Book review: More Than Good Intentions
February 13th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Only eight months after I finished the book, I thought I’d finally review More Than Good Intentions, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. Dean is my supervisor at Innovations for Poverty Action, as well as the organization’s founder, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was its clear explanation of how academic research in behavioral economics can lead to solutions for real problems of social policy in the developing world. Given the level of popular discontent with neoclassical economics, fairly or unfairly, after the financial crisis, works like this go a long way towards demonstrating that the economist’s conceptual toolbox can contribute to making the world a better place.
More Than Good Intentions opens with a short review of the Easterly-vs.-Sachs saga, and essentially sidesteps the debate about whether aid ever works with a call for more evaluation of extant aid programs. Their chosen tool is the randomized controlled trial. Of course, there are any number of development problems that are not amenable to randomized evaluation. Questions about the ethnicized distribution of government resources or the transnational funding networks of rebel groups really call out for other epistemological approaches. What RCTs can do well is evaluate program-based aid in contexts where funding shortages mean that some potential beneficiaries can’t be included, and this is precisely the approach taken by the research projects summarized in the book.
The rest of the book is thematically structured around financial activities (borrowing, saving, consumption) and non-financial activities (agriculture, healthcare, education). The financial sections of the book are the best non-technical introduction to the topic that I’ve seen. Dean’s interests tend towards microfinance and decision-making, and these chapters give a thorough overview of contemporary Western narratives around microfinance and the many reasons why the financial needs of the poor are more varied than simply “getting a loan.” For instance, whilst an RCT conducted in South Africa showed that randomly extending microfinance loans to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten one did raise those clients’ incomes, qualitative data from the Philippines also showed that the rigid structure of microfinance products drives many people back to the neighborhood moneylender. (The takeaway here isn’t that moneylenders are evil, but that microfinance banks might take a lesson in customizable loan repayments from them.) Another RCT in Peru used list randomization [PDF] to show that nearly a third of microfinance clients use their loans for household consumption instead of business needs – technically a violation of their loan agreements, but a more accurate reflection of their current financial needs.
The non-financial chapters are also consistently interesting, although they tend towards summarizing notable research and policy innovations rather than placing the results within a global context. They’re like the greatest hits of development research. For instance, the agriculture chapter doesn’t provide an overview of agricultural modernization attempts in Africa, but it does shed light on why Kenyan farmers don’t purchase fertilizer when they need it (it’s hard for them to save money after the harvest), and how Ghanaian pineapple farmers spread information about new agricultural technologies. Similarly, the education chapter doesn’t go into great depth about the history of universal primary education, but it does demonstrate that programs as simple as providing uniforms or cash grants to poor students can dramatically improve attendance. One of the most remarkable studies of recent years showed that treating Kenyan students for intestinal worms with a twenty-cent pill reduced absence rates by up to 25%. This result was so spectacular that the researchers started an NGO, Deworm the World, dedicated to reproducing this success.
All in all, More Than Good Intentions makes a strong case for the relevance of behavioral economics to development policy. It’s also an excellent popular introduction to some of the fundamental questions of foreign aid and development economics. I gave a copy to my parents to answer their perennial question of “so what exactly do you do in development work again?” So far it seems to be working.
Straus on remaking Rwanda
January 25th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Catching up on yet another batch of backdated conference blogging, I went to see Scott Straus discuss his edited volume Remaking Rwanda at CSIS last October. It’s a thought-provoking book, as is his previous work, The Order of Genocide, which contains a very insightful analysis of the microdynamics of the genocide. Remaking offers a largely critical look at Rwanda’s post-genocide domestic politics, with only brief acknowledgement of the RPF’s real successes in realms such as primary education and economic growth before proceeding to pillory the government for its repression of political dissent and attempts at social engineering.
Rather than revisiting the book’s conclusions directly, Straus used the conference to engage with the question of why the Western meta-narrative about Rwanda had shifted from a largely positive one in the early post-genocide period to the flurry of critiques that constitute it today. In part, he felt that the shift was warranted. Rwanda’s obvious intervention in the DRC contributed to an early change in public opinion, supported by the increasing number of defections from the RPF and the repressive manner in which the 2010 elections were handled. The 2009 death of Alison des Forges, who was an early critic of the RPF’s slide towards authoritarianism, then spurred the generation of a number of commemorative conferences and works on Rwanda at a time when scholars were abandoning the self-censorship that had previously characterized much writing on the country. Remaking Rwanda was one such work.
That said, Straus also acknowledged the complexity of Rwanda’s contemporary politics. Whilst “it’s not a secret” that the RPF has installed an authoritarian regime, he also noted the challenges of governing a post-conflict country, and suggested that we are in need of better methods to evaluate the effects of authoritarianism in different contexts. In part, he seemed to feel that this pointed to a need for more comparative work on Rwanda, and explicitly called for more comparisons with Burundi. Of course, as another commentator pointed out, there’s an even larger set of potential comparative partners out there, since practically every leader in East Africa today came to power out of conflict.
Having had a few months to think this through, it does seem to me that much research on Rwanda is limited by a lack of comparison. I do think there are good reasons to believe that genocide is a form of violence that’s analytically distinct from other types of civil conflict, but it also seems that some perspective is lost in treating Rwanda as completely unique. Regression to authoritarianism (or illiberal democracy, or some other non-democratic form of rule) was common in the 1990s even among African states that hadn’t suffered conflict. Straus’ more specific concern is that repression and “growing de facto ethnic inequality” will someday re-ignite all the familiar conflicts, which seems a likely outcome to me – one certainly sees the same pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi’s historical periods of ethnic conflict. That said, one might gain a better understanding of the specific conditions that contribute to the re-ignition of conflict, or to its avoidance, in comparative perspective. Uganda and Ethiopia might both be interesting places to start.
Graduate school & the development industry
January 3rd, 2012 § 10 Comments
(Update, 8 January: Hi MR readers! Thanks for stopping by; I’d welcome your thoughts. I should add that this post isn’t meant exclusively as a critique of SAIS, but as a representative experience of many of the schools that offer MAs in development.)
Greetings from the other side of A) the new year and B) grad school! With the help of several supportive professors and a hell of a lot of late nights in the library, I pulled off a six-course load this term and graduated a semester early. Now that I’m done thinking intensely about development for classes, I’m looking forward to returning to doing the same on this blog.
In my not-so-copious free time over the last month, I’ve thought a fair amount about this blog post and its trenchant criticism of the MA in international development at SIPA, much of which I share. Of course, there were plenty of things I enjoyed about my time at SAIS, chief among which were my classmates, the many insightful lectures I attended both on- and off-campus, and writing my independent study on post-conflict reconciliation in Burundi. It’s a truism to say that many of the best aspects of any academic experience happen outside of the classroom, of course, but with further thought I find it troubling that the majority of my classes, which took up by far the greatest part of my time there, were not among the things which I found valuable.
A bit of background here. I studied international development in undergrad as well, at Dartmouth’s geography department, which (among the human geographers) largely espouses a critical geography approach. I didn’t come away from this with anything like a canonical understanding of what development was or how it worked, but I did come away firmly convinced that context and history matter deeply, that my own understanding of the world is incredibly partial, that power relations are inescapable, that humility and a willingness to continually learn from as many sources as possible are the primary tools that ought to be wielded by the Westerner fortunate enough to participate in this whole development enterprise. (This is where the view on my Positionality page comes from.) The two years I spent in Africa after undergrad only convinced me of the depth of my own ignorance on matters development-related, and of the fallacy of assuming that poverty somehow stripped people of agency, or neutralized questions of internal politics.
That said, my geography courses did tend to pass over the types of structural questions addressed by political science and economics, and when I was applying for graduate school, I chose SAIS in hopes of remedying this deficiency in my education. There were some ways in which this certainly succeeded. I appreciated my courses in microeconomics and monetary theory, and was definitely intrigued by the insights of my polisci courses on democratization, corruption, and African politics. (They never went quite as much into questions of conflict and state-building as I hoped they would, though.) My introduction to development course also provided a useful overview of growth theory, and contemporary views on “bringing the state back in” to the development process. There were absolutely elements of SAIS academics that I am grateful for.
This doesn’t obviate my concern that many other aspects of one’s SAIS education prepare one for working in the development industry, rather than trying to understand the political and historical contexts in which one’s actions occur and work in humility and partnership towards a development-oriented end. We’re taught about the evolution of Western thought on development; we’re never taught about what life was like for ordinary people in the days of import-substitution industrialization, or during the reign of the Washington Consensus. We’re taught about the myriad policy failings of African governments, and the proliferation of NGOs in response; we’re never told to consider taking African politics seriously. For some reason, discussion of conflict is completely relegated to the Conflict Studies department, even though civil war has been the biggest menace to development in many African states. National and sub-national histories are entirely absent, as is any nod to the importance of local languages. Sometimes the whole experience felt like the world that we were studying in development classes had been colonized by homo economicus, who’s largely rational and comprehensible, though occasionally driven to irrationality by some moral failing like greed or stupidity. He has no pride or fear or compassion; he engages in neither petty quarrels nor heroic self-sacrifice; he has no social context or history. He is the ideal target for manipulation by the development industry. And, of course, he isn’t a real person.
In many ways, I think that SAIS is doing the best it can. Students have access to a broad range of development-related subjects; they’re required to learn a foreign language; our professors are often more thoughtful and compassionate than the material they teach might indicate. But I worry that SAIS leaves us just educated enough to be dangerous – to be hired by the World Bank and the INGOs to make decisions on behalf of the poor in accordance with contemporary development theory, without any requirement to understand an area’s political and historical context first, and without any sense that the poor have agency of their own, and with insufficient thought to the power dynamics of the relationships between aid agencies, national/sub-national governments, and ordinary people. I worry that the real assistance that the development industry does provide will be accompanied by other harms, born of ignorance and power, to those people who can least afford it. (The Dodd-Frank law on conflict minerals is a salient example of this; see this post for evidence.) And I don’t know how to begin changing this system.
Development aid in context
May 2nd, 2011 § 7 Comments
I’ve just started More Than Good Intentions, the new book on impact assessment in international development by Dean Karlan & Jacob Appel,* and was struck by a figure given in their introduction: US$2.3 trillion has been spent on development aid over the past 50 years. (They don’t specify how this figure was constructed, or whether it’s in nominal or constant dollars. However, Easterly cites the same figure elsewhere, so I’m going to run with it for the moment.) K&A mention this in the context of arguments about development effectiveness, with the usual gloss – the question of how that much money could have failed to spark development. Reading this now, however, I’d sooner ask the opposite question of why anyone might assume that such a trivial sum could suffice to materially transform large swathes of the world.
Think about it: US GDP in 2009 was $14 trillion in nominal terms. In a single year, the wealthiest country in the world produces up to 6 times the value of all the money spent on aid over the last 50 years. To put it in per capita terms, US per capita GDP in the same year was $45,989 in nominal dollars. Let’s assume that the $2.3 trillion in aid was spent equally over those 50 years, for approximately $46 billion in aid per year. Let’s assume as well that this aid went exclusively to the bottom billion during each of those years. That leaves us with about $46 per person per year over 50 years – about a month and a half of subsistence at an average of $1 a day.**
This is a highly stylized and inevitably inaccurate description of how aid funding is spent, but I found it useful to put these numbers into context. Why should we expect that a sum like $46 per person per year, no matter how effectively spent, might successfully pull nations out of poverty? Why should we expect this paltry ammunition to succeed against the array of historically and politically contingent reasons why countries find themselves unable to grow or to equitably distribute the benefits of growth?
Of course, this isn’t actually an argument against aid, or improving aid effectiveness. The fact that it isn’t sufficient to raise all impoverished people out of poverty doesn’t mean that the limited but real benefits that it can provide – like improving access to healthcare or education – are suddenly worthless. And certainly almost everyone in the development community sees aid as necessary yet insufficient for development. However, to echo Fukuyama’s critique of the lack of historical context in recent political science work (which you can read in my notes [PDF] from his recent talk at SAIS), I find it a bit troubling that we as development practitioners are still quite so focused on the causal link between aid and development, sometimes at the expense of broader thought about how countries develop and why. As a commentator at the Fukuyama talk said, much development work feels like it’s “trying to do history in a hurry” – and with insufficient tools at that. Alongside rigorous evaluation of the type K&A advocate, I’d love to see a stronger understanding of historical contingency & context in discourse on development.
* I worked on one of Dean’s projects with IPA, and he generously sent me a galley of the book for free.
** For the sticklers on research methods, yes, I know that nominal & real dollar amounts aren’t directly comparable; that aid hasn’t gone to a tidy billion people per year for exactly 50 years; that $1/day is actually a complex estimate of poverty [PDF]; and that living on $1/day doesn’t actually mean you get a dollar per day. It’s a thought experiment, yo.
James Ferguson on seeing what isn’t there
February 24th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Over at the wonderful Theory Talks, James Ferguson, the Stanford anthropologist, responds to the question of the “biggest challenge in global studies”:
One of the things that bothers me about a lot of what I read the in social sciences that’s, as you say, ‘globally oriented’, is that it seems to start with a bunch of certainties, a bunch of assumptions – a kind of Western liberal common sense – that we know how countries ought to be organized. They ought to be democracies; they ought to respect human rights; they ought to guarantee the rule of law; they ought to be at peace with their neighbors. And then you look at, say, a country in Africa and all you’re able to see is a series of lacks – of things that should be there but aren’t. And you end up constructing huge parts of the world as just sort of empty spaces where things ought to be there but aren’t. And it leads to a kind of impoverished understanding, I think, because you don’t really understand what is going on here. How do people conduct their affairs? How is legitimate authority exercised? How are rules made and enforced? You know, all the kinds of questions that ought to be the starting place tend to disappear or recede into the background. So, I think the real challenge is to approach this whole question with a sense of openness, a willingness to be surprised and learn something new and not to be so deductive.
I certainly believe that there are a number of Western development practitioners who have taken this perspective – of the limits of their own understanding – to heart, in useful ways. And it’s also quite clear to me that any number of practitioners persist in seeing the developing world as a series of gaps and lacks, filled with people who are not inherently passive, but are still incapable of generating substance and meaning on their own. When you look at a dirt road, and immediately wonder why it isn’t paved, rather than pondering the ways that people use it and the spaces it connects, your normative vision of the world is likely standing between you and a more proximately accurate understanding.
Shoe vendor, Kinshasa
I remember having this instinctive reaction myself when I took the above photo in Kinshasa (on my BlackBerry, apologies for the poor quality). Ha, a Congolese shoe store! That’s not the right way to move beyond bricks-and-mortar retail… I didn’t notice the creative display (maximum visibility of shoes in a minimal space, compared to piling them on a table). I didn’t think about the processes by which sending Western cast-offs to developing countries, to be purchased by the bale by clothing merchants, had become a normal and even admired aspect of globalization. It didn’t even occur to me that this particular vendor had thoughtfully specialized in white trainers. I only saw what wasn’t there. It’s the steady challenge of life, and especially work, in a globalized world, to learn to focus on what is there.
Eight books on development for the interested generalist
January 8th, 2010 § 31 Comments
A friend recently asked me for a list of interesting books on development, and I thought I’d share the results here. I read almost randomly in the field when I was still trying to narrow my initial broad interest in development down into something of which a career could be made, and the books below generally struck me as the most interesting, accessible, and generally well-supported introductions to their respective subject areas that I came across. (I haven’t read some of these in years, but in retrospect I think they’d all stand up decently to a reader with greater existing knowledge of development.) In roughly descending order of intellectual impact upon me:
- Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, is one of the best books I’ve read on the general concept of “development.” It addresses a number of common critiques, and creates a strong philosophical framework to support the argument that “development” is still necessary.
- Portfolios of the Poor is my favorite book of 2009 – an incredibly thoroughly-researched look into what poor people do with their money and how microfinance plays into this. I don’t remember learning more from a single book, well, probably ever.
- Understanding Poverty is a great introduction to a huge range of issues in development, from food security to education to microfinance. It’s written by a group of leading development economists, often from a behavioral perspective, and the thought contained here is both wide-ranging and rigorous.
- This is a bit quirky compared to the other recommendations, but I very much liked Expectations of Modernity, an ethnography of Zambian copper miners in the ’70s and ’80s. The description probably sounds boring, but it’s actually a great critique of the idea that people from the developing world who act in “Western” styles are blindly mimicking the West, instead of consciously bringing elements of Western culture into their lives in ways that reflect their own social & economic interests. It basically lays out a strong case for relativistic understandings of culture, which I find hugely important for any development worker, without framing it with that potentially off-putting phrase.
- The Bottom Billion has held up better in retrospect than its two better-known contemporaries, The End of Poverty and The White Man’s Burden, at least in my recollection. In a foreshadowing of my current interests, I liked its focus on research methodology in macroeconomics (i.e. where all that data underlying cross-country regressions comes from), and its quantitative look at the connections between war, governance and poverty. (Edit: David Roodman points out his own and Easterly‘s critiques of Collier for data mining in Wars, Guns and Votes, and believes that they’re applicable to The Bottom Billion as well. I’d suggest enjoying the intellectual curiosity of Collier’s research, but taking his statistical results with a grain of salt.)
- I can’t offer too much on the subject of public health, but I did greatly enjoy The Wisdom of Whores, which is an engaging book about health systems responses to HIV from the ’80s onwards, told by an irreverent epidemiologist with whom I would very much like to have a drink one day. It’s also a great critical look at where public health data comes from, how it’s used, and to some degree why governments and international organizations choose the health priorities that they do.
- Making Globalization Work is something I recalled as insightful on the topics of global financial institutions, markets and trade at the time I read it.
- I’ve been trying to find a good overview of the World Bank that I read for a geography class a few years ago, and while I’m not sure that I’ve identified it, The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity looks like it covers similar subject matter. I found tracing the Bank’s historical evolution quite interesting, as it also captures the variety of Western thought on “development” that’s occurred over the past 50 years, and explains quite a lot as well about current bilateral and multilateral aid regimes.
Tell me, dear readers, what else would you recommend for the interested lay reader?
Development wishlist
October 23rd, 2009 § 12 Comments
One of the fun parts of doing the job hunt/grad school application thing is that it gives you a structured opportunity to articulate what you’d like to see the development community doing, and how you’d like to participate in it. After straining out all the things that will actually be going into personal statements, everything that’s left is being added to my only moderately unrealistic economic development wishlist:
- I want to see more economic development practitioners talking to economic historians. There’s a strong share of immediacy in much dialogue on international economic development – the demand to stop dithering and end poverty now. I think this is a moderately useful moral statement, and a nearly useless policy formulation for engendering broad & sustainable increases in the incomes of the poor. Frankly, it promotes a strain of analysis that approaches successful, present-day Western economic policies as if they developed in a vacuum, and often gives short shrift to the historical quirks, accidents, and forethought that went into their development – the messy, long-term process of actualizing beneficial policy. I’d love to see more practitioners drawing from research into historical processes of economic development (such as De Soto’s work on the Homestead Act in the US), and much less poorly-considered application of Western present-day policies to non-Western situations. (Another great example is Roodman’s work on microfinance in Europe & the US as long ago as 1800. Which brings me to my next point…)
- I want to discourse on innovation balanced with discourse on not reinventing the wheel. I’m obviously not anti-innovation. People are doing some great thinking on how the constraints of poverty both necessitate and facilitate innovation. But I’ve also come to realize that, if you’re a smart & dedicated person and have an innovative idea, there’s a significant chance that at least one other smart & dedicated person has had a similar idea. At this point in your promotion of said innovative idea, you (generally) could A) seek out other people working on it and collaborate, B) learn about the shortcomings of the other idea and compete with an improved product, or C) independently develop & fund multiple small duplicative non-competing projects based on the same idea. I don’t mean to pick on stove projects uniquely – I think they’re tackling an important issue, and they were the first example that came to mind rather than the most egregious. But I do wonder how much of the time & how many of the resources spent on social enterprise product development (or program development more broadly) is genuinely productive, and how much goes to needlessly reinventing the wheel instead of learning from existing examples. (See also Easterly’s critique of learning in aid programs since 1938.)
- I want to see less programmatic emphasis on solving every problem simultaneously, and more on sequential implementation in increasing order of difficulty. You could equally rephrase this as, “it’s not always wise to do the hardest thing first.” There’s a lot of value in starting with a feasible goal, learning by doing, and expanding into implementation of more complex or wide-ranging programs later – and it’s much more likely to be successful.
I’d love to know, dear readers: what’s on your wishlists?
Microfinance in the short & long term
October 8th, 2009 § 3 Comments
It’s been a matter of some curiosity to me that the debate over for-profit vs. non-profit microfinance has remained quite vociferous over the past few months, even whilst more balanced views of the social role played by microloans have been gaining acceptance. It’s clear that a good deal of the heat generated by this particular debate is attributable to the inclusion of market-based anything – as Amanda recently wrote, “people conflate ‘market’ with ‘unfair and exploitative’ all the time,” which is obviously a sensitive issue when one is talking about banking with the poor. But then, MFIs by their very nature – even non-profit ones – are committed to helping clients participate in business and markets. A purely market-based critique falls a bit short of explaining all the differences between the two sides.
I was thinking about this when I read Matt’s recent post on arbitrary deadlines in development. The most insightful observation was that it’s “highly likely that the types of policies we should implement when thinking about poverty for the next 100 years differ significantly from those we would use when thinking about poverty for the next 20, or 5 years.” And this, I think, goes straight to the heart of the microfinance debate: there is often a temporal mismatch between the effective goals of for-profit MFIs and non-profit MFIs. For-profit MFIs, whose clients appear to be on average less poor than those of non-profits, fit into an economic space where real growth at least seems possible over the long run. Non-profit MFIs, on the other hand, are often better suited to meet the immediate consumption-smoothing needs of poorer clients, rather than long-term investment needs. The goal that one prioritizes probably indicates where one stands on the for- vs. non- debate as well.
This temporal perspective also goes a long way towards explaining certain criticisms that each side has launched at the other. For instance, among the various non-profit complaints about the Compartamos IPO is the valid criticism that poor clients who are left behind by a privatizing MFI may not have access to another financial institution. The subtext is, is short-term harm to poor people worth longer-term growth for their descendants? Conversely, one also finds criticisms of non-profits for funding small businesses that fail to generate jobs or economic growth – an interesting moralizing critique of MFIs that use their capital inefficiently, and perhaps help fewer people than they ultimately could in the long run.
I am, of course, generalizing to some degree about the characteristics of for-profit and non-profit MFIs. This is based on my current understanding of the debate, but I wouldn’t wish anyone to accept this uncritically, as I’m sure there’s a non-negligible number of MFIs out there for whom these descriptions would be wrong. (I’ll even point to the first one myself – FINCA-DRC is a for-profit institution that’s quite committed to small group lending with women, which is a short-term consumption-smoothing tool if ever there were one.) But the larger take-away here is that we as practitioners need to look more closely at the temporality of economic growth and poverty reduction, and discuss our allocation of resources between the short and long terms more explicitly. I’m guessing there’s a place for both types of MFI in most, if possibly not all, markets.
A comparative taxonomy of African cliches
April 28th, 2009 § 11 Comments
A bit of a rant, so feel free to find the egress if that’s not what you’re here for. But: beyond the standard stereotypes (either “savage tribal wars” or “happy villagers living in harmony with nature”), there are several slightly more complex cliches about Africa that make me want to grind my teeth. In fact, one could create a taxonomy of the African Cliche (genus Africanus) as follows:
- Africanus stereotypicus: The most common type of cliche, the Africanus stereotypicus typicus feeds off of broad generalizations of African history. It is characterized by its Manichean coloring, varying between the black of moral depravity and ancient ethnic hatreds, and the snowy white of peaceful farmers who live “as nature intended.” Other subspecies include the Africanus stereotypicus puerilis, known for its grating proclamations that Africans are too childlike to make decisions about their own lives, and the Africanus stereotypicus type-419, which exhibits severe distrust of Africans in the belief that they are all corrupt, dishonest, and/or Nigerian scam artists.
- Africanus journalisticus: Cliches of the the journalisticus group are most often found lurking in the mediocre Africa coverage of otherwise well-respected news publications. The Africanus journalisticus natura is frequently sighted in Madagascar, where international coverage of recent coup attempts uniformly begins with glowing descriptions of the country’s vibrant plant and animal life, in the belief that they must suck readers in with images of lush vegetation before seguing into actual African politics. The Africanus journalisticus spillover, on the other hand, is more often found in Congo and Somalia, where articles on the real suffering of millions of human beings justify the space they take up in Western newspapers either by A) referring to the current conflict as the spillover of a more interesting conflict (e.g. the Rwandese genocide), or B) explaining that the conflict is important because it could create terrorist threats that might spill over into the readers’ comfortable lives. A final subspecies, the Africanus journalisticus darfurensis, has seen a dramatic fall in its numbers after the population explosion of 2003-2004. However, the darfurensis still retains its unique ability to reduce the interwoven political, economic, environmental, and social roots of the genocide in Darfur into a simple morality tale of evil Arabs and innocent Africans.
- Africanus occidentalis: This cliche is at home in a broad variety of habitats, be it among development practitioners or wide-eyed teenagers visiting Africa for the first time. It can be distinguished by its prominent belief that concerted Western action can solve all of Africa’s problems. The Africanus occidentalis studentia lives a peaceful life in the dorm rooms of university students, who often react to its presence by talking at length about the spiritual connection and cultural vitality that they experienced while visiting one country in a very large continent for two weeks last summer. (The tragedy of receiving a university education whilst children in Africa are dying is an alternate topic, although this should not be confused with actual discussions of Rawlsian justice.) The Africanus occidentalis interventionis, on the other hand, prefers to settle among career development workers who really should know better. These include advocates of poorly thought-out boycotts that don’t address the roots of the labor issue in question, World Bank officials who support oil pipelines in Chad, and bloggers who duly repeat that the West must pay more attention to Africa’s suffering, as though the Western gaze has always been the missing ingredient for African development.
- Africanus impecunius: The Africanus impecunius is a specialized breed, whose natural habitats include NGO websites, blogs written by economics professors, and the Twitter streams of thousands of people with a passing interest in African poverty. Many subspecies in the impecunius group appear outwardly similar, but the practiced African Cliche-ist can easily spot their differences. For instance, the Africanus impecunius donatio is usually spotted at fundraisers in major Western cities, wooing potential donors with pictures of malnourished African children and practicing its “you have the power to save a life” call. The donatio‘s primary competitor is the Africanus impecunius entrepreneurius. The entrepreneurius prefers a stealth attack, often sneaking up behind the donatio at conferences and beating it over the head with large sets of panel data on import substitution policies. (Meanwhile, the Africanus impecunius polisci avoids these territorial clashes in favor of migrating from think tank to think tank, seeking a credible way to actually implement all of its theoretical insights about the importance of good governance.)
Ok, taxonomic rant finished. (Although I guess the entrepreneurius and the polisci are more stock characters than cliches.) The common thread among many of these tropes is my impatience with people who don’t make an effort to move past their Western points of reference when studying/discussing/visiting/speaking with/working with Africans. And I am saying “Africans” and not “Africa” very intentionally. There’s a large lexical difference between thinking of a place primarily in terms of the people who live there, and thinking of it almost as an anthropomorphized piece of suffering land. Consider sentences like, “Africa is unlikely to achieve the MDGs,” or “Africa suffers disproportionately from AIDS.” They don’t make any sense unless one interpolates some people in there to do the suffering, but this type of statement – endowing the continent as a whole with sentience and linguistically skipping over the people who actually live there – is usually taken at face value.
Anyway, I mention the perils of not questioning Western frames of reference not because I believe Western capitalist culture is evil, but because it’s at the least misguided and at the most dangerous to view everything in the world through the lenses of one’s own national affiliation. Misguided is assuming that Western actions are the only important actions in the world, as though non-Western political leaders or private individuals can’t impact a situation as well. (C.f. the movement for American companies to boycott Congolese minerals, which I guarantee will accomplish nothing besides making a bunch of Chinese manufacturers happy about their increased access to the mines.) Dangerous is failing to move beyond assumptions in situations where one’s actions actually may have a large impact – and where one is working in the midst of great power disparities to boot. (C.f. the assumption that structural adjustment would provide sufficient trickle-down benefits for the poor to counterbalance the loss of government-funded social services in the short run.) The fact that cross-cultural work is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. But cross-cultural work in the face of extremely uneven power relations demands that one actually take the time to thoroughly learn the environment in which and the demands of the people with whom one will be working, instead of resting on cliches.
The limits of microcredit
February 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I always thought the whole fuss over microcredit as the panacea of development, back in 2005, was a bit silly – there’s never a silver bullet for something as complex as economic development. It’s remarkable how much some people want to believe in such cure-all interventions anyway. We as a species are pretty clever, but we’re not very wise, nor are we particularly good at thinking in terms of complex systems and interactions over distance or between multiple parties. But I digress.
Sometimes I also think that people who wish to design economic empowerment programs for the poor have a poor track record of picking historical or cross-cultural examples to learn from. So many programs are erroneously predicated on fundamentally Western beliefs about social structures – say, the persistent thought in community development programs a few years that a local mayor or group of elders could accurately represent the rest of the people in a village, which seems to draw on traditions of democratic representation in local government that exist in the West, but don’t always hold true in developing countries. (Of course it does in some places, but there are plenty of counterfactual examples as well.) And yet, when it came to microfinance, so many providers seem to have made exactly the opposite mistake, and ignored the fact that in Western systems of credit, some people are outright judged too “vulnerable” (i.e. uncreditworthy) to take out a loan, for fear that they won’t be able to repay. I certainly understand that it’s hard to judge someone’s creditworthiness in a low-income situation, and microfinance does indeed benefit many people who may have been unfairly excluded from traditional credit on the basis of their existing poverty. But that’s the point: just because microfinance is “for the poor,” doesn’t mean that it’s for everyone who’s poor.
Indeed, it’s been shown that the benefits of microcredit tend to accrue to borrowers who live right around the $1-a-day poverty line – not to the poorest of the poor, such as those who are too sick or old to work, or who are somehow kept outside of the cash economy for other reasons. This may seem like a rather cruel paradox – that people who may be most in need of additional capital are least likely to benefit from a microfinance intervention – but instead I think it speaks to the fact that it’s unusual to use market-based solutions, such as microcredit, for social protection. Hence the kerfuffle about Bush’s social security investment accounts around the same time. This seems like a broader and more accurate analogy than any belief that local government must inherently be representative, and it’s interesting that the dialogue around microfinance as the best economic solution for the poor (as a unified body) seemed to miss the nuances of credit’s function in more developed economies. (Of course this is also a generalization, as there are surely some microfinance institutions who take these things into account, but the number of academic accounts that I’ve seen of microfinance’s shortcomings suggest that there are plenty which don’t.)
