Ever since that Saturday Night Live send-up of NPR ... a long time ago... two women talking about onions, in very quiet voices, with little inflection, is my recollection, ever since then I've never really wondered what the NPR people look like (I made an exception for Judy Swallow at BBC), but one reporter has always captured my attention, just because of the way she says, "from Dakaaahhhhrrrr, this is ..." and then some name that strikes me as possibly being from any continent. (Well, she's a great reporter too.) So, I was browsing allafrica.com, and who pops up as one of their reporters.... HER!!!! And her name is Ofeibea Quist-Arcton! She's in the photo with AllAfrica
President Amadou Mahtar Ba.Recently in Understanding Africa Category
Ever since that Saturday Night Live send-up of NPR ... a long time ago... two women talking about onions, in very quiet voices, with little inflection, is my recollection, ever since then I've never really wondered what the NPR people look like (I made an exception for Judy Swallow at BBC), but one reporter has always captured my attention, just because of the way she says, "from Dakaaahhhhrrrr, this is ..." and then some name that strikes me as possibly being from any continent. (Well, she's a great reporter too.) So, I was browsing allafrica.com, and who pops up as one of their reporters.... HER!!!! And her name is Ofeibea Quist-Arcton! She's in the photo with AllAfrica
President Amadou Mahtar Ba.
From an article in the New York Times:
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to grant African countries $10 billion in low-interest development loans over the next three years, to establish a $1 billion loan program for small and medium-size businesses, and to forgive the remaining debt on certain interest-free loans that China previously granted less-developed African nations. Mr. Wen made the pledge in an address to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheik. The $10 billion in new loans is double the amount China pledged at the last meeting in 2006.How much is $10 billion? Well, at $5,000 to establish a village library, and another $5,000 to endow it for librarian salary and incidentals, about 100,000 libraries could be established and operated for five years... for $1 billion. Burkina Faso has about 8,000 villages, and maybe 5,000 are big enough to benefit from a library (i.e. have a primary school). So if sub-Saharan Africa has about 450 million people in rural areas, and Burkina 10 million, Africa is 45 times Burkina, so 45 times 5,000 is 225,000. So under $3 billion is enough to cover pretty much all of rural Africa. The problem is that refurbishing an existing building to be a library and buying local books and local shelving and chairs generates no demand for anything Chinese... and most Chinese villages lack libraries themselves... so... ain't gonna happen. I'm not complaining or blaming... just saying...
Kate Parry writes in:
One reason why girls drop out of school in Uganda, and doubtless elsewhere in Africa, is the difficulty that they have handling their monthly periods. Sanitary towels are too expensive for many of them, and without adequate protection, they suffer excruciating embarrassment. Many simply skip school for one week every month, and some drop out altogether.
Shelley Jones, a researcher at Kitengesa who worked with and through the library, identified this problem, and Afri-Pads was established to address it. Its managers, Pauls Grinwalds and Sophia Klumpp, employed a single tailor, a graduate of Kitengesa Comprehensive Secondary School, early in 2009 and set up a workshop for her in Kitengesa Trading Centre. Together they developed a reusable sanitary towel that could be sold at a price rural Ugandan school girls could afford. The demand for the product has grown rapidly, so by June they were employing four tailors (one of whom is a former Kitengesa Library Scholar) and knew they would soon need more space.
The Kitengesa Community Library has been able to help. The library was initially established in a single room building on the school's compound, but when in 2008 it
towards a computer centre the decision was made to put up a new building to accommodate the centre and a community hall as well. The library has recently moved into the new building, so the old one is available for Afri-Pads to use as a larger workshop. 
Afri-Pads is paying rent, which is being shared between the library and the school, and so everyone is benefitting-and the new library will be used by Afri-Pads as a venue for workshops on sexual health. The pictures show Afri-Pads' tailors in their new space.
For more information, see www.afripads.com and www.kitengesalibrary.org.
Shelley Jones, a researcher at Kitengesa who worked with and through the library, identified this problem, and Afri-Pads was established to address it. Its managers, Pauls Grinwalds and Sophia Klumpp, employed a single tailor, a graduate of Kitengesa Comprehensive Secondary School, early in 2009 and set up a workshop for her in Kitengesa Trading Centre. Together they developed a reusable sanitary towel that could be sold at a price rural Ugandan school girls could afford. The demand for the product has grown rapidly, so by June they were employing four tailors (one of whom is a former Kitengesa Library Scholar) and knew they would soon need more space.
The Kitengesa Community Library has been able to help. The library was initially established in a single room building on the school's compound, but when in 2008 it
towards a computer centre the decision was made to put up a new building to accommodate the centre and a community hall as well. The library has recently moved into the new building, so the old one is available for Afri-Pads to use as a larger workshop. 
Afri-Pads is paying rent, which is being shared between the library and the school, and so everyone is benefitting-and the new library will be used by Afri-Pads as a venue for workshops on sexual health. The pictures show Afri-Pads' tailors in their new space. For more information, see www.afripads.com and www.kitengesalibrary.org.
Chris posts about carrying water... and new technology, and Mr. Luddite here had to write a somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment... it's a fascinating issue...
It is an excellent book for understanding why African economic development is so slow. I used it in our study abroad program in Burkina Faso.... Here's some comments I had for the students in the program after reading their "book reviews"....
A number of very good points were made by various persons and I expand on these a bit in what follows:
• Be alert to over-generalization. Collier is explicitly writing a book about a general problem- the plight of a billion people, living in 50+ countries. He boils down the source of the problem to the four (interrelated) traps. So of course he is vulnerable to the charge that he has over-generalized. A number of you pointed out the immediate example of over-generalization: Burkina Faso itself. BF is landlocked with bad neighbors, but still has grown steadily (albeit slowly); BF is not in conflict trap; BF is not in natural resource trap; BF is not really in bad governance trap by conventional measures. So what gives? (See Kevane and Englebert article, where we argue that entrpreneurial/managerial talent may be the constraining factor to rapid growth).
• Many of you noted the problem with the landlocked condition as a "trap", noting (as discussed in class session) that the comparison of landlocked countries with non-landlocked countries was misleading. The income gap between "landlocked" regions of the United States and the coastal cities of the US is, for example, quite large. Also, it is perhaps not useful to think of being landlocked as a "trap" in the sense that there is no probability of "escaping" landlocked-dom or no mechanism by which escaping generates a tightening of the trap (i.e. no Chinese finger trap).
• Many of you noted that the natural resource trap is really more like bad governance and civil conflict trap; the Dutch Disease itself is a more technical economic policy issue, and even then it is not clear that shifting country spending pattern towards urban construction and services sector is actually a bad thing for long-term economic growth in largely rural African countries.
• Some of you noted that the bad governance trap might be more accurately described as the corruption trap. Indeed it isn't clear how Collier distinguishes bad governance from corruption.
• As discussed in class, notably absent from Collier's analysis is a sense that maybe the poverty of the bottom billion results from the acts of the powerful G-8 (though he does nod to this here and there). And yet there is the slave trade legacy, colonial legacy, the Cold War legacy, the corrupting aid legacy, etc. Is it right to make the argument that the problems are all internal? And yet, Collier's "solutions" are largely directed at G-8 actions.
• Many of you took issue with Collier's civil conflict chapter, noting that some wars seem more complex than his greed hypothesis. Collier himself I think has retracted somewhat from his bald assertion, which was largely based on the statistical result that presence of natural resources explain some civil wars, while ethnic cleavages and measures of political oppression did not. But these statistical results have been strongly criticized (the same things that cause political repression presumably cause civil conflict, so statistical causality is hard to disentangle).
• What does it mean to be falsifiable? In social science, a hypothesis is falsifiable if there is evidence that would show the hypothesis to be false. In Collier's data- the performance and condition of countries over time- there is no "experiment" possible (i.e. one cannot randomly apply traps to countries, to see if they can get out of them) so in some sense the hypotheses are not falsifiable....
A number of very good points were made by various persons and I expand on these a bit in what follows:
• Be alert to over-generalization. Collier is explicitly writing a book about a general problem- the plight of a billion people, living in 50+ countries. He boils down the source of the problem to the four (interrelated) traps. So of course he is vulnerable to the charge that he has over-generalized. A number of you pointed out the immediate example of over-generalization: Burkina Faso itself. BF is landlocked with bad neighbors, but still has grown steadily (albeit slowly); BF is not in conflict trap; BF is not in natural resource trap; BF is not really in bad governance trap by conventional measures. So what gives? (See Kevane and Englebert article, where we argue that entrpreneurial/managerial talent may be the constraining factor to rapid growth).
• Many of you noted the problem with the landlocked condition as a "trap", noting (as discussed in class session) that the comparison of landlocked countries with non-landlocked countries was misleading. The income gap between "landlocked" regions of the United States and the coastal cities of the US is, for example, quite large. Also, it is perhaps not useful to think of being landlocked as a "trap" in the sense that there is no probability of "escaping" landlocked-dom or no mechanism by which escaping generates a tightening of the trap (i.e. no Chinese finger trap).
• Many of you noted that the natural resource trap is really more like bad governance and civil conflict trap; the Dutch Disease itself is a more technical economic policy issue, and even then it is not clear that shifting country spending pattern towards urban construction and services sector is actually a bad thing for long-term economic growth in largely rural African countries.
• Some of you noted that the bad governance trap might be more accurately described as the corruption trap. Indeed it isn't clear how Collier distinguishes bad governance from corruption.
• As discussed in class, notably absent from Collier's analysis is a sense that maybe the poverty of the bottom billion results from the acts of the powerful G-8 (though he does nod to this here and there). And yet there is the slave trade legacy, colonial legacy, the Cold War legacy, the corrupting aid legacy, etc. Is it right to make the argument that the problems are all internal? And yet, Collier's "solutions" are largely directed at G-8 actions.
• Many of you took issue with Collier's civil conflict chapter, noting that some wars seem more complex than his greed hypothesis. Collier himself I think has retracted somewhat from his bald assertion, which was largely based on the statistical result that presence of natural resources explain some civil wars, while ethnic cleavages and measures of political oppression did not. But these statistical results have been strongly criticized (the same things that cause political repression presumably cause civil conflict, so statistical causality is hard to disentangle).
• What does it mean to be falsifiable? In social science, a hypothesis is falsifiable if there is evidence that would show the hypothesis to be false. In Collier's data- the performance and condition of countries over time- there is no "experiment" possible (i.e. one cannot randomly apply traps to countries, to see if they can get out of them) so in some sense the hypotheses are not falsifiable....
FAVL friend Kim Dionne writes in:
Today, William Kamkwamba was interviewed by Diane Sawyer. I'm not sure if I had mentioned him to you before, but he is a rural Malawian who learned how to make a windmill by reading a couple of textbooks available in a rural library. Since then, his story has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on TED. A book about his story is being released tomorrow, which is why he was in NY: to promote the book. Anyways, I think it's a great story about the power of village libraries ...
p.s. some additional links:
Review by Ethan Zuckerman
Review by WhiteAfrican
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
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
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 timeTM).
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.
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 timeTM).
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.
Most people who come to the topic of development studies do so because they are interested in a particular region or problem. They realize that sometimes it is useful to have exposure to both broader views and narrower perspectives and analyses. For example, someone visits Ghana and becomes interested in learning more about why the people of Ghana are so much poorer than people in the developed countries (the broad view), and also whether spending two weeks volunteering on a Habitat for Humanity building site in Tamale, Ghana, would be a worthwhile way to spend their time (the narrow view).
The broad view enhances the contextual knowledge required to be a person of solidarity operating in a globalizing environment of increasing connections and significant inequality. Certainly we would think it somewhat arrogant to express opinions about poverty in Ghana and know nothing about how the economy and society of Ghana functioned. The minimum we might expect from a person interested in poverty in Ghana would be the capacity to fit Ghana into a broad schema, or model, of the essential features of developing countries. Such a schema or model makes generalizations about the multitude of regions that one might think of grouping under the rubric of “developing.” Some of the generalizations might be commonplaces: “In Ghana as elsewhere, people are motivated by a mix of material incentives and non-material goals.” Analyzing these commonplace generalizations is important, because often newcomers to development studies fall into the lazy trap of thinking that poverty is due to an indecipherable “culture.” A good chunk of the work in mounting a general schema is in leveraging people’s intuitive sense that culture matters into a more nuanced sense of how cultures matter.
The narrow view develops the analytical tools and experiences that enable a person of solidarity to be an effective agent of change. We should not applaud the do-gooder who botches a job, even as we acknowledge that botching a job is an important way that people learn! Some due diligence should happen before a job is undertaken. All sorts of examples come to mind. Some are simple common sense, involving learning from the experiences of others. Should a small village library classify books according to the complicated Dewey Decimal System? When installing a borehole well, will the villagers have the ability to maintain and repair the mechanical parts? Others are more complex and have to be thought about. When installing the borehole well, should it be the private property of a villager or should it be owned collectively? In setting up a computer lab where digitally-challenged villagers will pay a small fee for use, what incentives guide the computer lab manager in straddling the challenge of ensuring lots of users and minimizing costly breakdowns?
As these questions illustrate, some of the reflections in the broad approach (about what motivates people) are important for the narrow view (how to structure a contract to ensure long-term success).
The broad view enhances the contextual knowledge required to be a person of solidarity operating in a globalizing environment of increasing connections and significant inequality. Certainly we would think it somewhat arrogant to express opinions about poverty in Ghana and know nothing about how the economy and society of Ghana functioned. The minimum we might expect from a person interested in poverty in Ghana would be the capacity to fit Ghana into a broad schema, or model, of the essential features of developing countries. Such a schema or model makes generalizations about the multitude of regions that one might think of grouping under the rubric of “developing.” Some of the generalizations might be commonplaces: “In Ghana as elsewhere, people are motivated by a mix of material incentives and non-material goals.” Analyzing these commonplace generalizations is important, because often newcomers to development studies fall into the lazy trap of thinking that poverty is due to an indecipherable “culture.” A good chunk of the work in mounting a general schema is in leveraging people’s intuitive sense that culture matters into a more nuanced sense of how cultures matter.
The narrow view develops the analytical tools and experiences that enable a person of solidarity to be an effective agent of change. We should not applaud the do-gooder who botches a job, even as we acknowledge that botching a job is an important way that people learn! Some due diligence should happen before a job is undertaken. All sorts of examples come to mind. Some are simple common sense, involving learning from the experiences of others. Should a small village library classify books according to the complicated Dewey Decimal System? When installing a borehole well, will the villagers have the ability to maintain and repair the mechanical parts? Others are more complex and have to be thought about. When installing the borehole well, should it be the private property of a villager or should it be owned collectively? In setting up a computer lab where digitally-challenged villagers will pay a small fee for use, what incentives guide the computer lab manager in straddling the challenge of ensuring lots of users and minimizing costly breakdowns?
As these questions illustrate, some of the reflections in the broad approach (about what motivates people) are important for the narrow view (how to structure a contract to ensure long-term success).
Of course the same could be said of many a library project. Human personnel and incentives are critical.
HT: Kim Dionne... great blog!
At the end of the day I am still asking myself if the computers are worth the money spent on them. The cost of the laptops was about $2300, enough to pay the tuition for 23 students for a year. Jes and I plan on using them occasionally, but I suspect that after we leave they will be relegated back to the stockroom. The computer teacher may use them to illustrate networking, but without commercial software, he can’t use them regularly in his classes. I am afraid that in the case of MCV the tech project has failed. In many ways the OPLC laptops at MCV illustrate why high-tech projects are so risky. The computer required charging, a difficult proposition with intermittent power, no converters, few plugs, and no power strips. The laptop design also failed to accommodate the population to which they were given. These inconveniences, combined with a lack of prerequisite computer knowledge, doomed the project and wasted thousands of dollars. This example would seem to demonstrate why appropriate technology should be embraced and high-tech projects dismissed. However, living in Malawi I have been exposed to a perspective which also should be given credence.
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HT: Kim Dionne... great blog!
