“Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”
This week’s Ramble feels like it hasn’t slept since Monday.
The IMF Mission to Malawi is in country, and so we’ve been busy with the attendant meetings and number crunching that always entails. Additionally, I’m still beavering away on our Joint Assistance Strategy and trying desperately to co-ordinate our work with that which goes into the Budget. I’ve also been performing some basic statistics and analysis of the balance of donor funding to Malawi to give us a start in the coordinating work that the JAS will inevitably entail. All of this has pretty much taken up all of my waking hours, but this week I’ve had two added important engagements: the second legs of the UEFA Champions League.
Malawi, like most of the rest of Africa, is absolutely football mad. Most of my colleagues follow the latest happenings in world football as least as passionately as they do the latest comings and goings in development economics. Since they’ve twigged that I spend pretty much every second of my existence thinking about football on some level, every time someone needs to know who the fat Brazilian who played holding midfield for Deportivo in the late ‘90s was* or who first had the brainwave of playing Gaizka Mendieta in central midfield**, they come to me. As a result, this week I’ve been more in demand for my assessment of Werder Bremen’s attack as my opinion on the number of projects purporting to support good governance in Malawi (for the record, those opinions are: bloody good; and too bloody many).
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday alternating between wild optimism about Milan’s chances and profound depression about the same. Come Wednesday night, would we see the Milan that played Juventus off the park or the one that wilted 3-0 to Palermo?
Anyone who’s been to The Daily Hairdryer (if you haven’t, why not?!) will already know how that went, and what I thought about it, so I’ll limit myself to saying this: YES!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHOO-HOO!!!!!!!
And to make a sweet night even sweeter, Liverpool, the team that stole our seventh European Cup, went out without a whimper, taught how to finish by a Barcelona reject and a guy who couldn’t lace Del Piero’s boots.
* * *
I mentioned briefly that I was doing some basic analysis on the balance of donor funded projects in Malawi. This is the first time this has been possible, because no-one has ever had anything close to comprehensive information on this before. Even though the results were only preliminary, they were very, very interesting.
Donors love to talk about capacity. ‘No, we can’t fund that; you don’t have the capacity’. ‘No, you can’t ask for that information; you don’t have the capacity to handle it’. ‘Our primary function is to build capacity here; to help you help yourselves’. So of course, they spend a lot on this sector, right? No chance. It’s one of the most under-funded areas of development. If our capacity constraints are more than just an easy excuse for donor failings, they should be willing to put their money where their mouths are and fund improvements, which I think we definitely need.
You also really see the fashions of the moment. By far the most projects running in the country focus on governance (promoting democracy, supporting elections, anti-corruption drives etc); these are all good things in their own right, but do they help improve the actual real living conditions of the impoverished farmer? I don’t think so. They should be funded, but a balance needs to be struck; not all donors should be active in this sector, and those that are should coordinate what their doing and focus on a few major projects.
By contrast, no-one wants to fund tourism promotion, despite the obvious benefits this brings to our foreign exchange reserves and the fact that it can be used to generate income from the poorest people outside of the towns; no tourist spends long in Lilongwe or Blantyre.
* * *
Went to a workshop on Monday attended by most of the heavy hitters in Malawi. It was facilitated by a consultant from abroad who spent most of the time cracking appalling jokes and trying to gee us up with consultant speak. One PowerPoint slide included the following phrases: ‘the tipping point’ and ‘re-orient to synergise: cluster, locate, sequence’. Shortly after beating the consultant to a bloody pulp with his laptop, a colleague commented that he clearly aspired to be the Jerry Springer of Development.
* Donato was the first brilliant fat Brazilian player I ever saw. The second was Ronaldo. Despite the naysayers, he’ll still wind up lighting up Germany 2006.
** Claudio Ranieri. The guy has a habit of building up teams to the cusp of greatness before getting the boot. The superb Valencia sides under Cuper and Benitez were raised by Ranieri. He built them around a reformed right-back who was the Frank Lampard of the Mestella before Lazio killed his career. He did the same for Chelsea – he signed all of their good players, excepting Essien.
The IMF Mission to Malawi is in country, and so we’ve been busy with the attendant meetings and number crunching that always entails. Additionally, I’m still beavering away on our Joint Assistance Strategy and trying desperately to co-ordinate our work with that which goes into the Budget. I’ve also been performing some basic statistics and analysis of the balance of donor funding to Malawi to give us a start in the coordinating work that the JAS will inevitably entail. All of this has pretty much taken up all of my waking hours, but this week I’ve had two added important engagements: the second legs of the UEFA Champions League.
Malawi, like most of the rest of Africa, is absolutely football mad. Most of my colleagues follow the latest happenings in world football as least as passionately as they do the latest comings and goings in development economics. Since they’ve twigged that I spend pretty much every second of my existence thinking about football on some level, every time someone needs to know who the fat Brazilian who played holding midfield for Deportivo in the late ‘90s was* or who first had the brainwave of playing Gaizka Mendieta in central midfield**, they come to me. As a result, this week I’ve been more in demand for my assessment of Werder Bremen’s attack as my opinion on the number of projects purporting to support good governance in Malawi (for the record, those opinions are: bloody good; and too bloody many).
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday alternating between wild optimism about Milan’s chances and profound depression about the same. Come Wednesday night, would we see the Milan that played Juventus off the park or the one that wilted 3-0 to Palermo?
Anyone who’s been to The Daily Hairdryer (if you haven’t, why not?!) will already know how that went, and what I thought about it, so I’ll limit myself to saying this: YES!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHOO-HOO!!!!!!!
And to make a sweet night even sweeter, Liverpool, the team that stole our seventh European Cup, went out without a whimper, taught how to finish by a Barcelona reject and a guy who couldn’t lace Del Piero’s boots.
* * *
I mentioned briefly that I was doing some basic analysis on the balance of donor funded projects in Malawi. This is the first time this has been possible, because no-one has ever had anything close to comprehensive information on this before. Even though the results were only preliminary, they were very, very interesting.
Donors love to talk about capacity. ‘No, we can’t fund that; you don’t have the capacity’. ‘No, you can’t ask for that information; you don’t have the capacity to handle it’. ‘Our primary function is to build capacity here; to help you help yourselves’. So of course, they spend a lot on this sector, right? No chance. It’s one of the most under-funded areas of development. If our capacity constraints are more than just an easy excuse for donor failings, they should be willing to put their money where their mouths are and fund improvements, which I think we definitely need.
You also really see the fashions of the moment. By far the most projects running in the country focus on governance (promoting democracy, supporting elections, anti-corruption drives etc); these are all good things in their own right, but do they help improve the actual real living conditions of the impoverished farmer? I don’t think so. They should be funded, but a balance needs to be struck; not all donors should be active in this sector, and those that are should coordinate what their doing and focus on a few major projects.
By contrast, no-one wants to fund tourism promotion, despite the obvious benefits this brings to our foreign exchange reserves and the fact that it can be used to generate income from the poorest people outside of the towns; no tourist spends long in Lilongwe or Blantyre.
* * *
Went to a workshop on Monday attended by most of the heavy hitters in Malawi. It was facilitated by a consultant from abroad who spent most of the time cracking appalling jokes and trying to gee us up with consultant speak. One PowerPoint slide included the following phrases: ‘the tipping point’ and ‘re-orient to synergise: cluster, locate, sequence’. Shortly after beating the consultant to a bloody pulp with his laptop, a colleague commented that he clearly aspired to be the Jerry Springer of Development.
* Donato was the first brilliant fat Brazilian player I ever saw. The second was Ronaldo. Despite the naysayers, he’ll still wind up lighting up Germany 2006.
** Claudio Ranieri. The guy has a habit of building up teams to the cusp of greatness before getting the boot. The superb Valencia sides under Cuper and Benitez were raised by Ranieri. He built them around a reformed right-back who was the Frank Lampard of the Mestella before Lazio killed his career. He did the same for Chelsea – he signed all of their good players, excepting Essien.
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 7:21 PM
