or development and do not have an intellectual and existential crisis every year, then something is wrong”.

Kericho: causing me headaches

But, coming back to the micro-level, one of our entrepreneurs’ businesses is to act as a middle man between tea farmers and factories; tea farmers individually do not produce huge quantities of tea each day, meaning that factories often subcontract out the management of the plantations. So the middle man acquires a contract from a given tea factory to supply a certain weight of tea per month, earning significant profits working relatively few hours, once he has the all-important license. The process smells a lot like rent-seeking, and the benefits to society seem debatable. You don’t see many rich tea labourers around despite them putting in the hours, rain or shine. And this isn’t the only example: the difference between moneylender and loan shark is a thin one. These are, at least partly, questions of political economy, where the focus on entrepreneurship and innovation has to be complemented by a look at the social, political and economic context.

I guess I am asking too much. During the programme, the word politics is not even mentioned but that’s because we are not here to ‘do development’ (not that that exists), we are here to help individuals. The broader effects of that on society could be positive or negative. We shall see.

When HIV/AIDS is really funny

"...54% of all Indians shit outside... And we can't afford that shit - it's not like with Japan... where there's a tsunami that cleans all that shit - we don't have that facility in India.... And this number's being going up since 1947. In the 40s it was 34% and then 50s 44%, and it's being going up. Basically the British left and we started shitting outside - I think this is the best defence strategy any country can adopt... People have defence budgets, we have lunch."

Nothing like taking a joke out of context to kill the humour. It's all in Tanmay Bhat's delivery, as you can see here. But the main point of this post is the fact that that previous link doesn't go to a blog, or to a news article, not even a caustic comment from the Twitterati, but to a stand-up comedy set. 'Development' issues, like sanitation or HIV/AIDS can be funny, as the Stand Up Planet project shows.

According to its mission statement, "Stand Up Planet is a documentary TV show, transmedia series and digital campaign that showcases life in some of the toughest places on Earth – in parts of India and South Africa – through the lens and experiences of stand-up comics." I experienced this primarily through the TV show, and it's a breath of fresh air. It takes the often-used media model (I'm looking at you, Guardian 'poverty matters' blog or El Pais 'Planeta Futuro') of look-at-this-awful-situation-you-should-really-know-about-this-because-it's-really-bad and turns it on its head, and whilst recognising the seriousness of the fact, for example, that 4000 children die every day from diarrhoea, it hands the agency back to Indians or South Africans to highlight the issues through humour. A release from the slightly grave and slightly defensive campaigning mindset that often characterises media reporting on development. It turns "problems to punchlines," and returns the colour to the limited picture of the developing world we get in countries like the UK. How Matters provides an elegant summary.

"Stand Up Planet reminds us that people have to be at the center of any solutions. It moves viewers from despair to hope in a genuine and elegant way, creating a balanced and constructive story about some of the world’s biggest and most deeply-entrenched social issues – a new narrative so needed in our sector."

Stand Up Comedy director Hasan Minhaj. credit: MTV

The show itself is really entertaining - go ahead and watch away - as this Los Angeles-based comic, Hasan Minhaj, travels first to Mumbai then to Johannesburg to explore the comedy scenes and perform there before inviting Aditi Mittal and Mpho Popps back to perform in LA. Generally it gets the balance right between funny and serious, and leaves you with a hopeful smile. Having said that, there is something slightly disappointing in the 'Take Action' section of the website linking everything back to lobbying US Congress to spend more on aid. An exciting project foregrounding comedy artists from India and South Africa ends up handing the agency back to the USA, though this isn't the main focus and the organisations it proposes for donations are almost all national or local initiatives from India and South Africa.

Anyway, before I descend further into the type of 'serious' development media tone that this sort of comedy provides an antidote for, I will shut up and splatter you with links to funny people talking about important issues.

The documentary itself here
Aditi Mittal here
Mpho Popps here
Tanmay Bhat here
Loyiso Gola here

Goodbye to a gratuitous exercise in understanding global poverty

It's been emotional. Credit: Tumblr

I've exited my MOOC (massive open online course) adventure via the exit survey and can now claim to be an MIT alumnus according to my pdf certificate (classy). Time for some reflections on 'The Challenges of Global Poverty'. I'll split this into two: first, comments on the MOOC itself for those who might be interested in doing one/it, then some nuggets on content. Feel free to skip one or the other section, or indeed both.

The MOOC itself was a beauty. 14 weeks, each consisting of a couple of video lectures, split into bitesize chunks with (mostly multiple choice) questions after each to check you were following. It was perfect for that time after lunch when you don't want to do anything productive but feel you kind of should. Then each week there was a (again mostly multiple choice) homework which sometimes required dipping into the 'further reading' section, which was basically just Poor Economics so not too taxing. Overall perhaps 5 hours a week. Finally on top of that, a final exam (you've guessed, multiple choice) and a 'project' or 600-word essay on a topic of your choice, which was self-marked (I nobly docked myself one mark out of twelve). They got the level of questioning pretty much bang on in that it wasn't so hard that you had to continually go back to the videos, but generally you couldn't answer the questions without having watched the videos at least. I found it verged on the easy side but that's probably also a function of the fact that I'm a native English speaker, doing a related degree, who had already read the book which was the foundation of the course. I could have chosen a harder MOOC.

In terms of the MOOC experience more generally, it was perfect for what I wanted: a way to channel my slightly workoholic desires towards a topic of interest which would, unlike the course I'm taking simultaneously on international development at university here in Madrid, leave me with more knowledge than when I started. The baby homeworks and multiple-choice exercises keep you hooked with enough momentum to reach the end of the course and there's even a little section with percentages and bar charts to track your 'progress' and boost your ego as you nail yet another self-graded question. I really didn't engage much with the 'discussion forum' or 'community' sections, although they were pushed a fair amount and this podcast suggests that's where MOOCs are going, as they attempt to become more like 'real' unviersity, social interacion and all. I remain unconvinced.

Abhijit Banerjee speaks really slowly so I had to double the speed (literally) on the video to avoid boredom. Content was good though. Credit: The Guardian

As for the 'Challenges of Global Poverty' themselves, they are, predictably, many: from education to entrepreneurship, food to family planning. But in essence, this was a course about poverty from the point of view of social policy, where the basic message is that you need to pay attention to the details. The world's poor often don't obey the theories of policymakers, unfortunately, due to their being normal human beings. In the course and in their book, then, Banerjee and Duflo (B&D) try to get to the micro level, using experimental studies to identify why people act in certain ways at what that means for policy.

As a final farewell, I'll note their counter-argument to those like Bill Easterly who say that randomistas like B&D, in focusing on micro-level policy questions miss the bigger picture (seamlessly taking up a theme from an earlier post - see argument #6). If, as many profess, Institutions like Democracy and Property Rights (capitalisation explained later) are what ultimately makes USA better off than Chad, then this tinkering around the edges is surely just re-arranging deckchairs? Well no. Because even if you can't precipitate a social revolution and re-engineer a country's social fabric (engineering fabric?), institutional change (small-i) is possible even when Institutions (big-I) are bad. B&D cite a study that found improvements in outcomes when limited levels of democracy are introduced in village councils in China (but wait, China's communist?), and likewise mention effective health and education policies in 'bad institutional environments' like Indonesia in the 1970s. If you're lucky, policies can even sometimes change politics. So although the 'big questions' addressed by the development high priests like Sachs, Easterly, Acemoglu and Robinson are often fun to think about, it's at the ground level where the important stuff often happens. B&D argue that the question should be “where can we make a small push and see if we can make a change?” After completing their MOOC, I'm inclined to agree.

Emergent Thoughts on Emergence

Just finished ‘Aid on the Edge of Chaos’ by Ben Ramalingam, which applies ideas about complex adaptive systems to aid and development. Though ‘finished’ wouldn’t be quite the right word, as I reckon I’ll need about four more readings to get close to understanding the content. As the title suggests, this will be more a provisional set of conclusions.

Conventional development thinking: 'whoops'
credit www.drsalonen.com

I’ve already written about how Ramalingam critiques the current mode of thinking in development but it’s worth repeating the basic point: we need to stop applying simplistic analyses to complex problems. Ideas derived from Newtonian physics aren’t able to fully describe the totality of our social, environmental, ecological, political and economic reality. Who knew? Actually, the observation that the world is complex is so obvious that I can’t believe we’ve managed to fool ourselves into thinking that you can reduce REALITY to a few squares on a log-frame all this time. 

Upshot: as Abraham Lincoln says, "we must disenthrall ourselves" (one of many, many brilliant quotes in the book).

One part of this disenthralling is to stop looking for panaceas in development. Owen Barder recounts them nicely for us: more capital, more savings, more aid, more technology, better policies, better institutions, better politics. In fact, the desire for panaceas is itself part of the problem. And no, thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems is not the panacea either. This might seem obvious: accepting that there isn’t one solution to the problem of achieving development sounds easy, but actually our brains have a sneaky tendency to slip back into that way of thinking. This came home to me listening to a podcast in preparation for this post (it’s sad but I actually do prepare); Humanosphere editor Tom Paulson, when interviewing Owen Barder, asked him whether complexity thinking means that we need to look at tax havens to achieve development. Barder: that’s exactly the type of panacea thinking we are trying to get away from. Yeah.

So what are complex adaptive systems/systems of organised complexity? Let me throw some words at you that together constitute a vague approximation to an answer. Complex adaptive systems have large numbers of mutually interacting parts, are open to the environment, are self-organising in their internal structure, have ‘emergent’ macroscopic properties over and above the properties of their constitutive parts (think human consciousness as more than putting together feet and white blood cells and nerves and lungs). Complex systems are interconnected and interdependent and dynamic, constantly evolving and adapting. From all that I’m sure it’s apparent that I don’t totally understand either. Looking at the box might be helpful at this point. In fact Ramalingam takes pains to emphasise that complexity thinking is itself a work in progress even for people who research it, so don’t feel bad.

Comparison of conventional aid thinking and complexity-influenced ideas about development

Okay so that’s all well and interesting that clever people have found out why everyone’s been wrong for the last seventy years but what does it mean for development? Ramalingam provides some broad-brush messages on this: complexity thinking can’t tell you what to do on Monday morning, but it can help us understand the world around us better, promote more open debate about the challenges facing us, and help us think up new approaches to problems. It can help us “see through new eyes”. In this sense, development is more of an emergent property of a society/economy rather than a outcome of a process to be engineered. Aid in an ideal world then becomes “an open innovation network,” an “internal catalyst...[to] identify, expand and sustain the space for change,” a “fluid, dynamic, emergent” process. We stop looking for ‘the answer’ because, as the NYU Development Research Institute strapline goes, “there are no answers for global poverty. There are only answer-finding systems.” If nothing else, you can’t say complexity thinking isn’t good at snappy one-liners.

The thrill from this enormous potential is kind of feeding into my disillusionment with NGO work at the moment; the organisations I have experienced thus far are not embedded in the relevant 'system', not looking to foster small adaptive changes whilst accepting the underlying complexity of the problem they are trying to address. The organisations I have worked for have their ‘product’ with its own intellectual framework which is superimposed onto a given situation. They have their own thinking, activities and feedback loops which are only tangentially aligned with the problem at hand with all its complexity, non-linear characteristics and emergent properties. And most dangerous of all, they are self-sustaining, insulated from their own inadequacies by the current aid system.

Ramalingam shows us complex systems thinking in action: it’s all over the place apparently, from emergent leadership in Obama’s election campaign, to holistic range management in Zimbabwe, to conflict resolution in Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami, to the development of M-Pesa mobile money in Kenya. The book is filled with examples.

After the above whirlwind, I’m still left with a few questions though:

• How do you identify a system? What is the scale of a system?
• How do you know when something is not a problem of organized complexity?
• What would development institutions/donors/NGOs look like if you took them apart and rebuilt them to be equipped to face problems of complexity?
• What are the steps to changing aid in the right direction? Is it just that we read Ramalingam's book, realise we’ve been doing it wrong and change our approach? How do you change the system? (Ramalingam recognises the difficulties of this with the remark that “thousands of careers depend on sustaining certain ways of looking at the world”. That'd be politics again.)

Time to read it again I guess.

RCTs: Really Crap Things or Really Cool Things?

Credit: http://cplanicka.blogspot.com.es/

I’ve spent the last couple of months enrolled on two MOOCs (massive open online courses), ‘The Challenges of Global Poverty’, and ‘Evaluating Social Programs’, both effectively run by J-PAL, a research centre at MIT. I know what you’re thinking “Wow there Charlie, this year abroad’s taking you off the RAILS”. Well screw you. Anyway this has meant three things: 1) I’ve been exposed to a LOT of chat about Randomised Control Trials (RCTs); 2) I find the meme on the right much funnier than it actually is; and 3) I kind of wish I were an economist.

I want to talk about the first of those three things. Specifically: what are the downsides of RCTs?

First what they are (and I’m going to try to do this in my own layman words): a randomised control trial is a particular method of impact evaluation for an intervention (eg in development). It gets together a load of people, randomly assigns half of the group (the treatment group) to receive the particular intervention (e.g. access to microfinance) and half (the control group) to not receive the intervention, then at the end of the program measures the difference between treatment and control groups with respect to an appropriate indicator (e.g. income) to get the ‘impact’ of the intervention. Basically, the fact that the two groups were randomly chosen means that they were statistically the same, and so the cause of any difference in outcome between them at the end must be the intervention. Phew.

They’re argued to be pretty good at demonstrating the effectiveness (or not) of programs because they allow you to get to the heart of the causality, getting us closer to the ‘impact seeker’s Nirvana’.

Now after over two months of Esther Duflo and her ‘randomista’ (proponents of randomisation) babes enlightening me about all the cool things they’ve found out using their economist ‘gold standard’ tricks (like if you bribe them with dal, mothers are more likely to get their kids vaccinated. Or providing teenage girls with school uniforms can reduce rates of teen pregnancy more than sex-ed programs), I was ready to read some damning critique. But although RCTs to take a lot of flak, much of the arguments against seem weirdly bad. There’s a bit of a non-debate going on in many quarters.

1. Here’s one: it’s wrong to play God and experiment on people.
Reply: this one’s crap. As Howard White says, “all new policies are essentially experiments”. Now if we knew all the answers in development, then doing RCTs would be, at worst, expensive and useless. We don’t, so trialling and evaluating programmes as best we can to find out what does seems like the opposite of wrong.

2. And another, slightly better: RCTs are immoral because you’re rolling a dice to see who gets the bednet and who doesn’t.
Reply: you always have to choose who receives the intervention and who doesn’t; doing it explicitly and by chance its better than doing it implicitly and by virtue of the distance of the village from the nearest four-star hotel. RCTs never lead to “fewer people getting a service than they would if we haven’t been working on the evaluation” as Rachel Glennester, a randomista, puts it. Also, when you do an evaluation you don’t know whether the intervention works, so you might be better off not receiving it. Which is a bit of a backhanded benefit, but anyway.

Wait, so if the arguments against are rubbish, is this the answer for finding what works in development? Hah no, cause development is BORING, as thinkers ranging from Francisco Toro to my younger brother have argued (with slightly different meanings), and so there’s never one exciting answer, always lots of prosaic partial answers. As Lant Pritchett expresses it “RCTs are one hammer in the development toolkit and previously protruding nails were ignored for lack of a hammer, but not every development problem is a nail”. Some more thorny problems:

3. External validity: you can’t generalise from your RCT because the context matters. Owen Barder: “[in] the obvious example of the de-worming program, it clearly makes sense in communities that suffer from that kind of worm. But you clearly couldn’t generalize to communities where there aren’t worms”. ‘Solutions are slippery’ and you have to acknowledge the ‘hyper-dimensionalityof the design space’. Fuck. Sounds difficult and is. In fact so difficult that they do RCTs to see if the RCTs can be generalised.

4. Too much what not enough why: learning the impact of an intervention doesn’t tell you why it works or not. Also true.

5. Ironically, there is little rigorous evidence to suggest that rigorous evidence is used in policy. Lant Pritchett, chief development troller describes RCT-use as a ‘faith-based activity’. Meanwhile Philip Krause makes the obvious but valid point that “today’s rich countries didn’t get rich by using evidence systematically”.

6. Leaving out the big questions: you can’t run an RCT on whether aid works. You can’t use an RCT to determine what stimulates economic growth. You can’t use an RCT to test the effects of fixed vs. flexible exchange rates. Randomistas would accept this, and perhaps suggest that big ‘macro’ questions are made up of little ‘micro’ questions which they can answer. Debatable. But even WORSE, RCTs can’t answer many ‘micro’ questions either. Ben Ramalingam argues that many of the thorniest problems facing the world today are problems of ‘organised complexity’. With these, all the randomista assumptions about the intervention being the only difference between experiment and control group, linear cause and effect, etc. just don’t hold.

Basically, RCTs are good – so definitely read Poor Economics -... but not that good. According to the hype cycle, they are currently sunning themselves at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, soon to tumble down into the Trough of Disillusionment. Development is boring and there are no quick answers. Hooray!

The hype cycle, credit Gartner

DISCLAIMER: Having said all this, the above issues are slightly more nuanced than a short, deliberately-flippant blogpost would allow. Here are some extra resources (pick a couple) in the unlikely event you want to find out more.

A nice summary piece on RCTs in Slate

An in-depth document explaining RCTs by International Initiative for Impact Evaluation 'Big Cheese' Howard White

Some criticism of RCTs in the New York Times and a response from Jessica Goldberg

A development drums podcast on ‘Randomized Evaluations’

Some great blogposts questioning the relevance and impact of RCTs/raining on the parade

A more detailed look at the ethics of RCTs on the World Bank blog. Plus responses #1 #2 and #3

Involuntary guest post by Ben Ramalingam

I'm currently reading Aid on the Edge of Chaos by Ben Ramalingam, which attempts to apply complexity theory, i.e. the next big thing about five years ago (hate it when I get there late), to aid policy and practice. You should read it. Just finished Part 1, which dances lightly through the thinking and implicit theories behind the aid industry over the last sixty years and rips them apart, with wit, cartoons, punny chapter titles (Chapter 4 - 'The Goats in the Machine') and occasional classical references. The attack is directed at the linear, simplistic view of reality (cause and effect, rational actors, closed systems) derived from Newtonian physics, which underpins much of aid thinking and is totally inadequate for addressing the complex problems of development. There were some great passages which articulate, much more lucidly, elements of the frustration which underpinned my last post. Sharing is caring.

The problem with the aid industry:

"Despite the grander claims of some recent movements, development and humanitarian work is not a knowledge industry - except in the most idealistic interpretation. It is an export industry, and an exceptionally blunt, supply-oriented one at that. It gathers up poverty, vulnerability, and suffering from the South, packages them for sale in the West, and exports off-the-peg solutions back in relentless waves of best-practicitis"

And the traditional response:

"In the face of widespread institutional inertia, the resilient cookie cutters and travelling orthodoxies of foreign aid, the strategy most commonly found is to simply give up on trying to find a good solution. Just follow orders, do your job, and try not to get in trouble. Let the system do what it will."

The message:

"[A]id agencies are increasingly dealing with a world for which their learning, strategic, performance, and organizational frameworks were not designed"

If you fancy learning what more appropriate frameworks would be, take your pick from the following links on complexity in development, or, better, read the book. If I had to go for one (other than the book) I'd recommend the Owen Barder podcast (not that I've read all of these myself).

Papers/books (for the brave):

A (long) one by Ramalingam and others

A book on systems thinking by Donella Meadows

Podcasts (for the bus):

From Humanosphere with Owen Barder (short)

From Owen Barder himself (longer and better)

Blog posts (for the time-pressed):

From Ramalingam on his blog

Various from Duncan Green on his blog

From the Center for Global Development

Development double-think: how to (not) get out of bed in the morning

I'm currently in a very conceptual phase of my dissertation, with phrases like 'cognitive legitimacy,' 'socially constructed' and 'discourse' flying around. I'm trying to make them stop whirring using coffee and marks on bits of paper without success. In light of that I thought I'd continue the self-torture on this blog, by taking an assorted selection of ideas, articles and videos on a topic that occupies me a lot and attempt to construct a narrative. Let's see if pixels on a screen work better than ink on paper. Not promising coherence.

The problem is the co-existence of the following two facts:

1) Day-to-day, NGO/donor agency staff show up at the office and work hard and in good faith, to fill in the logframes/answer the emails/run the 'community consultation' session etc.

2) There is a consciousness among those who work in development that what NGOs/donors do is often extremely problematic conceptually and is fundamentally not what poor countries need.

Binyavanga Wainaina in a recent interview with the Guardian notes the guilty 'eye-rolling' of the aid worker betraying the fact she 'doesn't buy the bullshit' of aid work, just as he doesn't. Aid workers 'admit the irony, but the situation persists'. Neil McCulloch talks of the increasing popularity of the “political economy” approach to development assistance, attempting "to apply a more political approach to understanding development problems and, importantly, development “solutions”. In particular, a central tenet of the approach is that many development problems are fundamentally political rather than technical and that therefore solutions to these problems are most likely to come from inside a country’s polity than from outside." He finishes by remarking "Sadly, the political economy of donor incentives means that it [this approach] will probably remain a marginal pursuit [in development cooperation]." Banks and Hulme note in their 2012 paper on the role of NGOs in development the "increasingly professional and depoliticised nature [of NGOs] and their subsequent limitations in promoting long-term structural change."

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a massive judgement on whether aid is good or evil, not least because as I've remarked before, it's not the right question to ask. What I'm interested and perturbed by is the double-think that allows an development worker to carry out their job in good faith at the same time as knowing that it's inadequate as a solution to the task of helping countries to provide a better life for their people. This is something I feel myself in the work I do.

The paradox is easily explained in one sense: as Banks and Hulme put it, “organisational imperatives" prevail over the "development vision”. Much of the work that NGOs carry out responds to their desire to help not to 'satisfy any existing constituency' in Wainaina's words. There's no logic of the market or of politics to force NGOs to do what people actually need, so the development industry is free to define the task and the appropriate solution as they wish providing they can justify the whole thing to themselves.

And that's the key: to get over the cognitive disjuncture, you create a set of intermediary concepts like 'NGO' or 'partnership' or 'empowerment' or 'development' that you can imbue themselves with positive meaning, to save you the mental anguish of actually tracing the logic of what you are doing to its results and power implications. Because the results often ain't pretty. It's circular: I want to help those who are worse off in the world so I go do 'development', and 'development' is good because it's 'development'. The only problem now is that if you recognise all that and still work in an ineffective organisation (which is a lot of them), then that is probably unacceptably cynical.

Anyway I'm sure I've mixed up concepts, and ultimately make a fairly trivial, well-recognised point. But let's finish with a kind-of-relevant section of the Wainaina interview because he's brilliant and illustrates my existential problem perfectly (yes before you ask, development IS about me - that's the premise of the blog). 

"The utter cynicism of it is the assumption that there is no politics in Africa, so you simply bypass it; so you find a really, really good boy who's the best in his class in an English institution, and has symmetrical features, and [an impeccable] past, and so you know that when you know that when you give them a budget line that they'll stay [within it]...as you have defined. And those are what I call applications of power with a capital-P"

Down and Out in Paris and London from Madrid

General thoughts as a piece of writing: Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell

A strange read: I’m not quite sure what genre it was, somewhere between travel writing (but instead of moving geographically, moving economic situation and social class), short story, autobiography, and anthropological study. Orwell dons the 'beggar's cloak' (there's something slightly uncomfortable ethically now I reflect - using people's lives as material before hopping back out of poverty) and spends some months living the life of someone at the bottom of the pile, economically and socially-speaking. It’s written in such a way, with a cast of characters that seem more literary than real that it’s hard to believe that it is (at least partly) non-fiction. There is ‘Charlie’, who discourses on his discovery of ‘love’ with a terrified prostitute, and ‘Bozo’ the astronomer-screever (street artist), among many, many others. Meanwhile the description of life as a plongeur (the bottom rung of employee in a Parisian hotel-restaurant), the colourful and slightly disorientating account of Saturday night at Orwell’s preferred Parisian tavern, and the Russian secret society operating out of a laundrette similarly test the suspension of disbelief. Which also made it incredibly readable and compelling; I gobbled it up in about 4 hours.

Poverty 'over here'

The cover of my own 1984 edition

Anyway, we’re all here to witness my journey of intellectual enlightenment on development matters. Or for The Thick of It lovers, in Phil’s words, “my quest to become the man I know I can be". And in that context, it’s a useful tonic as someone who spends a fair amount of their life reading about and acting on poverty located outside their own society. It’s a cliché but poverty is a massive problem in ‘developed’ countries too, perhaps even reaching levels of a 'humanitarian crisis', and though it was published in 1933 the number of homeless people I awkwardly avoid eye contact with on a daily basis in London or Madrid (especially) suggests it’s still unfortunately relevant. On top of that, not only does the whole story take place in my own geographical space, the language and style of the writing means that it’s coming from my own cultural and class world. It shouldn’t be this way, but inevitably as a card-carrying public schoolboy (sounds awful doesn’t it?), reading an account of extreme poverty as ‘discovered’ by an ‘Etonian’ about 90 years ago is even more potent for me in some ways than having lived among extremely poor people in a rural area of Uganda for two months. The fact that writing all that has made me feel uncomfortable is probably another credit to the book. Too many middle class white people with no idea what poverty is like in ‘development’. ANYWAY.

A simple representation of poverty

Leaving aside nights spent in a postcolonial-theory-induced cold sweat, Orwell is super eloquent at illustrating the daily hardships and impossible decisions that people without money have to go through. It’s kind of the literary counterpart to reading Poor Economics which similarly aims to get away from grand theories and down to the realities of poor people, whatever your opinion of RCTs. We see the reality of the people on the other side of the wall in the fancy restaurant, who are basically invisible in contemporary media or politics (though this is a good article if you read Spanish). Going without food for days at a time feels “as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted”. Life moving from one lodging house to another is “a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom.”

One especially relevant point for this blog is the indignity of poverty and the power relations charity hides: on more than one occasion Orwell and his homeless friend Paddy are forced to accept a religious service in exchange for food, which he describes as a humiliating experience. In development land, it kind of links into Hattori's idea on giving as a means of legitimating the ethical hegemony of capitalism if that isn't too pretentious to mention (if you can stomach it, gated paper is here). Money, and especially charity, gives power at a very basic level. Orwell notes,“[i]t is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level”. The parallels with international development here are obvious. Structural adjustment imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s would do nicely, or, playing devil’s advocate you might well draw parallels with some donors’ recent suspension of aid over Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. Don’t quote me on that.

Though Orwell also describes little acts of resistance which are kind of brilliant. At one point a religious group spontaneously enters a hostel to give a service to the lodgers, presumably to ‘save their souls’. “No more notice was taken of them than f they had been earwigs”. Taking up the structural adjustment parallel again, you can kind of see this in the way that some developing-country governments made a complete mockery of the imposed conditionality. Easterly's great for this: in The Elusive Quest for Growth, he states that Pakistan was given no less than 22 adjustment loans conditional on reducing its budget deficit... which was steady at 7% of GDP throughout. Van der Walle also depicts this amazingly.

Anyway before I end up summarising the entire book, the message in general is (if there is one) that the poor are people like you and me. Orwell says it better: “the rich and poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit”. There’s a really poignant illustration of this (can’t help myself) quite late in the book, when Orwell, clearly in low spirits, suggests to Bozo, a disabled homeless person that “[i]t seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment”. And Bozo replies with moving defiance, “You’ve just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ – he tapped his forehead – and you’re all right”.

The broader picture

Oh and Orwell is humble. Self-deprecating (British) and humble. And that’s the beauty: that there is no stylised, trite narrative or direct attempt at mobilisation, just a plain presentation of experiences. The political implications are left for the reader to decide. It starts without back-story – “The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning.” – and ends just as simply -“My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story”. There’s definitely a moral to be drawn in the development world: the importance of decentring the role of ‘outsiders’ in defining the issues. Actually quite a nice illustration of this in this interview with Bill Easterly (about two-thirds of the way through I think).

Having said that, Orwell does venture some tentative opinions about the underlying dynamics of poverty and the injustice of the system. His explanation of the utter social uselessness of a plongeur and of fancy restaurants and hotels, for example, is persuasive (all that strife for a “cheap, shoddy imitiation [of luxury]”). In general the attack on the materialism and superficiality of society is probably even more relevant now than then, even if the politics then were different, as we now unfortunately don’t have any politics in the UK at least ("Q&A centred on people lamenting the state of the British Left or even whether such a thing still exists"). But the Marxist-inspired ‘keeping-the-mob-occupied-for-fear-of-revolution’ argument was probably more relevant in the 1930s, so I won’t dwell on the theorising too much, be cause neither does Orwell – just “a sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in a hotel”. Humble.

Much to think about, and development-related too, without there being a single line of argument. It’s a great read, and I’ll definitely be moving on to The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. I’ll leave you with the man himself for a modest conclusion:

“I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

[note: I feel obliged to mention that Orwell is weirdly racist and anti-Semitic for someone I think of as progressive, but I choose not to dwell for the purposes of this blog]

Problems with local legitimacy for your development project? Invent yourself a Goddess!

Normally academic papers about organisational theory don't yield much comedy value. But Derick W. Brinkerhoff has spiced up my Friday night in ways he could never have imagined with his 'Organisational legitimacy, capacity and capacity development'.

Aside from the fact that he references the concept of 'isomorphic mimicry,' which is my favourite thing at the moment because in one fell swoop it manages to explain both those 'fake wasps' that freak me out while actually being totally harmless and why education in many developing countries is so rubbish (here's a nice podcast to explain), there is a little gem half way down the left-hand column on page 9. And it's delivered so a matter-of-fact-ly in an otherwise innocuous paragraph about manipulative legitimacy strategies that you almost miss it.

"An interesting example [of manipulative legitimacy strategies] comes from the local family planning association in the village of Koppa, India, where to increase legitimacy for the association's services, staff created a new goddess of family welfare, Kalyaneshwari, to inspire women to limit family size"

WTF?!

Now you often hear about local beliefs being an impediment to implementing development initiatives. In the Global Poverty MOOC I'm currently taking (see earlier post) Ban
erjee and Duflo mention that some people in Udaipur are reluctant to get their children vaccinated for fear of the 'evil eye' that might fall upon them. But the audacity to take that problem and turn it into a solution is stunning, surreal and disturbing in equal measure. Local religious beliefs undermining your project? Create new ones, duh!

God-creation: tried and tested method for achieving development outcomes

Anyway if we can harness the brain-washing power of religion for development, then that's something I guess. God of good governance and democratic accountability anyone? Maaaah! Kind of speechless.

The Rebirth of Education (part 2): best bits

In part 1 I gave a quick run-down of Lant Pritchett's 'The Rebirth of Education'. In six words, learning not schooling, starfish not spider. Now I thought I'd highlight some important and/or interesting take-home messages. They mostly buzz around the same theme but hopefully will crystallise things a little.

On the problem:

1) You can't solve the education problem if you don't understand it.

We need to grasp that schooling systems adopted in developing countries were not designed to enable children to meet learning goals, so more of the same (more inputs alone) doesn't cut it. As with an addiction to Twitter, so with education policy, the first step is admitting you have a problem. "You cannot search [for solutions] if you are convinced you have already found what you need" says Lant. This also means that arguments on the public-private axis (as fun as they are) are also tangential to the debate in the developing country context.

2) 'More inputs help a bit so we might as well carry on doing that for now' = not advisable 

 “Taking a placebo can be dangerous if it prevents you from seeking out the right diagnosis”. Probably enough said there.


3) Western education experts need to eat some humble pie

Usefully-named 70s band Humble Pie

"No living Western education expert has led, participated in, or lived through a truly major national improvement in measured student achievement". All currently high scoring educational systems in OECD countries already had high-scoring systems 40 years ago, so we 'over here' don't seem to know how to transform an education system either. More generally the problems for education in developing countries are (unsurprisingly) different to those in developed countries, so even with a system proven to be successful in the Netherlands, for example, we may not be any closer to our goal.





4) This isn't technical, it's incentives, it's political

The problem is in the dynamic of the system and the incentives it produces, not just a lack of a certain missing X. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague when working in a school in Uganda last summer, when it dawned on us that everyone was 'playing their role' more or less effectively (teachers mostly present, pupils sat behind desks, adequate classrooms, timetable, register etc) but a lot of the time, nothing was actually happening. There was no learning. Pritchett's cover shows a child walking through a doorway of a façade of a school with nothing behind and this captures the point perfectly. Translating this into practical advice for someone who works for a charity trying to improve schools in developing countries (like me), when you think you've found the perfect initiative for the school, you need to ask yourself two questions: why isn’t this being done already? And why will it be done that way in the future? Incentives. And panning back out to the level of the whole system, this means politics: switching to a starfish system means ceding power and giving up central control to some measure, and there lies the difficulty.

Towards a solution...

5) There is no blueprint and there is no silver bullet

If what we are trying to do is learn the principles of design rather than how to design a particular house (Lant's metaphor), and we take into account architecture degrees are like six years (me stretching Lant's metaphor), it's clear there is no quick blueprint for success. Even within his six key characteristics for a successful system, you need these all functioning together. If you look at point 2, 'locally-operated' and think that the panacea for poor education systems is decentralisation, then you are likely to end up with a decentralised poor education system. You need all of these characteristics together, with the details right. Then adding in the inevitable caveat that political, social and educational context will determine the precise formula, and the surreal, incomprehensible bit of Zen teaching Pritchett adds in "If you should meet Buddha on the road, kill him"(?!), it's clear that there is no one formula for success.

*searching for something positive...*

6) There's loads of innovation at the micro-level, so change is possible

Particularly for those working on individual schools rather than an entire education system, take inspiration from the fact that there are plenty of actors doing great, innovative work in difficult contexts. We know that some interventions (remedial classes, curriculum reform, and others) are really effective at improving learning. The problem is more that the spider system often prevents these innovations from scaling-up.

And the irritating, super-keen development student's choice...

7) Systems-thinking is the way forward

Complex adaptive systems did this

Trying to take heed of the development ideas hype cycle and not explode with wonk-y excitement, but systems-thinking, and particularly complex adaptive systems theory, is the future. Lant has a great passage on why we're crap at thinking in terms of systems rather than agents (which is also an example of his excellent prose style) but all the cool kids in policy are talking about systems-thinking and I'll soon be blogging about it (once I've read this and this and this and this and this). Getting back to the concrete example of education, thinking in terms of systems explains why absent teachers and obstructive teachers' unions don't mean that teachers are the baddies and all we need to do is make teachers be less rubbish. If the system is set up to treat teachers like workers not professionals, and fails to provide the right incentives, then the outcomes will be inevitably be disappointing.

In conclusion, read the book because it's great and will change the way you think.

Thursday resolutions

Two sobering things have occurred to me this morning, both of which will hopefully improve this blog.

1. I am not Duncan Green. Perhaps obvious but important anyway. So given that I'm not an experienced Oxfam strategic advisor, author of the influential development book From Poverty to Power, I can stop trying to match him and other bloggers I follow for originality and analytical insight. I can be happy continuing to stab blindly in the dark at assorted issues vaguely relevant to development. More honesty and less coherence.

2. If I were to read my own writing but written by someone else, it would sometimes piss me off. There's nothing worse than a young person spewing out self-involved verbal diarrhoea. Just read a few articles on Thought Catalog and you'll get the point. So despite my best instincts (I love words) I'm going to try to unlearn the verbose rhetorical tendencies (witness the previous phrase) drilled into me at school.

Now that's over with, hopefully an actual post will appear sometime soon on food and the poor, the crappiness of (some) NGOs or why we need to rethink how we do education, depending on which semi-started draft I choose to finish.