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

Goodbye Spain, you're going backwards

"I suppose there is no one who spent more than a few weeks in Spain without being in some degree disillusioned." George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

I've come to the end of my time living in Spain. Unfortunately I haven't uncovered new truths about the nature of the Spanish soul. I do have a couple of quick sources of disillusionment to share about Spain and development though.

1. Spanish cuts in development have been drastic. As my hard-Left development professor begrudgingly pointed out, while Britain with its 'gobierno conservador' has hit the magic 0.7% target, Spain has gone from 0.49% GDP to 0.17%, with an overall fall of 70% since 2008. In some areas, like Spain's contributions to the FAO, UN or WFP, the budget cut has been up to 90%, which has reduced the country to irrelevance in multilateral debates. Not a month goes by without El Pais releasing something about 'los recortes en ayuda'. At the same time a former Valencia regional deputy has just been sentenced to prison for diverting aid funds for real estate projects. Add to that the permanent crisis of migrants trying to enter Spain via its North African enclaves (whilst occasionally being shot at with rubber bullets and subsequently drowning), and you have a mess.

2. Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s. In terms of professionalism, my experience of Spanish NGOs can be summed up with the word 'chaos'. This almost certainly has something to do with 1. above i.e. they have no money and so no paid staff, but even so... Aside from that, and I've mentioned this before, but NGO advertising in Spain, even from big-hitters like UNICEF, manages to hit up all of the 'poverty porn' no-nos. De-contextualised view of the situation in developing countries with white people sending money as the inevitable, paternalistic solution? Check. Dehumanising pictures of unnamed brown/black children depicted without dignity or respect? Check. One dimensional view of poverty? Check. Africa = hunger, disease, death? Check. You get my point.

I say Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s; I meant 60s. On the left is an advert I saw on Wednesday in Madrid and on the right, an Oxfam collecting tin from the 1960s. photo credit: WhyDev

I can't say I'm too optimistic about either. Although 81% of Spanish people agree that giving aid is "a moral duty and helps to build a more just and sustainable world," it's just not a priority for most people. Meanwhile, as Emily Roenigk points out, poverty porn works, as pernicious as it is.

I just hope that the kid in the picture is getting a chunky commission for her image rights.

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.

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"

Are the extreme poor hungry?

An obvious question maybe. The WFP reports that there are 842 million undernourished people in the world today. Policymakers, too, seem to think so: at Davos last month global leaders committed to the zero hunger challenge. MDG 1 refers to 'eradicating extreme poverty and hunger'. Ayuda en Acción also have a cool campaign on hunger right now which reminds me of Where the Wild Things Are. So the extreme poor are hungry, right?

But are the extreme poor hungry?

This question is the the central problem posed by Banerjee & Duflo (B&D) in Chapter 2 of Poor Economics, and of the second week of the 'The Challenges of Global Poverty' MOOC of theirs I'm currently taking. So, inspired by Development Intern's weekly report on Sachs' rival course on Sustainable Development, I'm going to do something similar, hopefully mashing up course material with ideas from their book and other sources sufficiently to sidestep anticipated legal issues (it's a free course available to anyone so not sure 'revealing course content' has any meaning but whatever I'm a coward).

Getting back to the question, B&D suggest that we could be looking at a food-based 'poverty trap'. I.e. poor people don't have enough food to be productive, meaning they earn less and have less money to buy food, and so the cycle continues. Meanwhile someone with more money can buy more food, be more productive, and thus escape from poverty. In the class B&D use concepts like the S-shape graph and capacity curves and elasticity so you feel like a real economist: it's fun.

But if we actually look at the actual behaviour of the poor in developing countries, we get a story different to the WFP and poverty trap narrative. B&D find that in Udaipur, the poor could spend up to 30% more on food than they actually do by cutting expense on festivals, alcohol and tobacco. Another study cited by B&D found that a 1% increase in income only translates into a 0.67% increase in food expenditure. Significance: there's room for the poor to be buying more food. A further study in China even found that when the price of rice declined, people ate less rice (that is to say, fuck you conventional economics). In general, Deaton and Dreze find that poor Indians have been eating less and less over the last few decades while the percentage of people complaining that they do not have enough food dropped from 17% in 1983 to 2% in 2004. Not what you would expect from hungry people stuck in a food-based poverty trap. So maybe poor people in general have enough food. As B&D put it, “most adults, even the very poor, are outside of the nutrition poverty trap zone”. We can offer some explanations - technological change means that people aren't doing as much physical labour and so require less food; people are healthier so lose fewer calories to hungry parasites or to fighting illness.

But the Freakonomics-style journey doesn't end there, because it's not just that the WFP is totally wrong and everyone is fine food-wise. Roughly half the children under five in India are stunted, a horrific stat which suggests something is going seriously wrong with their nutrition. So, skipping a few steps, we arrive at our 'solution': it's quality not quantity. When 40% of pregnant women are anaemic according to the WHO, it doesn't matter how much rice you give them, they need iron. And this is particularly bad in India because many people are vegetarian and the staple is rice (which actually inhibits iron absorption) creating a perfect, iron-free, storm. The results of addressing nutrient deficiencies are huge - B&D cite a study which found that deworming children for two years (equivalent of giving them the nutrients and calories taken by the worms - and yes it does work like that) led to a yearly increase in income of 20% and a lifetime gain of $3269, compared to a cost of $1.36 per deworming treatment. Bam.

Sweet potatoes: yummy and nutritious

So we need to get kids dewormed (already happening in Kenya), nutrients to pregnant women and to young children, because that's where the real 'hidden hunger' is, say B&D. Another nail in the coffin of USAID's food aid policy based on getting US-produced staples to supposedly needy countries (not that it needed another one). And bad news too for the Campaign for Boring Development with its focus on increasing incomes: money isn't the issue here, so having more of it won't make a big difference. Fortified fish-sauce is already cheap and within reach of the poor in Indonesia (relative to its benefits and average income). Instead we need to directly target mothers-to-be during pregnancy with fortified foods, perhaps sprinkle children's food at school with micronutrient-rich salts, and more sustainably, develop nutritious foods that people actually want to eat (see DFID bloggers' on exactly this topic.
Orange fleshed sweet potatoes and iron-rich beans are where we're heading apparently).

The most interesting part of this I've left until last. If the benefits are so great and the costs so small, why aren't poor people doing this anyway? And this is where B&D are at their best, taking us away from high-level, often introspective debates driven by Western academics (whatever its merits, I still find the fact that Nina Munks just wrote a book on Jeff Sachs kind of surreal) and towards the realities of the poor. As they drily put it, “the natural place to start to unravel the mystery is to assume that the poor must know what they are doing”. Unpacking all the reasons why the poor might not take to foreign experts' advice would, and probably will, take another blog post (think mistrust of the state and NGOs, difficulty of verifying supposed benefits, human psychology). But one aspect of the explanation becomes obvious when you think of the extreme poor as normal people. Because people aren't machines made to maximise their productivity or long-term income - I'm sure I'd be better off productivity-wise giving up coffee, sugar and alcohol but I'm not going to. Now imagine you work a lot harder than I do, and on top of that don't have the internet, books, podcasts and a load of leisure time to spend with friends, you might be justifiably tempted to spend your money buying tastier but less nutritious food, or even saving up for a TV, instead of investing in things that might, in the long-term, be objectively 'beneficial'. B&D quote George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

“When you are unemployed, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little tasty”.

So a couple of conclusions from this week's class: 1) quality not quantity. And 2) the extreme poor in developing countries know what they're doing more than we give them credit.

The Great Escape

Read book. Took notes on book. Listened to Development Drums podcast. Read review. Went on holiday to Bologna. Got flu. Now finally ready to pass on a few thoughts about Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape.

First thing, just to highlight, is the amazing, bird’s eye view you get of progress in a) global health and b) income/economic growth over the last couple of hundred years. One general message is that, on a world scale, things have been getting better at an incredible rate over the last couple of hundred years and that a big part of the inequality we see is a result

of the some parts of the world becoming rich (which is undeniably positive as a fact in and of itself). And Deaton provides loads of lovely statistical snippets to show it. For example in the health ‘section’, for the last 160 years, for every four years of calendar time, the world’s highest life expectancy increased by a year.  Meanwhile, between 1820 and 1992, the average income of all the inhabitants of the world increased between seven and eight times and the fraction of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 84 to 24% (at the same time as the world population increased by billions). Deaton is clearly a master of the data and a giant in his field and it shows.

Then of course we get some broad ideas of the ‘why’ without there being an overarching grand theory, which is quite refreshing and probably bang on given the scope and scale of the changes we are talking about. Deaton also focuses on some other pertinent issues like the hazards of measurement and indicators, economic growth as an overwhelmingly positive force (or not) and the (topical) issue of income inequality within the USA and worldwide (I have a word doc to which I add links to contributions on the inequality debate: currently on about 15 articles/reports in the last month).

But the most polemical, and (for me) interesting stuff is found in the final section on aid and why it’s bad, which got me writing angry comments in the margins. To cut straight to the chase, the central argument is that “foreign aid makes governments less responsive to the needs of the poor, and thus does them harm”. Essentially if we accept that poverty (broadly defined) is a consequence of poor institutions, and that aid to governments undermines institutions and democracy, weakening the social contract, aid is bad. Which isn’t revolutionary stuff, very broad-brush, reminding me a bit of Easterly with the idea that aid mucks with incentives, combined with sort-of Duncan Green/Oxfam change coming from combination of active citizens and progressive states working together. Deaton therefore also criticises what he characterises as the ‘hydraulic approach’ to aid whereby monetary inputs are automatically assumed to lead to positive outputs, with development conceived as a technical issue – definitely agree here, as does pretty much everyone up to date with current development thinking. And regarding the main argument about aid and institutions, the theory sounds eminently plausible...

However. The first problem is, as Owen Barder points out, this is an empirical not a theoretical question, and there isn’t hard evidence supporting Deaton’s view that all to-government aid ends up wrecking the given country’s political institutions and gets siphoned off by corrupt governments rather than being used to help the country’s people. Anecdotally, Barder mentions Ethiopia’s human development progress (see Development Drums podcast for this and further references) and Rwanda struck me as an example after listening to a Guardian podcast listing the positively stunning gains made in health there. This reported that in the last ten years alone: deaths from AIDS and TB were down 78%. Maternal mortality down 60%. Under five mortality down 70%. Paul Farmer called these developments ‘the steepest declines in mortality ever recorded, at any time, and in any place’. In this light, and even despite serious concerns about political freedoms in Rwanda, Deaton’s caricatured claims about corrupt African governments just don’t square with reality. It might be possible, in fact, for aid to strengthen democracy and the social contract when its use is made accountable to the people through traditional institutions. Rwanda’s imihigo system, whereby if the local ‘mayor’ fails to deliver on developmental promises he is made a social pariah, is one example. Chris Blattman in his review makes this point even more strongly:

 “And, frankly, I personally find it hard to believe that levels of democracy in Africa would be as high as they are without aid. I think the most important forces driving democracy are probably internal to Africa, and the example and economic success of advanced democracies comes second. But aid and foreign meddling comes a close third”

On the general point, Owen Barder, with characteristic succinctness, crystallises the underlying criticism when he accuses Deaton from arguing from extremes. And I’d agree that the sentence “the director of one aid agency gave me a bloodcurdling account of how aid funds had gone to gangs of murderers” isn’t the most nuanced or helpful reflection on aid I have read recently.  Basically there is definitely something lazy if not worse about taking a homogenised image of the African other (based on Mobutu or Mugabe for example) as a key premise of an argument about aid.

And second, even conceding Deaton’s argument about aid’s effects on political institutions, to claim, in the absence of hard evidence, that this overrides the (widely accepted) results from worldwide health initiatives (just one example) is a little strong for me. When first reading the chapter I’d scribbled down a note to Owen Barder’s ‘pocket defence’ of aid based on the smallpox case as potential rebuttal, and I’ve got to admit I did a fist-pump when he unleashed it in the podcast. And after Deaton took this road, it was a bit of a slippery slope, where he seemed to edge towards the view that political rights and freedoms trumped everything. The USA should consider stopping trade with Saudi Arabia (Deaton agrees to), okay, but then should the rest of the world stop trading with the USA because of Guantanamo? Deaton’s refrain that dealing with countries like Ethiopia under repressive dictatorships was “like having blood on our hands” seemed unconvincing.  Surely not supplying healthcare when people will die without it is also ‘having blood on our hands’? The world isn't that black and white.

And this is where my angry notes in the margin come in. Because it seemed to me that Deaton was, in general, pretty sloppy in the final chapter. My quibbles include: his use of hyperbole (see ‘gangs of murderers’ example above); his reliance on anecdotes, for example about 'WaBenzi'/corruption in Kenya; his random pot-shots about loosely connected issues ranging from RCTs (which he doesn’t like) to aid apparently being used as a way for rich country governments to boost their popularity (erm not sure I buy this given recent findings from ODI “the public may be becoming less supportive of maintaining, let alone increasing, current levels of UK spending on aid”). But worst of all (what Owen Barder with wonderful tact referred to as the chapter being “less well-evidenced”) his disingenuousness with statistics – his bread-and-butter! So he pulls up graphs showing that there is no positive correlation between aid and growth, or between aid and democracy, and then leaves these facts 'floating' in his argument, flirting perilously with the causation-correlation fallacy that jumped out even at me as a non-economist/statistician.  For a social scientist renowned in his field, to toy with these arguments seemed pretty petty.

Basically ‘Deaton-on-aid’ got a bit rant-y (though I do appreciate the sentiment of frustration with the aid sector, as Owen Barder put it, “a cry of exasperation”) and obscured the more important take-home ideas that most people agree on now and which did also come out partly in the final chapter:

1. Aid isn’t the solution – we can do far more through migration, climate change, trade policies, 'aid for development' in promoting global public goods like scientific knowledge etc;
2.  Aid and development is political - I think we can all agree that the technical, depoliticised, 'problem-solving' conception of aid and development can be put to bed;

But alongside these two conclusions drawn by Deaton, Chris Blattman's fundamental objection to Deaton is worth keeping in mind: that 'The answer to “Does aid work?” is the same answer to every question in social science: “It depends” ’(from his own review). So Deaton is coming up with (probably) the wrong answer to (definitely) the wrong question. The Great Escape is a triumph in terms of tracing broad global trends in health and income with rigorous statistical evidence, but the final chapter is best taken with a large dose of salt. Time to move on from Sachs-vs-Easterly methinks.