February 2012
2 posts
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“This model does not question the causes of poverty, either general or spe-...”
– Thorough critique of Nicholas Kristof’s “Starfish Parable” in Transition Issue 107.
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The Plane Truth
I wrote a story for The Atlantic, on Dakar’s new airport and “The Hidden Costs of Africa’s Air Travel Boom.” In short, it’s magnificent that I have improved choices as I hop from Kampala, Uganda (from where I write this) and Nairobi, Kenya (where I live). But the abundance of new airlines, airports and routes—and the accompanying ease in travel—comes...
January 2012
2 posts
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A Different Map of the Global Economy
The development sector hobby of ranking nations is pronounced. Metrics are almost beside the point; these empirical orderings of countries as “free” or “not free”, “fragile” or “stable” drive policy decision-making and affect investments on the ground. And usually, Africa does poorly. But what if the goalposts were moved—or on a different...
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Dakar, New Year's Eve
I have spent an excellent week in Senegal, traveling its northwest coast, and exploring the new airport that will open later this year.
More on that in due time. I thought it worth posting my photographs from New Year’s Eve. A friend, surgeon and professor at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop was kind enough to take me out for the evening, at the fancy Hotel des Almadies. At midnight, at the...
December 2011
2 posts
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10 Positive Africa Stories of 2011
At the New Yorker, Alexis Okeowo’s got a list:
1. Africa is experiencing an economic boom.
2. South Sudan gained its independence.
3. Ugandans staged Walk to Work protests
4. Two Liberian women won the Nobel Peace Prize.
5. Cell phones continue to change how Africans live.
6. South African democracy took a turn for the interesting.
7. African innovation was celebrated for a third year...
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Lions in Waiting
Reread The Economist’s “Year in 2011” predictions. They’re laughably bad. Or, I should say, irrelevant. The august magazine missed the biggest stories of this most interesting year: the Arab Spring, the ongoing Eurozone fiasco, and the global anti-inequality movement known as Occupy Wall Street. They were able to accurately predict that there would be political gridlock in...
November 2011
4 posts
3 tags
Bureaucracy in America
I have begun contributing to the online opinion pages of the New York Times, for an exciting new blog on global issues called “Latitude.” Here is my first post, on the expectation differential between health care systems in America and around Africa.
I came down with my first African disease in America. It happened after I traveled to Nigeria last April to witness my country elect a...
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Another 99 Percent
These days, I hear chants echoing through the window of my apartment. “We-are-the-99-percent… and so are… We-are-the-99-percent … and so are … We…” Repeat as necessary.
I like Occupy Wall Street. After a summer spent with Al Jazeera and the low hum of unrest in the Middle East, I appreciate the rhythmic waves of objection pouring out from New York...
October 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Liberian Democracy
I’m in Liberia for about a week. The country heads to the polls on Tuesday, to decide whether to re-elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to another six year term as president.
Outside of Liberia, Johnson-Sirleaf is a widely respected head of state and a historical figure—not least because she is the first female to lead the first African republic. And now she is the second African woman to...
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That Ibrahim Index
Since 2006, the Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim’s foundation has released an Index of African Governance. The report evaluates countries based on metrics like “Safety and Rule of Law,” “Human Development,” “Participation and Human Rights,” and “Sustainable Economic Opportunity.” The foundation also awards an associated $5 million prize for...
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Apps4Africa
There’s a presumption that being behind is bad news for Africa. That immature governments and insufficient infrastructure signify a perpetual lag in development that will take years, if not decades to overcome. Certainly, it will take time for Kampala to look like Hong Kong. But it’s now uncontroversial to talk about “leapfrogging” over these same difficulties, particularly...
September 2011
2 posts
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True Grit
I encourage you to read Paul Tough’s thoughtful reporting in the New York Times Magazine. The title of the recent article—“What if the Secret to Success is Failure?”—is provocative, and is ostensibly about American education policy. It nevertheless tracks a lot of my thinking about the resilience inbuilt within contexts of scarcity, hardship and centralized failures....
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“Tackling root causes of poverty” : Repackaging what we’ve already done in a...”
– Retired from the great AidWatch, Bill Easterly rounds up “Aidspeak” from practitioners. Good timing for UN Week 2011.
August 2011
3 posts
5 tags
Conference Call Radio
How do you keep a diaspora community intact? Guineans immigrants to the United States have developed an unusual workaround to the problem of dispersement: using free conference call lines as radio stations. American users, often from francophone west Africa, dial in and join a vibrant “talk show” linking past and present—with a collaborative twist. It’s pretty ingenious:
...
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"Why Africa is Leaving Europe Behind"
This FT essay by William Wallis knits together the news events of the last several weeks—riots in London, debt crises across the Eurozone, famine in the Horn—with a broader assessment of how Africa may be better positioned than Europe to weather the uncertainties of this century.
In the decade and more since China began sketching out the terms of its new engagement with Africa,...
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WatchEarlier this year I filmed an interview with CNN’s “Marketplace Africa” discussing some of the broad themes of my book. Give it a watch!
June 2011
4 posts
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Dialing Up Development
The New America Foundation and CNN have partnered on a channel exploring innovation outside of the US. I’m part of the team committed to sharing information on the pace and shape of change around the world. Here’s my first piece:
The global explosion of mobile phone technology has spawned a host of applications, products and services facilitating development outcomes from financial...
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WatchPivot 25, an exciting competition for mobile software entrepreneurs (more exciting, I’d say, than the Y-Combinator presentation days hyped in this month’s Wired) kicks off today in Nairobi. I can’t wait to see the innovations and innovators from across Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan.
In addition to promoting the conference, this trailer is a...
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"Emerging Emerging Markets"
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in east Africa this week, visiting Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. It’s a follow up to her gender-focused 2009 jaunt through seven African countries and focused specifically on economic development. She offered closing remarks at the Lusaka summit discussing renewal of America’s AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act) trade agreement....
May 2011
7 posts
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“Some dynamic economic performers also have many of the hallmarks of what western...”
– Insights from “Africa: Progress and Risk,” a very useful essay by Stephen Ellis.
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Stuff We Don't Want
At a hospital in Malawi, I met a woman wearing a “Harvard Volleyball” tee shirt. I don’t think she was on the varsity squad in Cambridge. More likely, her shirt was a “gift in kind”: a used and sometimes useless item (think caps and tee-shirts honoring also-rans in the NBA playoffs), which are sent from advanced economies to the closets of teens and toddlers in frontier and emerging economies....
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Transparency 2.0 →
If you haven’t already, read Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s heated altercation with journalist Ian Birrell on Twitter. It’s a remarkable example of how technology can pry open heretofore opaque systems.
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Culture Timeout
Lest we forget the importance of shifting our gaze from Africa’s natural resources to its human resources:
I’m pretty sure I’d rather watch this movie
than this movie.
(Viva Riva!, 2011) (African Cats, 2011)
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Food, Glorious Food
Foreign Policy’s current issue, on food, is a good one. The conversation on feeding the world is worth improving. Both because food prices are a basic cause of social and political instability—across time and geography—and because there is plenty of food to feed everyone, it is just poorly priced and distributed. One essay in the package, by Raj Patel, imagines the 10-billion person...
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Pay attention to what is happening in Uganda
The background, from Time:
Over his 25 years running Uganda, [Yoweri] Museveni has ushered in a stretch of unprecedented stability and economic growth amid liberalization. Poverty has dropped from 56% in 1992 to 25% last year. Donor dependency has dropped to around 25%. Uganda has become one of Africa’s shining successes in the fight against AIDS. And the government is set to start...
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Storytelling
On World Press Freedom Day, I found this recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review (“Hiding the Real Africa”) to be illuminating:
Reporters’ attraction to certain kinds of Africa stories has a lot to do with the frames of reference they arrive with. Nineteenth century New York Herald correspondent Henry M. Stanley wrote that he was prepared to find Zanzibar “populated by...
April 2011
10 posts
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Moving Target
Posting here has been unbearably light, as I am in transit and when not in a plane or train or automobile, at a dead run. More soon, though.
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“Our program is a living repudiation of the notion that development beneficiaries...”
– From Jonathan Starr’s compelling Wall Street Journal essay on “the business of international aid.”
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Swazi Solidarity
Is the “Arab Spring” moving Sub-Saharan? Since nine Arab countries started protesting their questionably legitimate leadership, we’ve heard a lot about why Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are not the same as, say, Zimbabwe or Cameroon. But what about Swaziland?
For weeks, the pressure has been building in sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The government’s announcement of...
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Man v. Wild
It seems that nuclear-wasted northern Japan may be in better shape than Cote D’Ivoire.
High levels of violence, political or criminal, are much more destructive than natural disasters. The report found that criminal violence in Guatemala cut economic activity in 2005 by more than twice as much as the damage caused by Hurricane Stan.
“People in fragile and conflict-affected states are more...
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What I Saw in Lagos
I woke up on election day in Nigeria with a sense of foreboding. The country’s history with democracy—and government period—is highly unencouraging. The long reach of military dictatorship and thuggish, thieving, uneducated politicians that have pocked the road to democracy since 1999 has left a sour taste in the mouth of many Nigerians, at home and abroad.
Yet today was the most fun I’ve had...
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Nigerian Election Day 1/3 →
I’m in Nigeria for two weeks and three rounds of national elections. It’s a big deal. I’ll have a formal writeup in a few days, but for now, I’m headed out to see what democracy looks like in 2011.
For a bird’s eye view, check out Poll Watch, a real-time platform for reporting irregularities, violence, and other news from the ground. Based on Ushahidi.
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The Battle of Abidjan
After four months of disastrous stubbornness, Laurent Gbagbo, the loser of a December presidential election in the Ivory Coast, is said to be negotiating with the United Nations to leave the country he’s since helped to destroy. The presumptive victory by elected president Alassane Outtara is the opposite of sweet relief; thousands have been killed and thousands more displaced by the ordeal, which...
Africa Surpasses Europe in Mobile Phone Use →
theatlantic:
“Africa has passed Western Europe in the number of mobile connections during the final quarter of 2010, Wireless Intelligence reported on Thursday. It comes as the telecom market on the continent continues to show marked improvement in both services and infrastructure, especially in North Africa. The new report said that African mobile connections reached 547.5 million during the...
March 2011
15 posts
4 tags
Battle of the Exes
On the parachuting into poor countries beat, it’s Sean Penn versus Madonna:
A high-profile charitable foundation set up to build a school for impoverished girls in Malawi, founded by the singer Madonna …has collapsed after spending $3.8 million on a project that never came to fruition…. the plans to build a $15 million school for about 400 girls in the poor southeastern African country of...
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Against the MDGs
Last fall I attended the United Nations’ grand 2010 celebration of the 2000 Millennium Declaration—which enshrined the Millennium Development Goals as a global project for a new century. It was a pomp-filled, yet hollow-feeling affair in part because the goals are lagging behind. Some goals—primary school enrollment, for example—are held up as exemplars of the rightness of the MDG framework....
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Flying Green →
Kenya Airways offers online bookers the opportunity to offset their carbon credits with a donation to Kenyan clean energy projects. First airline or only airline to do this?
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Whatever Works
A recent report in the Boston Review discusses the application of behavioral economics to development schemes. Across regions and interventions, researchers tried to find out how to incentivize (or, to borrow from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, “nudge”) individuals into choosing behaviors (hand-washing, sending children to school, having protected sex) that are known to produce better outcomes....
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The Aethiopian Ocean
I’m a bit of a junkie for weird or inaccurate or simply dated cartography. The BBC’s brief history of mapping Africa (in partnership with the Royal Geographic Society) thus pushes all the right buttons. Give it a watch.
The important part: Early maps of a well-populated African continent were flush with detail; regions were identified by tribe, trade, physical landmarks or other...
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Democracy in Action
We’re less than one month from Nigeria’s presidential election. Through the lens of pro-democracy uprisings elsewhere in Africa, author Chimamanda Adichie writes about what the democratic process means for youth in Nigeria:
About 70% of Nigeria’s population is under 35, and there has been, for a long time, a political culture of ignoring the youth, who themselves were disconnected from the...
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Money Where Your Heart Is
In keeping with what I am hearing is a reenergized comittment to diaspora issues at the World Bank (and its new Africa strategy), Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala takes to the New York Times to argue for diaspora bonds to standardize African migrants’ long-running subsidy of African economies. It’s certainly worth talking about:
These diaspora bonds would be in essence...
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Should Africa Learn From China?
So. China.
The People’s Republic has recently convened its annual National People’s Congress to outline a new economic agenda for the years ahead. Concerns about an overheating economy and a widening gap between rich and poor seem to have informed much of the conversation. Many watchers also noted that China has upped its defense spending by 12 percent—but has, of course, no intention of becoming...