#devco

RETO: ¿Cúal es el lenguaje? y realizarlo en otro lenguaje...

Kenya: Finance Manager- DEVCO and BRCiS Consortium (Kenya Nationals Only) – Kenya

The Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS) Consortium aims at improving the resilience of vulnerable communities and households in seven regions, 22 districts and 99 communities of south and central Somalia, directly targeting 30,100 households. The BRCiS Consortium is formed by five organisations: NRC, SCI, IRC, Concern Worldwide and CESVI. The five years programme, at the moment, is…

Eric Posner's op-ed "The case against human rights" in The Guardian is at first very convincing and therefore dangerous. He concludes with a silly cliché that human rights are a western imperialist import. This was debunked by Amartya Sen and many others. The parallels with development cooperation are too simplistic and wrong. Today the DevCo sector has human rights based approach (HRBA) at its core. This approach is not about grand proclamations but it represents a mode of thinking about people and their issues. It means all interventions should focus on human rights and their expansion and not on the physical output (number of wells, schools...). Because only if we address the question of why some people don't have access to certain goods or services, can our intervention be sustainable. Mentioning Ester Duflo is inappropriate, her innovation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in DevCo is only a minor technical improvement, and overemphasizing it might lead us astray. For example, it is very effective to give poor people money. The so called direct cash transfers are becoming popular. But duh? In developed countries this is the function of social safety net and a result of implementation of various human rights. The problem of poorer countries is that they don't have enough resources (because of underdeveloped economy, corruption, bad tax collection and waste) to finance this safety net. Also they don't have enough resources and too weak middle class to approach the issues of human rights abuses (the threshold is much higher than in developed countries, but if you look at police killings in the USA one wonders...) . Duflo's and Lomborg's logic leads us to experiment with handouts and some exotic innovations but without addressing the underlying power/rights issues. They might select few poorer looking houses in some village in Kenya give them cash through mobile money m-pesa and observe some social indicators. But they abstract from the social dynamics of a particular village and distort the reality with non-systemic interventions. On contrary the HBRA tries to address the systemic issue of marginalization or inadequate access. So no human rights didn't fail us, we just didn't invest enough in them and let the lobbyists of autocrats and their talking heads tell us that this is a prodigious luxury. But is it? The whole economical success and nation branding rests on the perception of respect for human rights. Without it the country is fragile and will pay dearly in some point of time.

Why do ultra-rich people buy contemporary art of living artists for tens of millions dollars? Peter Singer argues that purchases of Jeff Koons’ art and others aren’t motivated by economic value but are meant solely to enhance the status of the buyer. He thinks this is unethical because those funds could be invested to save lives or help thousands of artists in the developing world. We should redefine the meaning of success and status and make it shameful for rich people to boast in this way. But this is easier said than done. I think, besides success, we should equally change the narrative of development (cooperation) and make the data and statistics more “poetic”, aspirational and inclusive.

Beyond The Cost Effective World

 The one problem with development cooperation narratives is they are extremely boring. If you search “Development Cooperation” in Google Trends you won’t get far beyond political capitals and (UN) cities of Washington DC, Nairobi, Brussels, New York and Geneva. On the contrary, search for “social business” and you get Nairobi but also Manila, Singapore, Bangalore and Dublin. The search for “CSR” shows you results from other vibrant cities of developing countries. The narrative slowly changes from the charity of helping poor and saving lives to empowering young people to be successful actors of positive social change. But this requires some counterintuitive moves of working with Big Business and investing for example in events and project such as “CSR in Africa Awards” that doesn’t benefit the poor immediately. And this many times contradicts the requirement that the foreign assistance should benefit the neediest poor people first.

The second problem is the pursue of cost-effective solutions. Should we invest over next 15 years in saving lives through deworming or focus more on sustainable industrialization and promotion of CSR? Deworming and direct cash transfers are one of the most effective and efficient interventions to alleviate poverty according to GiveWell.org.  Bjorn Lomborg, the director of Copenhagen Consensus Center, urges states to prioritize the next development goals according to cost/benefit analysis. I think this view is too simplistic, suboptimal and prone to making errors.

United Nations is at the centre of debate on the future development goals that should replace the MDGs after 2015. The question is how to make the Sustainable Development Goals aspirational, marketable and attainable at the same time? One side of the debate argues that we should prioritize proven cost-effective interventions s such as deworming, supplying micronutrients and getting girls to primary schools and abandon grand proclamations such as “End extreme poverty by 2030”. The other side argues for a more systemic change of consumption and production patterns and new development narratives that focus more on inequality than on economic growth.

I argue that sometimes a low-hanging fruit of development opportunities can be a so called wicked problem in disguise. On the other hand taking a more strategic approach and asking the hard questions about global trade, tax havens, corruption and media freedoms can provoke a “race to the top”.  And change the status quo for better instead of curing only the symptoms.        

Hacking the narrative of development and success

Problem with the cost/benefit view of the policy solutions for the better world is that they are too specific interventions from the past in a concrete context and both the calculation of benefit and the assumption of easy replication are prone to errors. I would say this discourse suffers from “microscopic view”. On the other hand the grand proclamations of ending hunger and poverty suffer from a too vague and “macroscopic view”.  We need another, let’s call them mezzanine solutions that are transformative but also clear, concrete and workable. For example instead of “fighting inequality” or destroying “tax havens” one can take an example of a concrete solution by Piketty to tax only the net worth of individuals. So people with outstanding mortgage debts would pay less in property taxes than those, who inherited their real estate or acquired it without debts.    

My example of a workable yet revolutionary policy change is to abolish the per diem and consider them just another taxable income. It sound boring but it is much easier to implement and collect than for example carbon or Tobin’s “Robin Hood” taxes on financial transactions. The abolishing of per diems would discourage excessive travel in pursue of financial benefits that would reduce the carbon footprint and free up both politicians and business people to be more productive. It can be also marketed to more conservative politicians as a pro-family solution. The problem of hunt for per diem is very serious especially in development cooperation sector and developing countries and there are various studies of Norad and other agencies that confirm it.

There are two important steps we need to take when changing the obsolete narrative of development cooperation:

1)      Change the way we measure progress, success and development. Forget GDP. We need a new unified metric to measure the progress of countries. It could be composed of some meta-indices. I proposed inequality-adjusted HDI, press freedom index and CRIS (Comparative Rating Index of Sovereigns). One could add Fragile States Index and others.

  2)      Engage in aspirational storytelling and give the data and statistics more life and meaning through “poetry”. I mean some meta-narrative of hope. But based on new and reliable metrics.

 Poetical Economy

How to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place? This is the question Bjorn Lomborg and a team of renowned economists at Copenhagen Consensus asks every four years since 2004. They prioritized the most effective global development solutions and for example micronutrient supplements won twice and subsidized malaria treatment (2012) or finishing Doha trade talks (2008) were second.  Now, through post2015 Consensus project, they evaluate proposals of Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved in 2030. I argue that their approach is limited on various accounts and therefore should be treated only as an input to a broader discussion. It can be summed up as “Computer says no”.

Low hanging fruit instead of free media

I think there is a consensus that global resources to tackle poverty are limited and therefore we should use them wisely and calculate what would be the best actions in terms of effectivity. The Open Working Group in their last session presented 17 goals and 169 targets that the economists rated for cost effectiveness on a scale from phenomenal to poor and colour-coded them elegantly right within the text of the proposal. 

For illustration of a rather great visualization this is a snapshot of some education targets:

I will explain soon why I have a problem with this cost/benefit analysis approach but first let me quote a part that annoyed me most and where economists overreached their evaluation with a strange commentary:

I don’t understand why they had the urge to mark especially media freedom as a poor target if the others were left without colour-coded evaluation:

  Sometimes the economists do a good job spotting empty phrases and the common political sweet talk but many of the targets they evaluated as poor have transformational potential (ICT and vocational skills, free media, industrial jobs creation) and are exactly the goals that can sell the whole SDGs development agenda through enthusiasm and activism.  And some of the “phenomenal” targets are either low hanging fruits (micronutrients, malaria [bed nets]…) or so called wicked problems in disguise (malnutrition, gender equality…).   

Numbers make us poor, narratives make us rich

One can ask what exactly is the point of just another set of global development goals when most of African countries have elaborate and visionary national strategies until the year 2030. For example Kenya invests in education of STEM and TIVET areas and focuses on job creation in IT and financial services. This is exactly the area that Copenhagen Consensus Centre discourages and offers simplistic explanations such as “Skills can be obtained in a more efficient way outside the main school system, such as in specialized vocational schools or by training on the job.” Really? Can they be obtained this way in Kenya? Even young unemployed Europeans wouldn’t agree.

In my opinion we should focus not on (cost efficiency) numbers in prioritizing the Sustainable Development Goals but on broader unifying narrative that can bring together developed and developing countries and challenge them to increase the quality of life. If the powerful motto of MDGs was to “End Poverty” the new set of goals should aim to achieve “A Decent Life for All”, as the European Commission proposes. In other words on increasing quality of services such as education and reducing income and wealth inequality.

I see these limits in Copenhagen Consensus approach to post2015 process:

1)      Incrementalism – only marginal improvements are prioritized within a narrow paradigm and many transformative ideas are dismissed. For example many regulations we have today showed their benefits only in hindsight.  One can use a landscape model where we reach only a suboptimal solution. It will be the most effective and will reach “a peak, but not on a highest hill”. Sometimes you need to go downhill to reach a higher plateau.   

 2)      Scientism – the cost/benefit analysis might be a wrong tool for heuristics of solving wicked and complex global problems. It makes little sense to extrapolate the outcome of one research of a small intervention that happened in a specific context and time and apply it to a global goal. This analysis can be never as robust as is needed for this “macroscopic view”. Thus one needs to take this approach with a grain of salt because of many possible errors and wrong assumptions.

 3)      Solutionism – I borrowed the term from Evgeny Morozov and mean by it mistaking wicked for tame problems and applying simplistic solutions and assumptions. This is a long and broader trend that seeks quick answers without posing painful questions. Similar to the self-tracking movement that counts calories burnt and kilometers run, also the development community is currently obsessed with (open) data and RCTs but fails to ask the hard philosophical questions and thus falls for suboptimal solutions. Maybe those very cost effective opportunities for action are not lacking additional funds  but are just symptoms of some wider “wicked” problems.

On 12  December, just two weeks after European Development Days ministers from EU countries postponed a deal that would cut the percentage of biofuels at the petrol stations from 10% to a watered-down proposal of 7% (instead of an original 5%). The support for the first generation of biofuels is an ill-conceived EU policy that has negative impacts on food prices, deforestation and land degradation in developing countries. This is a sad example of the lacking "policy coherance for development". The EDDs are one of the biggest events in development cooperation community. Last year they were held for the eighth time, on 26-27 November in Brussels with around 7000 participants. Here are a few personal main ponits and observations:

- the focus on cooperation with private sector and especially multinationals was even more evident than in 2012 (CSR, PPP, blending of grants and corporate loans or investments)

- Not much focus on startups, social enterprise or innovative technology, maybe after the excitement with M-Pesa there is no other really succesful innovation that would "disrupt" the status quo in development cooperation.

- Data revolution in development was mentioned but also less enthusiastically  

- Interestingly there was a corner dedicated to data protection with a few NGOs, such as RWB. I guess an EC reaction to the Snowden saga.

- Very big focus on post 2015 agenda and search for the process and content of the goals that should replace the MDGs. These goals could be unified for both developed and developing countries ( quality education, youth employment and inequality reduction...). Also a focus on new metrics of development beyond GDP. Especially inequality.

- How to change the narrative and sell the development agenda to EU citizens? DevCo comissioner Piebalgs used a phrase 'International solution, national interest'. According to a recent Eurobarometer poll 66% of Europeans think helping poorer countries is beneficial also for the EU and 48% would buy more expensive grocieries if they knew the product benefits the poor. 

- Last year a 20th anniversary of OHCHR and EU Special Delagate for Human Rights was celebrated. In 2012 it was an anniversary of ECHO. Human rights and promotion of good governance remain important but they are not so stressed as in the past. New EU members play an important role in sharing the transition experience. But I'm not sure if with Ethiopia or Liberia (participants of one panel on transition)

- The case of worsening education in Nigeria was presneted together with a solution of eLearning delivered by satelite television - an example of PPP. (From our own ICT4E projects in Kenya we could see where some problems may arrise - generators, expensive equipment, need for sustained training and feedback, too ambitious scale-up. But fingers crossed.)  

Jakub Simek, Program Manager (ICT4E  - Kenya, CSR - Belarus)