Since You've Been Ghana ...

Interesting story last Friday on the BBC about Ghanaians abroad returning home to participate in the country's vibrant new economic development. I wasn't quite sure about the first person's observation that when she came back to Ghana she could find everything she regularly used in New York in Accra (possible, but not quite accessible to the vast majority of Ghanaians), but I did agree with the observation further down about Ghanaians possessing a strong entrepreneurial spirit.

Here's the BBC video about the Accra Mall. I admit I never actually visited it because I thought it was just some escape for rich foreigners--and I didn't want to be the stereotypical (read: weak) first-timer to Africa. May have to give it a try the second time around, though.

Digital SLR recommendations?

So I leave for Ghana in exactly a month, and it occurred to me today that I should really bring along a decent camera since I'll be there for a year. It sure would be nice to take some emotionally compelling, National Geographic-like photos--and it would go well with the safari hat, Land Rover look.

I've done some online sleuthing, and am considering the Canon Rebel XS and the Nikon D60. Any of you have recommendations? Thanks!

An Appealing Alternative?

Bananas at a Ghanaian supermarket. Image sourced from here.

A former roommate of mine has this favorite joke: what is Beethoven's favorite fruit? [...] The Ba-na-na-naaa. (in the style of the Fifth Symphony, 1st mvt.) Deep, I know.

Aside from being an excellent source of potassium and the subject of lame jokes, bananas, according to a science article in today's BBC Africa can also be a valuable source of alternative energy in developing countries. The article notes that,

In some African countries, like Rwanda, bananas are an important and versatile crop, used for food, wine and beer.

But experts estimate that the edible fruit makes up just a small part of what the plant produces.

According to scientists, for every one tonne of bananas, there are an estimated ten tonnes of waste, made up of skins, leaves and stems.

The skins, in particular, can be useful for energy production. Engineers at the University of Nottingham have figured out a way to turn banana waste into alternative fuel by combining it with sawdust, compressing it into briquettes and letting them dry in the sun for a couple weeks--a process that doesn't seem to require much advanced technology.

The banana fuel briquettes. Can be used much like firewood under a stove. Imaged sourced from here.

The article isn't too clear about some of the on-the-ground specifics, such as how much sawdust is needed per brick (and where would it come from? how much does it offset the compensating non-deforestation?) and how economical the bricks are for families relative to firewood. Also, are these briquettes "clean-burning"? But those might just be minor kinks in the overall design.

These briquettes have the potential to address a lot of key issues across Africa. Not least of these is female labor productivity and family well-being. Women spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering firewood for African households, a project made more arduous given rising deforestation, only to burn the firewood indoors, leading to health risks for themselves and their families. Banana waste could be gathered much closer to the point of consumption, thereby reducing the time women spend gathering fuel. And, if these briquettes turn out to be clean burning, then perhaps health costs could be cut down.

I'd like to see if NGOs pick up on this article and try to partner with these Nottingham engineers. It seems like these briquettes can be produced in either a capital-driven (like in their labs) or labor-driven process. The latter, in particular, might be useful for encouraging female employment and the building of social capital, something that could be quite handy in post-conflict areas. Who knows, maybe they could bring new meaning to the term, banana republic?

World Fairtrade Day

This past Friday, May 9th, was World Fairtrade Day, and to celebrate, 70 countries around the world engaged in the "Big Bang"--basically large communal drum circles, sometimes with local-flavored dancing and culture. The folks at Cadbury Fairtrade have this video up on their site:




Well done, London. There are also videos from the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, Indonesia and many other countries.

Here's to Mum

In honor of Mother's Day, the New York Times has published a series of op-eds from women's health experts on simple ways to improve the well-being of mothers around the world. Here's a quote from Esther Duflo, professor of economics at MIT and co-founder of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab:

FOR millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy. One reliable way to solve this problem is through education. The more affordable it is, the longer girls will stay in school and delay pregnancy.

Never Ghana Give You Up?

Yesterday's Ghanaian Chronicle reported on several government cars that have still not been returned by officials of the previous NPP administration, which was voted out in January 2009,

It was gathered that 41 government cars were still in the custody of Regional National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) coordinators and ex-government officials who have applied for the cars, but were not granted. [sic]

The government, according to our information, would soon direct national security to retrieve all the cars from people who are illegally keeping them after their names have been published in the dailies.

At the time this article went to press, several ministers had visited Osu Castle (the current presidential mansion in Accra) to negotiate for "time and a price review." The article is somewhat unclear on what is meant by this price review, but it does indicate that the current NDC government is considering measures that would prevent officials from purchasing their cars once their term is up. On the other hand, some ministers also appear keen to sell their cars for higher prices, which itself presents accountability problems.

I am personally quite annoyed with the behavior of the ex-ministers listed in the article, but one heartening thing I got out of this piece was the fact that Ghanaian newspapers (and probably the radio stations) were ready to seek out the ministers who weren't returning their cars and "make them known" prior to official impoundment. Score one for an active civil society.

On another note, if you find this or other stories compelling issues that President Mills and the NDC government need to address, then send in a question to the BBC's Africa Have Your Say programme in which Mills will be answering questions on the air. It's scheduled for this Thursday, 7 May, 1600 GMT. I may or may not have submitted a question of my own. (And it may or may not currently be the third one from the bottom.)

Civil Society and Ghanaian Oil

A map of the primary oil regions, and the companies that own those tracts, just offshore from the Western Region. Image sourced from here.

Today's Accra Public Agenda reports on a two-day conference held in Takoradi that briefed civil-society organizations on the need to take an active role in reviewing the fiscal and institutional aspects of oil-revenue management before such revenues start accumulating in 2011. Emmanuel Kuyole of the Revenue Watch Institute led discussions and encouraged Ghanaian civil society to engage further with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a kind of international compact that lays out minimum standards for corporate and public-sector transparency on payments, revenues, costs and so forth.

One of the major problems for Ghana brought up in this story was lack of capacity, namely that of the Ghanaian Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I haven't had much interaction with Ghana's IRS, but with informal-sector employment hovering at 80-90 per cent, I am inclined to believe that the IRS isn't really able to as good a job as it could. My own fear is that the government will get lazy and not improve the IRS. As has happened in so many other oil-rich states, once the windfall comes in, taxation drops off. Without these taxes, the government loses the incentive to be efficient and the people lose the incentive to hold the government accountable. You can see the vicious circle that that leads to--a circle broken only by a price plunge and the devastating social, economic and political consequences that follow.

Sunday Book Reviews

Two of them for you today. And neither of them written by me. Which automatically ups the credibility of this blog post. Significantly.

Over at the NYT, Nick Kristof today reviewed Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, currently ranking #3749 on Amazon. Dowden, a veteran British journalist currently heading the Royal African Society, aims to correct the negative stereotypes associated with Africa--stereotypes often perpetuated by the popular press. He asserts

“The media’s problem is that, by covering only disasters and wars, it gives us only that image of the continent,” Dowden writes — and 90 percent of the Africans reading this are now nodding at that line. “Persistent images of starving children and men with guns have accumulated into our narrative of the continent.”

“The aid industry too has an interest in maintaining the image of Africans as hopeless victims of endless wars and persistent famines,” Dowden continues. “However well intentioned their motives may once have been, aid agencies have helped create the single, distressing image of Africa. They and journalists feed off each other.”

Kristof takes issue with this point, particularly referring to his own coverage of the DRC's civil war, which has been the most lethal conflict since WWII, and counters that such conflicts have not been written about enough (something I am inclined to believe). Nonetheless, I find Dowden's overall point still valid, but the media is changing and covering more than just disasters and wars. In particular, fair-trade and governance issues have started to take more prominence. (Be sure to check out this link from Kristof's review.)

Dowden and Kristof agree that Africa needs to be developed more by the Africans, rather than messianic outsiders--Dowden takes some hard shots at Tony Blair and Bono. I certainly find this a valid point, particularly after seeing the numerous entrepreneurs (textiles, electronics, services, etc.) lining the streets of Accra and Kumasi. However, I take issue with Kristof's assertion that "[o]ne of Africa’s problems to this day is that there is very little manufacturing of the kind that is powering Asia’s industrial revolution." First off, world norms have changed quite a bit since Asia started state-led industrialization in the 1960s--most African states lack the global support and domestic capacity to do such a thing. And, secondly, technology has changed quite a bit since then. Chile, for instance, underwent industrialization and then moved to non-traditional agricultural exports but is now primarily a services economy. India has a strange gap between agriculture and services, without their being a huge industrialization push. All around the world technology such as cell phones is revolutionizing the ways in which agriculture is brought to market and the ways farmers can now organize against governments. I'm not saying that Africa doesn't need industrialization but rather that the economic future is a bit more nuanced now.

All in all, a great review. Might have to put this on the summer reading list.

~~

Shelby presents a candid review of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's humbly named memoir, This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President, currently ranking #498 at Amazon. The first half of the book is especially enlightening:

I learned that Sirleaf has been sophisticated in using her indigenous ancestry and Americo-Liberian upbringing to her advantage. Her parents are from Bomi and Sinoe County, but both were raised in Americo-Liberian families. (Similar to the way Helene Cooper’s family took in Eunice in The House at Sugar Beach.) Sirleaf grew up as a part of the Americo-Liberian elite, yet she is technically correct in saying she is not Americo-Liberian. She took advantage of her Americo-Liberian background to join the Tolbert government, and of her indigenous background for her current job.

I was very interested in the description of Sirleaf's personal touch in handling situations where she was pretty close to being killed. Much of it seems to be her skill in making her adversary's men see her "as a person, as a human being, as a woman old enough to be his mother or his aunt." I'll have to remember that one the next time my life is on the line.

I was about to sign off but then I noticed this gem:

One scene was classic Liberia: Sirleaf describes her daily police-escorted walks from prison (she called Doe and co. idiots, which led to 9 months in prison) to court. She says she had become a folk hero, with festive crowds watching her as she walked to court. "Even the policemen enjoyed it. They would walk alongside me, smiling and waving to the crowds as if they were heroes themselves.”

Simply priceless. A very insightful review, and I recommend you all read it. No shortage of books for this summer.

Inductive and seductive

Chris Blattman just posted on a piece written by Barry Eichengreen in The National Interest on the inevitable shift of deduction-driven economics--long dominated by the intellectual theorists at their ivory-tower blackboards--to induction-driven economics firmly rooted in real-world observation.

Though Eichengreen is speaking specifically to the current financial mess, I agree with Blattman's point that he could easily be referring to development economics, a subfield that is now (thankfully) reinventing itself not just with better academic direction and collaboration but, more importantly, with a new mindset that emphasizes fieldwork and gathering data creatively. It is upsetting that Blattman reports journals still asking papers to be written in a deductive style, but it will only be a matter of time before field researchers and experimenters sweating it out in rural Africa, South Asia and Latin America start rewriting those theory books. Now if only we could get my fedora to double as a safari hat we'd have the best of both worlds.

International Monetary Fundamentals

A very interesting article in today's Economist about the new direction the IMF is taking in today's economic crisis and what that means for developing countries. Notably, the IMF has taken a bit of a Keynesian, pro-gov spending turn:

But it is back in a new guise. The IMF is notorious for favouring hard money and tight budgets. The new fund (“IMF 2.0” as Time magazine called it) believes in casual Fridays and Keynesian policies. Since January 2008, Mr Strauss-Kahn has urged the world’s biggest economies to loosen their belts. And fiscal stimulus is not just for rich countries, he said at the spring meetings last week. Poor, well-run countries like Tanzania should also try it.

One thing that particularly surprised me about this article was the IMF's warming-up to mixed neoliberal strategies, such as "heterodox" monetary and fiscal policy--something that, particularly in 1990s Latin America, has included such heresies as wage increases, price controls and increased social spending. (NB: I am only making a point here, not actually taking a position on loan conditionality.)

Furthermore, I found the implication that the IMF was changing because this financial crisis, unlike the East Asian crisis of 1997, "originated with rich-world lenders, not emerging-market borrowers" to be a bit unsettling. Now I'm not an IMF-hater, and I do know that it's meant to be a market-psychological lender-of-last-resort rather than a development bank, but it just seems a little off that it takes a crisis in the developed world to get the IMF to change its practices (of course, the developed countries do hold majority shares, but still). In any case, it is welcome to see the IMF taking political realities into account when advising fiscal policies. I was talking to a friend from the Kennedy School a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that the World Bank had started advertising posts for political scientists, something that he had never seen before. Guess it's time to show those economists ...

P.S. The article brings up a really compelling point about fiscal multipliers being low or negative in developing countries and that having a strong effect on the reach of government spending (the alternative is lower taxes, but if taxation capacity is poor to begin with ...). Just some stuff for the Bank to work on, especially if it's institutional inefficiency or corruption.