Rwanda « Rachel Strohm

Fun with the World Governance Indicators

September 27th, 2010 § Leave a Comment

I attended a good lecture last week by Daniel Kaufmann, who showed up at SAIS to speak about the new version of the World Governance Indicators approximately an hour after they’d been released to the public. His central point invoked the utility of triangulating governance data from multiple sources, and emphasized the need to keep data use transparent by including margins of error:

All measures of governance and the investment climate are unavoidably imprecise. The WGI capture this imprecision by showing margins of error with countries scores that capture the statistically-likely range of values of governance. These margins of error reflect the extent of agreement among the underlying data sources: when data sources tend to agree, the margins of error are smaller, and when they disagree, margins of error are larger. (source)

That said? Playing with the indicators online is even more interesting than hearing about how they were compiled. Check out the differences in the quality of regulations in the 10 largest economies in sub-Saharan Africa:

Also interesting are cross-country comparisons on all six main indicators, such as this interesting graph of governance in Rwanda and Burundi. (You know you’re doing badly on the voice & accountability side when even Burundi beats you.)

Go have fun playing with the indicators – and check out Kaufmann’s blog, the Kaufmann Governance Post, while you’re at it.

Other Rwanda Photos

May 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment

Photos from around Rwanda:

Lake Burera

Tea fields near Nyungwe National Park

Decorative shields at the National Museum, Butare

Information & pricing in local agriculture

March 20th, 2009 § 2 Comments

Landscape, Murambi District, Rwanda

Thinking some more about the geographic scale of different agricultural markets has led me to consider how information availability and pricing might differ between them. Mobile phones are still a fairly rare commodity in rural Rwanda (outside of the towns), and if some set of extremely poor farmers were only selling extra produce hyperlocally, it seems that perhaps prices would either be set in total isolation from regional or national prices, or might be determined exclusively by a few people with mobiles. (I wonder if outside information would be convincing in this scenario – if the phone guy says to the farmer, “this cassava is 5 francs cheaper in Nyamata,” would the farmer accept this as a negotiating tactic, or assume that he’s lying? Perhaps it’s connected to how easy it is for the phone guy to actually access the cheaper cassava in Nyamata – the credibility of his threat.)

Then again, even with mobile technology to help information access along, its helpfulness still seems fundamentally predicated on A) physical mobility and B) social networks. Information about great prices in a town up the road will be less useful to a farmer if he still can’t reach it easily, and receiving the information in the first place is still connected to one’s actual social network (and ability to pay for airtime, of course). I wonder if the differing availability of mobiles to rural residents of different socioeconomic statuses may actually increase the vulnerability and exclusion of the poorest of the poor, rather like differing levels of access to microinsurance might actually push healthcare farther out of reach of the poorest.

Market access for the poor

March 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment

I wish I had a better intuition on the question of the social impact of large-scale agriculture on smallholder farmers. I’m guessing the deciding factor is the strength of their existing market connections – whether they’re strong or weak, and central to livelihoods or a supplemental source of income – but I can’t seem to get at it on Google with specific regard to Rwanda.

This is probably analogous to any form of large-scale, cost-efficient production – the potential for socioeconomic displacement depends on the product you’re displacing. And I suppose that’s also a commentary on the target market. I’d guess that the vast majority of Rwandese agricultural production is by smallholder farmers for either hyperlocal (within a few miles) or local (say half a day’s walking distance) markets, and that only certain commodities are ever going to be linked to the Kigali low-income or high-income markets. (There’s not really a hell of a lot of local stuff being sold to high-income people in Kigali anyway, except maybe the specialty vegetables at Simba. The wealthy mzungus & Rwandese have their own totally separate selection of imports, whose prices correspondingly reflect good information about international pricing and transport costs. Which is to say, they cost an arm and a leg.)

So I’m wondering if perhaps there are many smallholder farmers who are producing the same types of commodities as might be produced commercially, but if they’re really not linked into the same markets that large-scale production would target. It seems like this might be more of a threat to medium-scale enterprises that already serve perhaps a regional or national (Rwandese) market, but then that’s a difficult ethical issue from threatening the livelihoods of smallholders who have almost nothing to start with. It’s a persistant challenge of doing business in poor countries – weighing the social benefits of increased food production & lower prices (marginal improvements to the well-being of many relatively poor consumers) vs. the possibility of undercutting the incomes of medium-scale farmers (major detriments to well-being of a few relatively poor producers). As an aside, I think there’s also an interesting lesson about innovation in there – that its effects will go in different directions depending on whether it’s creating an improved version of an existing product or service, or whether it’s creating something so novel that new markets develop around it. “Innovation” always seems to be referred to as a uniform category of activities, without regard for its differing impacts, at least in popular parlance.

Occupational categories

February 1st, 2009 § Leave a Comment

Baskets woven by co-op members, Mayange, Rwanda

I was struck recently by the New Times‘ “good news” that the rate of non-agricultural employment in Rwanda has doubled in the last 10 years! That is, it’s apparently gone from 5% of the population to 10%. Kigali is such a bubble; it’s easy to forget that there are many Rwandese people who will live out their days without ever seeing a multiple-story building or a paved road.

That said, this official stat about 10% non-ag employment/90% subsistence ag seems like at best a crude measure of people’s actual livelihood strategies. I haven’t seen a specification of how much non-ag employment is formal or informal (or even what you’d consider to be “informal” around here), and in a similar sense, I’m sure that many rural residents participate in at least some non-ag activities as part of their income-smoothing plans. I’d love to see a better measure of this data – to get a sense of how many people are exclusively dependent on agriculture (though perhaps with different types of income-generating activities within the sector), and how many are principally dependent on ag, with a significant amount of income still coming from other activities (carpentry, say, or teaching, or day labor on other farms…). I also know a small subset of co-op members in Nyamata who grow most of their own food, even though they make a majority of their income from basket-weaving – I wonder how they’d be classified.

Transportation infrastructure

January 24th, 2009 § 1 Comment

Walking a bicycle taxi up the newly paved road

I’ve been trying diligently to imagine Nyamata as it must have been in the peri-genocidal period, and it’s an interesting thought. I keep coming back to Hatzfeld‘s research, and one of the genocidaires’ statement that the looting that was so common during the genocide allowed the impoverished farmers to go into shops in Nyamata “where farmers had never been before.” I also keep thinking of the night when the 6 mzungus apparently bought all of the beer in Mbyo. If the economic situation along the Kigali-Bugesera-Burundi road has picked up since it was paved last year, its baseline must have been awfully low, which offers further commentary on the poverty of the farmer-genocidaires.

Improved transportation infrastructure is obviously going to be more beneficial to people who already have the wherewithall to use it – the wealthier shopkeepers in Nyamata, I’m guessing. The picture of pre-genocide Bugesera that Hatzfeld develops seems predicated on local production to a much greater degree than it is today, where you can find Primus & packaged foods way the hell off the main road, like in Ngeruka. (I’m pretty sure Ngeruka is still waiting for the water pipeline to come its way.) So transport of heavy & imported items, like bottled beer and maize flour, would be privileged. It extends the reach of existing markets.

I suppose what I’m wondering about is its effect on the incomes of people inside and outside of Nyamata, then. It seems reasonable that their incomes must have gone up to some degree in order to be able to afford such things; was this because of trade with Kigali, or because new markets developed with truckers and construction workers passing through town? I’d also love to know how this affected the market access of rural Bugesera residents. The weekly market at Nyamata strikes me as decently large; did a paved road make it easier for outlying farmers to come to town? Or does pavement only really make a difference for people who can afford wheeled transport? The rain here rarely makes roads totally unwalkable after it’s finished, so perhaps pavement would only be a marginal improvement for people who were just walking anyway. Institutional memory in Rwanda seems remarkably short sometimes, in large part because of the enormous upheaval and movement in the several years following the genocide; I’m not sure that anyone in Nyamata, literally, has been there long enough to know.