August 2009 Archives

I thought the Burkina Faso team had opened the new Dimikuy library, but it turns out that last month they decided to wait for me, since it was rainy season anyway and kids are all out working in the fields.  School starts next month.  Drat.... now I have to attend the opening ceremony... unless.... I can get Leslie to do it when she comes in November.... yes... let her drink the lukewarm Fanta.  Seriously, it is a cute building and the librarian, Salimata Ouedraogo, is very eager to get started.

Read in reverse order (bottom up) an exchange with my (name-changed) friend Paul:

Paul,
Krugman this evening:
"As you can guess, I don't share that vision. I don't think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don't think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don't believe it should try."

Notice the careful, "I don't think", I believe", "I think", and "I believe". He's been listening to our conversation?

Here is Moyo's web page: "In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse-much worse."

Notice the uncareful "In fact".  And the awful unintended pun- the people who are worse off are precisely the non-recipient- the recipients often ended up with nice bank accounts (in her telling).
Michael

Michael,
 Moyo does not include medical intervention as "doing more harm than good" and in fact explicitly excluded it, at least in her remarks on Charlie Rose. She also is NOT talking about the humanitarian outlays in Darfur and elsewhere. So these two issues are off the table. She is speaking about development aid that has often, historically, been used to prop-up corrupt or, at best, non-functional regimes who have few interests except staying in power. She spoke at length about micro-finance and making concerted  efforts to open up the markets of developed nations to Africa. Perhaps she is too romantic in believing that, left on their own with open international markets, Africans would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that pouring "development" money into many of these countries has slowed the development process. I am going to read the book.
Paul


Paul,
There is little doubt (of the credibly identified kind) that many primary health care interventions (vaccinations, bednets, deworming, eradication of Onchocerciasis) provide benefits that are vastly in excess of the usual very modest costs involved (all of aid to Africa, BTW, is about $30b... small potatoes really).  There is also little doubt that many of the conditional cash transfer programs have quite sizable effects.  In my mind there is also little doubt, though obviously very hard to identify, in the vast humanitarian operations of Darfur, Congo, South Sudan, Uganda.  Sure there is wastage and inefficiency, and people are always trying to improve these operations, but to suggest they "do more harm than good" is almost patently absurd.  The same people who argue that humanitarian relief is generating dependency would never argue, when faced with 300,000 displaced persons on a no-man's land border zone in a civil conflict, "Don't do anything to help these people- they are better off fending for themselves."
 
So that leaves maybe the 20 billion of government budget support and less obviously beneficial projects (government capacity building, technology transfer, agricultural extension, etc.).  The US government committed, for example, 300 million through Millennium Challenge Corporation to build schools and roads in Burkina Faso.   If these schools and roads were allocated randomly, would there be an identifiable growth effect?  Consider that government might reallocate its budget depending on where aid was assigned.  So, the idea that you are going to separate out some kind of aggregate growth effect is kind of a non-starter.  Just like identifying whether the "stimulus" was effective if the economy starts up again at the end of the year.  Public discourse should be very modest about what kinds of judgments we can offer on "good" or "bad" and instead concentrate attention on improving effectiveness.
 
IMHO books like Easterly's Collier's and Moyo's operate at a different level of rhetoric- they are opinion briefs, and we need to recognize that kind of rhetoric and treat it lightly, and beware of all the behavioral pitfalls (because someone made a salient sticky story about an irrelevant but really interesting project, my "prior" has now shifted to a different position).   Let's not "Joe the Plumber" the subject of "aid to Africa"...
 
Michael

Flexible Learning of Multiple Speech Structures in Bilingual Infants
Ágnes Melinda Kovács* and Jacques Mehler

Children acquire their native language according to a well-defined time frame. Surprisingly, although children raised in bilingual environments have to learn roughly twice as much about language as their monolingual peers, the speed of acquisition is comparable in monolinguals and bilinguals. Here, we show that preverbal 12-month-old bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals. When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, whereas monolinguals learned only one of them. Hence, bilinguals may acquire two languages in the time in which monolinguals acquire one because they quickly become more flexible learners.

FAVL volunteer Madelyn Bagby, a student at George Washington University, spent almost two months in Béréba village in Burkina Faso, helping out with summer reading programs and the libraries in general.  She had a great time, and was very positive about the camp experience, noting how important it was in helping students recognize that "reading is fun" and not something done solely to get a good grade on a test in school.  We had an interesting conversation in her debrief, and one of the things that we talked about was the difficulty, in the absence of any professional reading resources in the villages, to diagnose the perhaps 5% of kids with real reading disorders (i.e. dyslexia, very bad farsightedness, etc.).  A tough problem... leading me to think next year we'll try to recruit a Ouagadougou professional (at some cost) to do some training.  If anyone knows of online training materials in French for recognizing reading problems, let us know (well, once we enable the comments section in the new blog).

I haven't yet received a report about how the conference went, but I wish I could have been there.

I'm a judge for the annual Tech Awards here in San Jose, and every year I write an article summarizing the Tech Award laureates and saying a few pearls of wisdom about technology and education.  So I sat down to write this year's article, and was reading last year's, and thought to myself, "Not bad... maybe I'll do a cheap reposting.."  So here are the first couple paragraphs and a link to more.

As an economist, I am sometimes asked to justify how my current research on reading habits in rural Africa is related to economics. "How do they let you study that?" people ask. A quick definition of economics as the study of how to make choices in environments of scarcity, and an addendum of economics as a toolkit of methods for empirical analysis, quickly reveals the naiveté of the question. Schools in Africa are grossly under-equipped for the task of developing the skills of an educated person, and parents, often non-literate themselves, have little appreciation of the power of reading practice as a way to reinforce reading ability. The same parents who will have their children patiently walk a young ox back and forth several hundred times, to train the ox how to plow a furrow, will believe that a child reading the same book twice is a waste of time: "She already read it." In this environment of enormous potential for improvements in "human capital," encouraging reading is crucial. Economics would seem to play a critical role in helping to understand.

     But for all its vaunted capabilities, the contribution of economics to the discussion of how to improve education outcomes is modest. This is because the more interesting and serious core problems in education fall rather squarely in the domain of psychology. Education is, after all, the process by which minds with particular ways of understanding the world (teachers) impart that way of understanding to minds that have different ways of understanding the world (students). Improvements in education come from more careful attention and insight into how the minds of children work in these structured interpersonal situations. What words should a teacher utter to inspire a student to overcome the hesitation and inertia that are the hallmarks of the reluctant reader? What practices can students carry out that will enable them, through repetition, to master a skill? How can active learning be fostered in a classroom with no electricity, no desks or worktables, and 75 students per teacher? Education psychology brings innovations to the table; economists are more likely to be technicians testing whether new methods actually work.

Read the full article...

I'll tell you why. I just went to order some copies of my colleague Alain Sissao's book, Contes du Pays Mossi, and it would cost 26 euros plus shipping to get in to Burkina Faso- total about $40.  This for a small paperback... albeit of delightful short folk tales translated from Moré into French.  But what reader is going to pay that much?  Sigh.

Every small non-profit dreads the day of the IRS form 990... and last May we dreaded so much we just applied for automatic extension. yesterday FAVL Treasurer sat down for five hours and completed all the forms. Yaay! Big THANK YOU to Deb... without dedicated people like her, willing to spend five hours on a gorgeous Saturday morning here in San Jose, FAVL would not be able to implement the libraries and reading programs that our generous donors help fund.

A long time ago... FAVL made a financial contribution to help this library get established...

As a college professor, students are always engaging me in discussions about what the better strategy is. Especially the ones going to law school. There are all kinds of maxims out there, and the only wisdom I feel I ever impart is for students to not be over-optimistic about their ability to retain their former self present in their future mind. And sometimes that former self might even be subject to insult by the future mind... "What were you thinking.. you were a total idiot!" I do tell the story of Andrew Carnegie, who as he saw that he was going to be capable of becoming very wealthy, wrote himself a letter to remind himself to give his fortune away and help the less fortunate. And that is what he did... though he postponed until he was well into older age. he sold out to J.P. Morgan and gave his fortune (though critics accuse of self-serving giving).

FAVLers and others passionate about helping kids read... a mystery in terms of how it fits into a coherent life philosophy.

FAVL friend Chelby Daigle send us this editorial by Tolu Ogunlesi:

LAGOS: The literary world is once again shining a spotlight on Africa. There are new prizes: the South Africa-based PEN Studzinski Literary Award for short stories, and the Penguin Prize for African Writing, a pan-African prize covering both fiction and non-fiction genres. There’s a new book series, the “Penguin African Writers Series,” which will include not only new books from emerging writers, but also classics taken over from the defunct Heinemann African Writers Series. And next year South Africa will be featured as the “Market Focus country” at the 2010 London Book Fair and African writing will be showcased at the Gothenburg Book Fair.

The African ‘Greats’–Ngugi, Soyinka, Gordimer, Okot p’Bitek– have given way to a new roster of names — Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina, Sefi Atta, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Chika Unigwe, Brian Chikwava — who have become the new faces of contemporary African writing.

This explosion of literary talent and publishing opportunities might be likened to a similar one that accompanied the heady post-independence days of the 1960s. But in spite of all the inspiring and exciting happenings of recent years, there still remain nagging questions regarding who exactly are the proper ‘gatekeepers’ of African literary tradition and production.

Read the full article "Who Controls African Literature" here.

A hilarious (to me) posting from ugandan insomniac on "what if" Museveni were twittering...

Had a rough nite. Mbwenu journalists are giving me grief 4 ordering the arrest of errant policemen in Nateete. They say it’s an attempt @ cheap popularity. As if!

The food situation is more than satisfactory. Henry is coordinating things on that front for me in the village as Aaron is busy with some local government business and has been ill with the flu the past week or so on top of it. Henry has been great, making sure I'm satisfied with everything and the food is great! I'm sure going to miss ugali and mchuzi when I get back to the US! haha Henry set me up very nicely in the guesthouse adjacent to the school and library and I'm sleeping there with the company of a few children who are very sweet. It works out well...I tutor them in English and they help me learn Swahili. So food/lodging are great! (Joseph has been very helpful with escorting me to and from transportation and helping me while I'm in town at Dodoma. He lives here in Dodoma and works with Habitat for Humanity but is very much in touch with Henry and Aaron and very helpful and responsible. He is a great contact and knowledgeable about development in rural areas in Tanzania.)

The library is a wonderful place for the children to read during school breaks and after classes get out for the day. It is a nice structure and the bookshelves and tables/chairs are in good condition. What is lacking are resources (as I'm guessing is the case with most if not all FAVL libraries and other educational facilities in sub-Saharan Africa). The 200 or so Swahili children's books are tattered from overuse and many are falling apart and need to be taped together. The English books do not get used much as the nearest secondary school is quite far and the teenagers rarely walk the distance to the library. (Also, many are not culturally relevant as they are American/Euro-centric). So...what is needed are more children's books in Swahili, beginners/intermediate level English-learning books, rudimentary English stories, bilingual materials would be ideal, and a comprehensive Swahili-English dictionary would be great. I look forward to discussing possibilities for utilizing FAVL funds and/or fundraising to send some of these resources to the Chalula library when I return.

While resources is the main issue, usage is very high. The library is usually very full with all the tables and chairs full and scores of children sitting on the floor/along the walls. The children understand the importance of education/literacy and seek it, when the facilities and encouragement are there to promote it.

I spent the last four days up in the Sierras at San Jose Family Camp (our city's socialized but market-priced camp site), blissfully reading Three Cups of Tea in between poker matches with kids, beautiful hikes with friends into the Hetch Hetchy/Yosemite watersheds... and lots of coffee (in socialism, bad coffee will be available for free in copious quantities, as long as policemen's pensions can be capped at under 95% of salary...that last strictly for San Jose insiders).

Anyways, odd that the two premier development blogs (Blattman and Easterly) apparently have never mentioned Mortenson (at least a search of the blogs was empty on both sites). Too bad, because it's a good book, with lots to discuss, and more importantly, is probably the single most widely read "tract" about development aid in the last decade, and so what it says, or does not say, is probably shaping the perceptions of millions of persons around the globe, far more than the development studies academics' wishy-washy "we don't know the answers" style.

So just so you know the book's main message: heroes are taking care of the problems, just like they always did. Sure, things were smelly in the Augean stables, but Hercules was ready! So here comes Mortenson, ready to tackle world poverty (one girl at a time^TM).

So I'll say up front that while I obviously find Mortenson's work and devotion and success very inspirational and fantastic and laudable, I find the book raises all kinds of interesting questions, and raising those questions will inevitably make me appear less laudable than Mortenson. But hell, I'm an academic and the whole schtick is to raise questions.

And questions to be raised, there are. Only two paragraphs in the 330 page book are "questioning," in the sense that they diverge from the standard 40-something-American "it's all good" refrain, and these deal with an important issue, non-profit governance. Otherwise there is nary a questioning attitude to be seen. Weird, cause the guy writing it is a journalist (David Oliver Relin, who keeps himself completely out of the text, but must have insisted on inserting two photos of himself that make no sense at all... the captions just use his last name, and for 2/3 of the book I thought the guy in the pictures was some Pakistani dude who would be introduced later on).

So we have a book about a hero. It's a thrilling book, but it brings to mind the Brecht line (yes, Michael Watts did influence my reading habits...) from his play Galileo: “ANDREA: Unhappy the land that has no heroes! . . . GALILEO: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.”

I could go into literary analysis- what is a hero and all that... but since this blog is about development and literacy, better to focus on that. Mortenson is basically doing what FAVL would have been doing if someone had given *us* a million dollars! So of course one can't help the sour grapes. But I do feel that gives me a rather unique perspective. Most people reading the book probably feel unqualified to be critical. They have never slept with a yak, nor befriended an authentic representative of "The Other"... Haji Ali. Of course, Haji Ali turns out to be Yoda, a very nice, reasonably wise uncle figure prone to platitudes about listening to the wind. Anecdotes and trials and tribulations are played to maximum effect... and some are downright bizarre- Mortenson's "bodyguard" beats up someone leering at his wife breastfeeding. A Pakistani general cowboying around with Mortenson in a helicopter buzzes "like an angry bee" the compound of some local chief who's fallen afoul of Mortenson. These anecdotes, and much of the book, serve to make clear to the reader that there are good guys (hero allies) and bad guys (hero enemies) and the hero can tell the difference (loyalty... everyone is ready to "give their life for Mortenson") except when the hero is tricked. Oops, no more literary analysis!

One more aside. My overall impression is that Relin was more interested in name-dropping mountaineers killed here and there than Pakistanis or Afghans killed during the various stages of the wars in the region. The brand-name turn in American literature is there, instead of riding around in an "old helicopter" it has to be an Alouettte. Instead of wearing an "old parka," he has to give the brand name. I confess I never understood the reader interest inknowing the brands of their book-characters, but then again, I wear a cheap watch, cheap pants, and cheap shoes.

As you can see, I am meandering around my thoughts, and it is now late, so I'll come back to the development and literacy stuff tomorrow.

SCU student Louise O'Rourke will be spending the Fall in Burkina on the Santa Clara University study abroad program Reading West Africa, that is operating in partnership with the FAVL libraries... Nice article about her and her sister in the Bellevue Reporter.