Category Archives: _In English

Day 1 – 18 February 2013 – part 1

1 Reply
Victoria Terminus

The impressive Victoria Terminus station, actually called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. 17 February 2013.

So I touched ground in Mumbai, in India, at about 5am on the 17 February. I felt immediately the differences between travelling on a shoestring as a cheap freelancer and travelling this way. Two guys from the hotel were waiting for me at the airport at this inhumane hour. They kindly took me to a big car, where they offered me a wet towel to refresh myself and a wide range of drinks, plus two very good sweets that I ate at once. Then I was given a little tour of and introduction to Mumbai by one of the guys while they drove me to the 5-star hotel where we are staying. There I checked in and a lovely girl walked me to my room. Finally, and after sleeping for a couple of hours and having a shower, I had a huge and actually very good breakfast while reading the complimentary newspapers. And then I had a full day to explore Mumbai before the actual trip even began.

So, cheap freelance travelling: 0. This kind of travelling: 1

Beautiful trees.

Beautiful trees in South Mumbai (don’t ask me their name). 17 February 2013.

In the morning of the first day of the IRC’s reporting trip we had an orientation briefing and a talk by doctor Armida Fernandez, founder trustee of SNEHA, a Mumbai-based NGO focusing on women’s and children’s health.

At the briefing, IRP’s founder director John Schidlovsky talked about the organisation. He insisted on the editorial independence of the program, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As far as I can tell, this is true. John and the other IRP staffers have encouraged us to hold a critical point of view when talking to and about NGOs and other organisations during the trip and to make up our minds ourselves. Apart from this, of course the Gates Foundation will want the trips to be to places where they work, and they do a lot of work in India.

Then we introduced ourselves and it was interesting to see how not only we come from different backgrounds but there are several who are not journalists as such. I am very curious to see the stories the others will produce. And I believe the experience of being all here together may be enriching for each other.

Finally, Dr Fernandez gave us an overview of child survival issues in India. She began her talk by saying, yes, that India is the world’s biggest democracy and that she is proud of it. She said India has improved its maternal and child survival situation in the last couple of decades but a lot of more work has still to be done.

A personal note about the world’s biggest democracy. Saying this has become kind of a cliché to start stories about India. But in my opinion, it doesn’t say much on its own. Having a democracy is not the goal but rather the starting point. Then you have to make the democracy work and, ha, that’s hard. Not only in a huge, young state like India or in a developing African country like Kenya (where I lived for most of the last three years and a half) but anywhere in the world. Have a look at my country, Spain. It has quite a dysfunctional democracy, populated by many corrupt politicians who have done almost nothing good to stop the economic impoverishment of the country during the last years. Anyway.

Mumbai taxi

An old taxi in Mumbai. 17 February 2013.

Dr Fernandez then told us about figures and, actually and since these are public figures, let me quote from the notes the IRC gave us prior to this trip (cheap freelance travelling: 0 – this kind of travelling: 2):

“A September 2012 UNICEF report revealed that more than 6.9 million Indian children under the age of five died in 2011, a rate more than six times higher than China’s statistics. While India has improved its rate of child survival by 48% since 1990, it continues to lag behind poorer neighbors like Bangladesh and Nepal. India’s child mortality toll is more than those of Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo combined.”

This could be misleading. India does have the biggest number of children under-5 dying. But with such a big population, estimated at 1.2 billion people, India hast the biggest number of people living and dying in many ways. When it comes to the under-5 mortality rate (per 1,000 live births), India fares much better than many countries. According to the World Bank, in 2011 61 children-under 5 (per 1,000 live births) died in India, which makes it the 49th worst country in the world. Of course this is still bad but it’s much better than those rates of Sierra Leone (185), Somalia (180) and Mali (176), which are the top 3. As a comparison, those countries in the actual top have a rate of 2 (San Marino, Liechtenstein) or 3 (Iceland, Norway, Sweden but also Singapore, Slovenia and Cyprus, for instance).

South Mumbai

A policeman on a charming street in South Mumbai. 17 February 2013.

During her talk, Dr Fernandez highlighted some of the important underlying issues when it comes to maternal and child survival in India. The role of family planning and how many husbands may oppose the use of contraception. The big differences between urban and rural India and how to reach to those people living in small places scattered around huge rural India. The relationship between health and nutrition (apparently not that obvious in some rural areas). The access to clean water (a most important and sometimes unregarded issue, in India and in many other places all over the world). The clash between some religious and traditional beliefs and health practises like immunisation. Urban poverty, the terrible living conditions in the slums and some contradictions like the fact that many poor families won’t use the free public health system, because they think if it’s free it mustn’t be as good as a private doctor (who may not even be an actual doctor). And of course corruption.

A funny quick note about this. I’ve seen a board over a café in South Mumbai saying: “Our politicians need to take a lesson from the Pope”. Ha, I think many of us not Indians identify with that (and again, just have a look at my country). But of course it’s not that politicians should take a lesson from the Pope. After all, this is a man who was running a hermetic, outdated and undemocratic organisation and who only resigned because of his old age. In my opinion, politicians should resign when they are caught in corruption scandals. And even if unfortunately we in many parts of the world are getting used to them, every corruption case should be a scandal, even small ones. Democracies aspiring to become functional should aim for zero tolerance on corruption, period.

As Dr Fernandez noted, corruption may cost lives. It is as simple as that. When it affects maternal and child health corruption may partially be the cause for women and children dying unnecessarily in India and in other places.

But she also told us about good things. The eradication of polio in India, which is one of the great success stories out there. And also, for example, how nowadays many more women, after being incentivised with some little money, go to hospitals to give birth, which greatly decreases maternal and new born mortality.

Finally, we were set for our first field visit to one of the slums of Mumbai, a rich city where an estimated 10 million people live in the slums. Talk about inequality.

Unethical journalism

3 Replies

Yesterday, the Independent’s columnist Johann Hari apologised publicly for wrongdoing. It turns out for the last weeks Hari was being accused in the blogosphere and on Twitter of plagiarism and factual embellishment. After repeatedly denying those allegations, Hari has admitted to plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists by editing their Wikipedia entries using an alias. However, the apology is soft and it even seems Hari is taking the blame off himself and putting it onto his interviewees.

There have been many takes on this apology, many commentators praising Hari and as many (or more) criticising him again. The best comment I’ve seen is on Bagehot’s notebook in the Economist. The text perfectly summarises how and where the responsibility lies when interviewing people and goes on to discuss the related temptations when reporting from faraway countries. It’s a must read. I subscribe every word and, of course, couldn’t say it better myself. So here’s a big chunk of Bagehot’s article:

It is a nifty defence: there he was, travelling the world to meet all these famous and brilliant people, conducting all these excellent interviews, only to find, on returning to his hotel room to transcribes his tapes, that time and again his subjects had garbled their lines.

I do not recognise the phenomenon Mr Hari is describing. Some interviews go well, others less well. But in the midst of each conversation, as I write my notes, I am aware (sometimes heart-sinkingly aware) whether my subjects are saying interesting things or not. I also know something else: if you go to interview someone who is famous or important or witty or wise (as opposed to a member of the public swept up in a news event) and they say only boring or incoherent things, it is mostly your fault.

This is what baffles me about those colleagues leaping to Mr Hari’s defence. It is as if they imagine conducting an interview is mostly an act of stenography: you find someone interesting, ask them things, and then write down what they say. It is not stenography. Perhaps 80% of the knack of interviewing involves the ability to get people to open up and say striking things. When a subject is bored, or tired, or hostile your job is to charm or provoke them. It can be hard work. Surprisingly often, it can feel like (non-sexual) flirtation.

If you come away with gems, you know it, and may call your editor to say: “It went really well, he gave me some really great quotes.” If you come away with a notebook full of mush, you are not allowed to go to another interview conducted by someone else who was given better quotes and take them without attribution. If you do, that is stealing.

…

One of the things you find out fast as a foreign correspondent, especially reporting from the developing world, is that there is very little to stop you making things up, except your own conscience. Out in a Chinese field, interviewing a peasant who has had his land stolen, or out in an Afghan refugee camp speaking to victims of Taliban brutality, it soon becomes obvious that if you embellish and improve quotes, nobody is going to find out. Chinese peasants and Afghan refugees are not going to read your work, and are not going to shop you to your editors.

As it happens, and you are going to have to take this on trust I fear, I am a fantastic prig and Puritan on this subject, and fanatical about getting quotes straight and reporting only what I have seen, or if I am quoting what a local or a photographer or a wire agency saw, saying so. That is not because I am a saint. It is more about managing the existential angst of being a reporter a long way away from home: once you start making things up a bit, you might as well start making it all up and file without even getting on a plane. And then you quickly feel the ground vanishing beneath your feet: if you are inventing things, why be a journalist at all?

I know some foreign correspondents who have gone down that route, and have had priggish arguments with some of them. Plagiarists, liars, make-it-up merchants, they all exist. The war correspondent solemnly announcing to television viewers that he is on the front line, when he is 20 miles from the fighting and his colleagues are mocking him just out of shot. The foreign correspondent who wrote a vivid portrayal of an Asian dog meat restaurant, complete with descriptions of brutal dog-killing, callous chefs and hungry punters, without actually visiting the country in question, and who—when I challenged him–told me “oh that, it was a bit of imagineering”. The gentler souls who use foreign languages to cut corners. (I once knew a correspondent with the amazing gift of diving into a Chinese crowd and coming out, 30 seconds later, with the perfect quote, despite pretty limited Mandarin. I never had the heart to say: great quote, now tell me how you say that in Chinese.)

Dealing with climate change in the real world + bonus track

Leave a reply

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has published a paper in which they analyse how ten African countries are dealing with climate change (pdf). The countries studied are the members of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA). They are Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

IFPRI studied 26 different strategies to cope with the challenges brought up by climate change:

Of the 26 strategies mentioned, only two are common to all 10 countries, while five more are common to five or more. The strategies common to all member countries include the development and promotion of drought-tolerant and early-maturing crop species and exploitation of new and renewable energy sources. Most countries have areas that are classifiable as arid or semiarid, hence the need to develop drought-tolerant and early-maturing crops. Strangely, only one country recognizes the conservation of genetic resources as an important strategy although this is also potentially important for dealing with drought. Biomass energy resources account for more than 70 percent of total energy consumption in ASARECA member countries. To mitigate the potential adverse effects of biomass energy depletion, ASARECA countries plan to harness new and renewable energy sources, including solar power, wind power, hydro and geothermal sources, and biofuels.

As it turns out, Sub Saharan Africa is the most vulnerable continent to the possible consequences of climate change. For example, the African Development Bank says about this:

Recent assessments have shown that the economic costs of climate change in Africa are likely to be significantly higher in relative terms than in other regions of the world. The costs of addressing the huge impacts of climate variability in Africa are already being felt on the continent. In East Africa, for example, major periodic droughts and floods have cost 5%-8% GDP per event. Their regular frequency has a direct long-term fiscal liability of over 2% GDP per year that is largely absorbed by the national governments.

And a few months ago, a US House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health heard the US State Department’s Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, Jonathan Pershing, and four other experts from Conservation International (CI) – about the consequences of climate change in Africa:

Committee Chairman Donald Payne (D-NJ) in his opening remarks said, “African nations emitted only about 3% of world carbon dioxide from human-related sources in 2007. However Africa [because of its arid landscape, development challenges, and surging populations] is most likely to experiences rises in temperatures first. That’s not fair.”

“We are greatly concerned by climate change and believe that we are already living with its impacts”, testified Ambassador Rajaobelina, from severe droughts, to increasingly devastating cyclones, and rising continental temperatures.

“For people in poverty and simply trying to survive on a daily basis, even small climatic changes that impact a harvest can be catastrophic. Adaptation responses that improve the ability of the rural poor to cope with events for which they cannot plan are clearly going to be needed.”

I found out about the IFPRI report via Duncan Green and, as he says:

While climate change negotiators seem to be wading through metaphorical cement, national governments have no choice but to get on with adapting to current and future climate change, as far as they are able.

The latest example? The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen last December. Which was either a failure or a failure.

But an important point is this: many Sub Saharan African countries are already struggling to feed their populations and, if anything, climate change could make this harder.

So it’s good to know that, while the international community talks and talks, some affected countries are trying to do something practical, according to the IFPRI’s report.

In Nairobi, there is the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). ILRI is one among other centres which form the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). According to their 2009 financial report (pdf), ILRI is funded “by more than 90 private, public and government organizations of the north and South”.

Last March, I went to ILRI and did a story for Efe on the opening of a new lab at ILRI. This new lab is the BecA hub, which stands for Biosciences eastern and central Africa hub. Even though it won’t be officially launched until November, the BecA was then already working at 95 percent of its capacity. Their main research programmes at the time were about drought-resistant crops, plant parasites and livestock diseases. They were studying the local crops and livestock varieties present around them, in Kenya and the rest of East Africa. The aim was to improve the practical and material conditions for farmers and herders to produce more and better stuff. It doesn’t sound very sexy and you won’t see very often these issues featuring in the mainstream media. But a new cassava crop or a new vaccine for cows could greatly improve the lives of many people in the region.

I talked to Carlos Seré, ILRI director general, and Segenet Kelemu, BecA director. We talked about how to improve the food security in East Africa. They both seemed no-nonsense to me. They acknowledged the complexities of farming in East Africa and the impossibility of a green revolution in the conventional sense. “Here, we need a million green revolutions for the million particular problems”, Seré would tell me. They wanted the researchers to go and talk to local farmers. They wanted the research done here about the very problems of the region. Instead of big plans to save Africa, they asked for better roads and irrigation infrastructures.

Global climate change summits are fun to attend as a delegate or a journalist or to protest against. Big plans to save the world are great to make the headlines and to write flowery speeches. And, hey, both things may have actual good consequences and everything. But I keep thinking organisations and institutions based locally and dealing with local problems to improve the local situation will have a much bigger impact to improve people’s lives.

Bonus track: global warming, climate change and blah blah

Now, I’m no expert on climate change (I think I’m no expert on anything, actually). But it’s for people like me that Wikipedia was created. There is some controversy surrounding whether the current global warming is being mostly caused by humans or not. That’s not my point now (even though there’s almost complete scientific consensus on human-made climate change). One point is that the consensus about global warming actually happening, no matter whose fault it is, is even greater and that this will have likely negative consequences for us people.

Climate model projections summarized in the latest IPCC report indicate that the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the 21st century. The uncertainty in this estimate arises from the use of models with differing sensitivity to greenhouse gas concentrations and the use of differing estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions. An increase in global temperature will cause sea levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern of precipitation, probably including expansion of subtropical deserts. Warming is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost and sea ice. Other likely effects include changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, species extinctions, and changes in agricultural yields. Warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe, though the nature of these regional variations is uncertain. Another major worldwide concomitant of global warming, and one which is presently happening as well as being predicted to continue, is ocean acidification, which is likewise a result of contemporary increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Of course, that’s Wikipedia speaking. But if you are really bored, go and check all those links and the sources the articles quote, that’s where all the meat is.

And the other point is, no matter whether climate change is real or if it’s our or the cows’ fault, food security in Sub Saharan Africa is already very fragile and should be addressed in ways that actually make change.

(The bolding in the quotes is mine.)

War is boring

2 Replies

David Axe is a military correspondent, as he is introduced in the website he shares with some other people. This website is called War is Boring.

This website is interesting. In it, Axe and others post their own stories, pictures, drawings and videos from conflict zones. This is part of their mission statement:

We are citizen journalists with a deep interest in world and national security. We are opposed to violence but recognize the necessity and utility of war. We advocate diplomacy and compromise over force as a solution to conflict.

We are wary of partisan politics, skeptical of the military-industrial-media complex, calm in the face of extremists’ rhetoric and adamant that open debate almost always trumps secrecy.

We lament the passing of old media but embrace the emergence of New Media. As journalists, we abide by three simple rules:

* Be accurate
* Be honest
* As often as possible, observe first-hand

We are expeditionary, investing our own resources and those donated to us, in order to travel to current and emerging conflict zones.

(…)

I would add ‘Be transparent’ to those “simple rules”. Be transparent to both your sources and readers (viewers, whatever). Or at least be as transparent as you can be given the circumstances of the situation. But anyway, cool enough.

In 2006, Axe published a “graphic novel war memoir” called War Fix, drawn by Steve Olexa. And now he is publishing another graphic novel, this one called too War is Boring and illustrated by Matt Bors. This second one is a more personal account of his life as a conflict reporter for four years. During that time, Axe reported from East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Chad and a few other places.

It looks at least interesting, as the comic offers different possibilities than more traditional media to tell war stories (not that this is the first ‘war comic’ ever, but anyway).

He published this new book this month and so he’s giving interviews and stuff. Yesterday, Noah Shachtman posted an article about it in Wired’s Danger Room (DR). Axe has written for Wired, he and Shachtman are friends and this article is mostly made up of an email exchange between them. This offers a revealing -if short- insight into this guy’s experiences and is worth to read. I’m highlighting this for you to go there and read it in full:

DR: You’ve covered just about every war on the planet. Why don’t you like being called a war correspondent?

DA: (…) So I’m not a war correspondent in the truest sense of the word. I’m something else. I like to use the term “conflict reporter,” since I spend 2/3 of my time sitting on my ass in Columbia, S.C., writing about war and technology from a distance, rather than “corresponding” from the battlefield.

(…)

DR: You wrote that you started covering war zones, in part, to make you “smarter, sexier, and happier.” How’d that turn out?

DA: Not at all. I brought back one serious skin condition from Iraq and another from Africa. Two bouts of dysentery in Iraq mean I now have trouble digesting many foods. I can be rather volatile and depressive these days. I don’t always make for pleasant company.

I said this is revealing because I find it’s not the usual image most people may have of a war or conflict reporter. What do you think about this?

Warning: Bad journalism inside

Leave a reply

We journalists, newspapers and the media in general don’t respect the reader anymore. We just write and publish the stupidest stories and don’t give a shit about it. Sourcing the information? Ugh, too much work. Linking to the original source when writing online? I feel too lazy. Double-checking the data? Who do you think I am, a serious scientist? We shouldn’t just copy and paste press releases as news? Oh, but it’s so quick and easy and it looks like real news. We shouldn’t publish unverified claims as facts? What, do you want me to actually do some work and find out…?

I find, via Bad Science‘s @bengoldacre, these journalism label warnings by Tom Scott (who has other cool stuff too, funny guy).

They are just brilliant. Do visit the webpage and check them out because they are excellent.

Shit, Wikipedia is unverified? (Photo: Tom Scott)

Shit, Wikipedia is unverified? (Photo: Tom Scott)

Other warnings, but not all, are:

  • Statistics, survery results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company.
  • This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.
  • Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.
  • To ensure future interviews with subject, important questions were not asked.

Imagine there was something like a ‘Respecting the Reader Service’. It would be in charge of posting these warnings in the many suitable articles just before the papers go to the newsdesk. Oh man. I think that would bring many journalists down a peg or two and bakeries would run out of humble pie.

Go and read them and tell me what you think: Is it more appropriate to laugh or to cry at this? I vote for laughing.

Y si hablas español, te aburres, tienes tiempo libre y no eres tan vago como yo, por favor, haz algo parecido en nuestro idioma :-)

What’s up in development economics?

Leave a reply

Via Chris Blattman: available free in pdf the latest symposium on the Agenda for Development Economics in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

These are the contents:

  • Understanding the Mechanisms of Economic Development — Angus Deaton
  • Theory, General Equilibrium, and Political Economy in Development Economics — Daron Acemoglu
  • Diagnostics before Prescription — Dani Rodrik
  • Uneven Growth: A Framework for Research in Development Economics — Debraj Ray
  • Giving Credit Where It Is Due — Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
  • Microeconomic Approaches to Development: Schooling, Learning, and Growth — Mark Rosenzweig

Is WikiLeaks’ Afghan diary “a bad precedent for the Internet’s future”?

1 Reply

Reporters Without Borders (RSF, in French) today published an open letter to Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, its spokesperson and recent worldwide media and internet celebrity. In it, RSF openly criticises him and WikiLeaks about the publication of the ‘Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010‘. WikiLeaks presented this as a “compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010″. And it has its own website: Kabul War Diary.

This ‘diary’ was published by WikiLeaks last 26 July. But prior to this, WikiLeaks worked with the Guardian, the New York Times and the Spiegel, all of which published online and one day before their particular more journalistic version of the big leak.

On the same 26 July, the White House condemned the leak and accused WikiLeaks “of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America’s national security of the US“.

And a few days later, some US officials went personally for Assange and admiral Mike Mullen graphically said WikiLeaks could already have blood on their hands:

Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.

And then Assange defended WikiLeaks’ action and said it was the US itself that might have failed to its sources:

We are appalled that the US military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled. We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities.

…

This material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan… It’s the US military that deserves the blame for not giving due diligence to its informers.

The debate went and goes on and one can only imagine how excited some journalism students -and how bored some others- may be while discussing the whole thing and drinking at the Queen Boadicea.

And now here it comes RSF joining the criticism. It’s an interesting text in itself and the arguments are mostly pragmatic and involve the security of the sources.

RSF begins its letter by saying the WikiLeaks’ logs disclosed “the names of Afghans who have provided information to the international military coalition that has been in Afghanistan since 2001″. Later it goes on and says that “revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks“.

Now, I don’t know if it’s that easy to identify the informants mentioned in the logs, so I’ll leave that point aside.

Then RSF offers a pragmatic argument about the consequences for the internet in democratic countries:

We are not convinced that your wish to “end the war in Afghanistan” will be so easily granted and meanwhile, you have unintentionally provided supposedly democratic governments with good grounds for putting the Internet under closer surveillance.

This is an interesting point for anybody publishing stuff in the internet. Should you not publish something that is worth knowing because democratic governments could find it uncomfortable and could put the internet under close surveillance? Mmm, that’s a difficult one. Or is it? I would go ahead and publish it. Then it’s up to the government. One can argue how much any particular information is worth knowing and if this outweighs the risk of the government then increasing internet surveillance – but that’s missing the point. I think the point is: are you responsible for the government’s move after your publication? I do not think so, not even considered from a purely pragmatic point of view. Also, doing otherwise and not publishing it would mean there is a red line you don’t want to cross and that, effectively, the possibility of the government knowing did stop you from publishing something. Which is bad.

Then, in my opinion, RSF goes to a key point:

Nonetheless, indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility. Journalistic work involves the selection of information. The argument with which you defend yourself, namely that Wikileaks is not made up of journalists, is not convincing. Wikileaks is an information outlet and, as such, is subject to the same rules of publishing responsibility as any other media.

I think the arguments Assange uses to defend himself and WikiLeaks are much more complex than only that. After all, Julian is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. (Ups, there it goes, I didn’t want to say I know him but couldn’t help it.) Anyway. The main point is what I made in bold. I agree with it: anybody or anything that publishes information should be held to the same rules of “publishing responsibility” as any other person or organisation that also publishes stuff. What takes me back to the former point. I don’t think anybody should not publish something fearing the government’s reaction might be to increase the surveillance of the internet (which anyway governments try already to do).

Then RSF says Assange and WikiLeaks “cannot claim to enjoy the protection of sources while at the same time, when it suits you, denying that you are a news media”. Again, I think RSF misses the point. WikiLeaks does protect the identity of their sources. If we are to believe them, they say they even avoid knowing who their sources are and so they couldn’t reveal them even if they wanted to.

And finally, RSF makes the judgement:

The precedent you have set leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals. Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium.

What? The Afghan informants who may be in danger didn’t become informants “for the sake of online information”. They did because they thought they were doing the right thing or because the US army paid them or whatever the reason. They probably didn’t think their information would end up freely available in the internet. And they were the US army’s sources. Apart from that, how does this whole thing actually affect whoever risks her freedom or her life for the sake of online information? I don’t think risking your freedom or your life for the sake of online information has become riskier, or less risky, because of this whole issue. In the occasions when it’s dangerous, wherever every time it happens to be, I think it remains as much as it was before.

And about the second point in that paragraph. This hasn’t endangered WikiLeaks’ sources. If Bradley Manning is a source of WikiLeaks’, as funny as the story looks like, then it was he who got himself into trouble by confessing to Lamo. Nothing to see with WikiLeaks. If it wasn’t him, nothing has happened to any source of WikiLeaks’ as far as we know. And I can’t see how the Afghan logs could endanger those who already are WikiLeaks’s sources or those who may become so in the future.

So I don’t really see the point of this letter – apart from the argument that I left aside: whether the publication of the logs does endanger the Afghan informants’ lives or not. Again, I don’t know enough about that issue to really discuss it. But I don’t think this very issue is one for RSF to send an open letter to Assange. I think it’s not the stuff RSF usually deals with or criticises people or organisations for.

But I think the more journalistic and media-related arguments RSF makes, about protecting the sources and being careful about not annoying the government, are mostly bullshit. Why did they say all this?

Anyway, an idea comes to my mind about the whole informants thing. If, as Assange claimed, “this material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan”, and if it’s that easy to identify informants in the text, then maybe whoever wrote the logs should’ve been more careful when mentioning the sources? Then maybe there should be different rules in place when writing these logs to protect the informants’ identities? Or maybe not, I don’t know.

WikiLeaks and the ‘Afghan diary’ may or may not be bad for a number of reasons and Julian Assange may be becoming too much of a celebrity himself. But, as much as I respect RSF, I think this letter is mostly bullshit. Even though, now that I think about it and to be honest, I don’t know that much about RSF. But anyway, I don’t understand why they wrote this letter and what they are actually after with it. We’ll see what Assange replies if he does.

I’m meeting some friends for dinner and cocktails and I’m already late. And so I wrote this very quickly and I’m sure I made mistakes and I hope I said outrageous things. Or maybe it’s not RSF but me who is missing the points here. And I could even be wrong about something, even if such a thing doesn’t usually happen to me. So c’mon, say it, point those things out in the comments and let’s begin an interesting debate for the first time in the history of this blog.

(All the bolding in the quotes is mine.)

Is aid depressing? And two giraffes

3 Replies

I find, via William Easterly’s Aid Watch, a post by Chris Blattman that quotes another by Todd Johnson and that, me too, what the hell, I’m going to quote:

“Africans don’t see a reward system in place for being entrepreneurial. In fact, they view it as a matter of survival, not an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. Rather, what they learn at a very early age, is that in order to make good money, they should learn to speak English incredibly well and then maybe, just maybe, they can get a job driving for an NGO. In a few years, if they play their cards right, they might be able to land an NGO job as a project manager and even advance further.”

Sammy’s point was simply this. As a struggling businessman creating new start-ups, he could not compete with what NGO’s were paying for some of the best and brightest. And even worse, he said, “by the time the NGO’s are done with them, there isn’t an ounce of entrepreneur left.”

And then there is the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle’s reaction to this:

I don’t really know what to do with this.  On the one hand, it’s terrible to think that aid is keeping economies from developing–and this isn’t the only such critique; there are also fears that aid acts like a “resource curse”, insulating political leaders from the need to win public support for their spending, and breeding corruption.  On the other hand, I’m not sure I’m quite willing to walk up to a woman dying from malnutrition to tell her that I’m sorry, we’d like to help, only unfortunately it would distort the local economy and so I’m afraid you’ll need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.

On the third hand, I’m conscious that in this scenario, I am biased towards the seen harm, rather than the unseen–I’ll never identify the people who might have been pulled out of poverty if we hadn’t screwed up their economy, so my tendency is to discount them.

Aid is the most depressing topic in economics.  I don’t know how William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs stand it.

Apart from the whole intertextuality thing and me pretending to be cool by quoting all these famous people, this is an illuminating debate. And it is so thanks to its simplicity and how clearly it illustrates these two main viewpoints among people who look into the aid and development businesses.

The thing is, aid and development economics are awfully complicated. They many times have negative unintended consequences. The possitive unseen consequences remain, precisely, unseen. And it’s difficult to know if one is helping or is rather being part of the problem.

So one can say, with McArdle, Shit, this is so complicated that I don’t know what to do and actually I find it depressing. But then, and usually after saying that first thing, one can also say, Shit, this is so complicated that I find it fascinanting and am going to work hard on it to find out what actually works. That’s more or less what Blattman responds:

Aid is only depressing if you start off with the wrong expectations.

Aid is not a mythical goddess, walking through a barren field, greenery spouting in her wake. None of us, including McArdle, really believe such a thing, but we do approach charity as though rapid transformation is possible.

It’s uplifting (well… less depressing) to remember a few things.

1. This takes time (…)

2. Aid can only speed this diffusion or accumulation a little. Ultimately it’s up to the Africans or South Americans or Central Asians. If you’re not from there, the best you can do is help those willing (or unable) to help themselves.

3. When you throw gobs of money and people at an economy, there are going to be side effects. Some of them will be bad. Some will surprise you. The main difference between prescription drugs and aid is that, when we give countries aid, no one makes us give them a four minute speech telling them that aid may cause rashes, stomach pain, and erectile dysfunction.

4. Failure happens (…)

5. Most of the failures are small, while the victories are huge (…)

This, of course, brings up the next level of the debate: what the hell does actually work and how in earth to find out? Is it the big, really big, plan that will end poverty in 5 yeas time? Or is it more a bottom-up approach, the one able to change little things one at a time, the right one?

Me, I’ve gone from the silly idealism I held in London to the pragmatic and much more limited view I have now, after one year in Kenya. And I find Easterly’s scepticism and realism about this issue necessary:

However, their dialogue does remind me of  The Big Question that I and many others get whenever we give lectures on economic development. Inevitably, after every single lecture I have ever given, the first question is … What Can I Do to End World Poverty?

How to respond? On one hand, I want to (and usually do) salute the questioner for their willingness to give of themselves for those less fortunate. I admire their idealism and commitment.

On the other hand, I find this question to be unproductive and frustrating. It sounds mean, but the honest response (which I have never given) is, “look, the biggest problem to solve in economic development today is NOT what you can personally do to end poverty.”  Poor people do not perceive THEIR biggest problem to be that rich people are agonizing how to help them.

More constructively, I want to say: Don’t be in such a hurry. Learn a little bit more about a specific country or culture, a specific sector, the complexities of global poverty and long run economic development. At the very least, make sure you are sound on just plain economics before deciding how you personally can contribute. Be willing to accept that your role will be specialized and small relative to the scope of the problem. Aside from all this, you probably already know better what you can do than I do.

But I do salute you again, and I do believe when there are enough people like you, you will cumulatively make a difference.

I made bold those lines in Easterly’s text and these area a few points I will contribute to the debate from my very short experience in Kenya. Not that I’m going to say anything new or super intelligent (there would be almost no blogs if people only wrote posts to say new or super intelligent things), but anyway:

- Aid and development workers tend to be intelligent and dedicated individuals who know they won’t save the world by themselves.

- They usually complain about too much bureaucracy and too many bureaucrats.

- They usually say projects they helped to set up at a local level won’t survive a week after the project is done and the organisation they work for leaves it there.

- Many ‘poor’ people don’t see themselves as poor. And, if anything, they are the best suited to make improvements to their lives’ material conditions within their lifestyle.

- Lack of money or funding doesn’t seem the problem as much as corruption and bad governance for these States to be ineffective. I don’t think giving money directly to a government here will be of much help, unless they can be made accountable for every penny they’re given.

- A visit any day to Kibera, the biggest slum in Nairobi (yes, and maybe the biggest in Africa, as white people who’ve been there like to say), shows that the entrepreneurial spirit is well and alive as many small businesses compete to offer the most amazing goods and services.

- NGOs (and UN programmes and the such) may have the effect of discouraging entrepreneurism – or may not. Some programmes may leave behind expertise and equipment that can help local entrepreneurs. It depends on the case.

- Aid and development workers, journalists (like myself) and other expats in Kenya and other places tend to afford much higher living standards here than if we’d stayed home. Amazing houses and flats, maids, big cars, dinning out every evening at good places… Plus the excitement, coolness and ‘feel good’ of being doing these jobs.

- This doesn’t have to be counterproductive in itself, and may be one of the reasons why intelligent and dedicated individuals do come to ‘poor’ countries to try to help.

- But some workers may end up disconnected from the people and communities they are supposed to be aiding, as well as taking themselves too seriously and thinking they are more important than they really are.

- And finally, the red snapper and the tilapia at Osteria, an Italian restaurant in Hurlingham/Kileleshwa in Nairobi, are very good even if a bit pricey.

These are just some impressions I got after one year in Kenya and I am sure and hope you people can prove me wrong on some of them. Please do so in the comments.

Oh, yes, and here there are the two giraffes:

Aren't they cute?

Aren't they cute?

The future of the world job market

Leave a reply

Future of the world job market

"One billion youth world wide..."

“One billion youth world wide enter the employment market in the next decade. 85 % of these youth lives in developing or transitional countries!”

The source? This mural in Kariobangi North, an area of Nairobi next to the Korogocho slum. It may not have all the acronyms or abbreviations of a UN report or all the seriousness and abstract figures of an International Labour Organization‘s paper – but whoever painted it does have a point. As the population in many Western countries grows older and older, the youth from developing and transitional countries will have an important role in the future world job market.

Of course, this in itself doesn’t mean much and there are many more questions than answer about the whole thing. How actually globalised will the future ‘world job market’ be? Are we heading towards a global gerontocracy of old Western leaders and ‘dinosaur’ African ones among others anyway? What will happen if many of these ‘poor’ countries do develop during the next years and the youth stay at home instead of going abroad to turn into cheap labour for the advanced economies? Would then the ‘rich’ countries start to miss these people whom now they claim not to want? If, as it seems more than likely, financial and economic crises go on happening and States go on being unable of creating jobs, where would future jobs come from anyway? Oh well, and so many more…

Es viernes, lee algo sobre África / It’s Friday, read something about Africa

1 Reply

In English_

- There is a gold rush in Eritrea:

But among the stories of the mining boom in Eritrea and the mining companies’ stocks going up and down, the dirtiest secret that has remained untold is the extensive use of slave labor in these mining projects.

- Unlike many think, piracy in Somalia looks pretty much like any other ‘business’, pirates themselves are just the cheap labour force that’s trying to save some money and move to doing something else:

Piracy has become a sophisticated business. Pirates say the operations are now run by a small group of warlords and financiers based around the world. The men who do the dirty work get only a tiny piece of those multimillion-dollar ransoms.

- In the slum of Kibera in Nairobi, a “merry-go-round” microfinance program is keeping some residents fed and allowing them to send their childreen to school.

- ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo is finally coming to Kenya to officially launch the investigation on the 2007-2008 post-election violence. Expectations are high among most Kenyans except, maybe, for the very witnesses that are supposed to give evidence:

On top of this they also will be the least likely to be supported by either the ICC’s witness protection programme or the state’s witness protection agency.

Because both programmes are, for obvious reasons of law, most interested in the kinds of witnesses who can connect the dots and establish chain of command for the organised violence and the equally organised counter-attacks.

- Sonangol and the looting of Angola’s oil.

—————

En español_

- Casa África, una curiosa iniciativa del gobierno español para ‘acercar’ África a España.

- Human Rights Watch denuncia que hasta 50.000 niños en las escuelas coránicas de Senegal viven prácticamente como esclavos:

Muchos de los morabitos en daaras urbanas (profesores de las escuelas coránicas) demandan una cuota diaria a los niños que obligan a pedir limosna, e infringen graves abusos físicos y psicológicos a los que no cumplen con ello. Human Rights Watch documentó numerosos casos de palizas, y varios casos en que niños fueron encadenados, atados, y obligados a ponerse en posiciones de estrés mientras fueron golpeados.

- Hoy se estrena Viaje Mágico a África, la primera película española rodada en 3D.

- “Alejandría, una ciudad con encanto eterno”.