The Weekly Ramble from Malawi

"Step away from your busted-ass vehicle, and put your hands in the air!"

2008-02-14T11:46:00.005+02:00

In this edition of The Occasional Ramble from Malawi: Further excuses for the extreme infrequency of updates; and we ask: who wants to be a development economist?

* * *

From our pathetic excuses department: The Maradona has been pretty busy, but certainly not so busy as to be unable to draft even a phoned-in, cribbed-from-the-New-York-Times post. Mainly, my lack of Rambling has been because the problems I’ve been encountering at work have been the same ones I’ve Rambled about already in the last couple of years. I’m reluctant to repeat myself, so I’ve been silent. That, plus I’m lazy.

Recently, though, a new thought has occurred to me (I know, an original thought – whatever next?). I’ve talked a lot over the last two and bit years about why Aid doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work all that well. And recently, I’ve found myself becoming more and more open in my criticism of Aid, and finding that the vast majority of people I rant to agree with me. This leaves me with a rather basic question I’d never asked before:

If so many people agree that Aid isn’t working, why does it continue to be managed this way?

It has become increasingly apparent to me, as I’ve made contacts further and further up the Aid food chain, that the structure of Aid relations is determined not by individuals, or even by committees, but by institutions and structural relationships.

This is a pretty important statement for how we understand Aid, so let’s go into this a bit deeper. Take a bilateral donor agency, one that represents a specific Government and provides Aid to a number of Governments (or NGOs) in other countries for development. Lets say that the civil servant who heads up this agency is that rare breed, a competent, insightful, intelligent chap, who recognises the primacy of socio-economic transformation as a subject for attention in the development process (btw – I’m not just sexist. Almost all senior civil servants I’ve met are men). Now, we’ll give him $100 million of tax money.

Unfortunately, he can’t just spend it, in conjunction with the host Government, on consolidating land-holdings or stimulating some medium sized enterprises to wrest control of others and create a large enterprise. His first responsibility is not to the host Government, but to the taxpayers whose money he is about to spend. As a result, he must create a portfolio of activities that reflects their vision of what development is, and more importantly, what they are happy to see their money spent on. As a general rule, people don’t really like having money taken from them to make others rich, which is what Aid used for capitalist development would achieve. Never mind that it’s the best way to reduce poverty in the long term, the immediate use of the taxpayers money would have them baying for blood. Thus, health, education, gender rights etc. are pushed to the fore. All wonderful, important things, but not the basis for a self-sustaining economic development process.

There’s more: taxpayers also require results. Naturally. Someone takes my money to spend on ‘the greater good’, they’d better do a better job than I would have done myself. Our intrepid civil servant now enters the world of impact and outcome indicators. These lovely little things essentially seek to quantify the effect of each funding stream on the population it seeks to help. So, fair so far. But scratch the surface and we see another insidious effect: how do you show a direct link between expenditure on trade policy analysis and reform to economic growth and job creation? In practice the best an evaluation of a donor funded programme in this area can show is a correlation between the programme and improved results. And if the programme is doing good but coincides with, say, skyrocketing prices of oil, you may not even get that correlation. Thus, our civil servant, to best show taxpayers that their money is ‘getting things done’ focuses on what can be measured with proven causality: build a new school and count the number of children who graduate from it, or a new hospital and show how many new people are treated for malaria. Again, all very important, but only one aspect of what development requires.

So, we’ve seen how our civil servant is actually presented with a limited menu of options, given the institutional structure he finds himself in. He’s not unique – all his colleagues in the other bilateral agencies are faced with the same problems. So certain sectors are over-crowded and others too sparsely populated.

Without going into the same level of detail, Multilateral agencies are also constrained, but in a different way. They are not accountable to taxpayers directly, but rather to the various Governments who provide them with their funds. They have to justify their expenditure not against a public perception of what development is, but against the prevailing economic and social theory of development. Again, this distorts the way Aid is spent. I won’t go into the details, as it’s well covered in my archives, but the prevailing thinking doesn’t place nearly enough emphasis on the transitional aspects of development.

Most of the seasoned development workers I’ve met recognise this characterisation of the major Aid organisations. This brings me to a second question. Why do so many people work in development when there are such structural impediments to their effectiveness? Well, to be sure, there are a number of people who believe that the current structures work, and that sustainable economic development should take a backseat to immediate poverty reduction. They’re probably a minority, however, especially once you get to the policy-makers. So what of them? I think most of these people are just trying to do the best they can in difficult circumstances and trying, in their own way, to change these structures. But if efforts to change the structure of development organisations fail, eventually we will have to ask some very difficult questions. For example, what would happen if there was no Aid? Or at least no Aid agencies? It’s a thought experiment that I’ll reserve for a future blog.

A Hard and Inconstant World

2007-08-24T16:54:00.000+02:00

Time to make a change to the title of this page, perhaps? The Ramble is pretty well versed in self-deception (when I look in the mirror, I see a face that would put a young Paul Newman to shame), but this is indefensible, even for me. It’ll get worse before it gets better, too; I’m on holiday next month, and my Rambles may not come too frequently in that time.

Try to contain your depression, though - on the flip side, I’ve extended my stay here for a likely 12 months, so you’ve another year of infrequent mutterings to look forward to.

* * *

One of the arguments that I’ve made repeatedly in the last couple of years has been that to really understand the process of development and how we might stimulate it in places like Malawi, we first need to fully engage with the historical realities that characterized development processes elsewhere. Not to replicate them, mind, but to learn from them. It sounds trite to say, but too few people in this field think this way. There is an increasing trend in development economics to look to and appropriate from sociology, political science and even, to some extent, anthropology. But the holistic study of past development processes is still relatively uncommon. Sure, all economists can cite the examples of South Korea and Taiwan; but how many of us can talk with authority on their evolving socio-political make-ups during the process of development? It’s near-impossible to understand the economic changes they underwent, the policies they followed and their success except against this context. The logic of these policies often translates to other countries, until you start to look at the social and political structure, the power relations they reflect. If you ignore these you may apply policies to no effect or worse.

And before this? Can we not learn from English development? From American development, and German development?

I bang on about this time and time again, but many disagree with the emphasis I put on such knowledge. The main objection they raise is simple. The world has changed, and it’s now a far harder place to develop than it ever has been before.

* * *

It would be ironic if someone as concerned with the study of history as the Ramble is failed to recognise the fundamental truth in this. The world of the Industrial Revolution was profoundly different to that in which we live today. Equally, the context against which the East Asian Tiger economies expanded so rapidly is very different to the contemporary realities of Africa and South America.

Even a cursory examination supports this view. The global economic structure has changed enormously and at a growing pace over the last one hundred years. The extent, scope and ease of trade has changed beyond recognition. The means of production are more fluid than ever before; knowledge about trading conditions and economic potentialities are more extensive; access to foreign credit is greater. It is no longer the case that domestic entrepreneurs are best placed to expand and exploit opportunities for growth. This in turn has significant implications for the need to develop an indigenous capitalism (indeed, one can even question the need for one at all). Import substitution has worked, but only in some countries, and under specific conditions; and what’s more, its becoming harder – there’s more to substitute and consumer behaviours have changed just as much as producers in the new global economy.

Politically, too, the world is a very different place these days. The interactions of the economic superpowers with the developing world have changed enormously. Simple colonialism (if such a thing ever existed) is no longer a dominant form of interaction. However, it has been widely argued that through long term trends in primary commodity prices and the structure of the global capital markets (whose fluidity is not reflected in labour markets) the developed world has, if anything, increased its hold over the less developed; these economic changes increase the range of tools by which political influence can be established or maintained. What’s more, post-Cold War geopolitical priorities have changed the set of countries in which an economic vested interest is held, just as the Cold War was a divergence from previous geopolitical realities.

I could go on: the effects of globalized cultural influences on social values and behaviours in developing countries, and the further reaction this causes in Government is hardly insignificant. And I haven’t even mentioned one of the biggest changes of them all – the massive expansion and changing priorities of the aid ‘industry’, which has also had far-reaching effects on how we must understand the context in which we operate.

* * *

So change all around. But how much does all of this affect my argument on the importance of history? Sorry if this is an anti-climax, but not much. Firstly, it’s easy to overstate the actual impact of some of these changes (in particular, those who extrapolate trends in commodity prices into a system of exploitation by nations wear thin on my patience). Secondly, and far more importantly, the merit of studying historical processes is not to replicate them chapter and verse, but to learn the key lessons; the most important of these is that the though context and detail changes from one case to another, the development of a viable capitalism is as much a socio-political phenomenon as an economic one. Capital accumulation is the constant, but it looks different in different places, and to effect it, a great deal must be understood about the time and place in which you’re operating in. The knowledge of historical example helps us see what in particular we need to know about.

It won’t give answers for today’s development puzzles but it helps us ask the right questions. That’s the first step.

Don't Worry, Be Happy...

2007-07-22T22:22:00.000+02:00

The Ramble apologises profusely, yet again, for undue tardiness. I’d blame ‘circumstances’ once more, but a man must take responsibility for his inaction. I’ve been busy at work, and The
American Geordie (well known to regular readers) came to visit, but the main reason for my lack of Rambling was sheer, unadultered laziness. I shall attempt to reform. That said, I am writing this as I watch the cricket, in the hope that Tendulkar can entertain.

* * *

As mentioned above, the AG came to visit, with a sociologist doing research in Johannesburg, giving me the opportunity to go to Zomba again, which was great. As ever, the plateau was gorgeous, despite the apparently accelerating pace of logging; the walking was confusing, thanks to a map that bore no relation whatsoever to the real world; and the birds were numerous, which became a small consolation in the sixth hour of our three hour walk. Drinking in the Wheelhouse, a bar that is slowly but surely falling off the pier which houses it and into the lake it overlooks was equally rewarding and less complicated.

* * *

During a discussion over dinner with the AG, the aforementioned sociologist and a few others, conversation turned inevitably to my increasingly strident views on the drawbacks and limitations of development support. We were a disparate bunch: the AG is an economist, while the Ramble is a non-practicing economist. As mentioned above, we had a sociologist in our midst, and also an aid worker with Unicef and the owner of a tourist lodge in Zomba. Unsurprisingly, the conversation became an argument, without any satisfactory resolution (bugger. Tendulkar, lbw Panesar). It did get me thinking, however. I’ve posted at length many times previously on the various problems with development support, but what do donors do well?

Most of the debate over dinner focused on this central question. No one disputed that the ways in which donors have operated over the last few years has generally been sub-optimal. But there were convincing arguments that donors have traditionally intervened to positive effect in specific areas, and beyond this, are increasingly administering their aid in more productive ways. There’s definitely something to both arguments.

Firstly, development support in health and education has generally been well administered, at least in Malawi. Health is one of the few areas in which donors have been willing to accept that to make any sustained difference to the country, they will need to support recurrent funding, specifically salaries. Beyond this, aid to the health sector has been firmly in support of the Government’s own strategy for improving health care, giving us the greatest say in the direction of policy. From an economic point of view, as well, expenditure in the health sector makes very good sense – a healthy and productive workforce makes will improve whatever form of economic organisation it exists within. Similarly, from the humanitarian point of view: one of the huge black spots on Malawi’s public health record is our high maternal mortality rate – expenditure in this area can only be a good thing. In education, similar arguments can be made, though at Malawi’s level of development, education is not particularly important from an economic point of view – why do you need to spell if your job is package tea leaves?

The second plus point on development support raised was the improvements seen recently in the modes of aid delivery used. I’ve mentioned this before: budget support, allowing Government direct and unfettered control of the resources provided, and pooled funding in support of sector strategies, providing Government with funds to finance a strategy without donors stipulating how it should be spent, are both increasing - a very welcome development from the Government’s point of view. At the same time donors are under more and more pressure, much of it exerted by Government, to move towards best practices in aid delivery, to become more and more unobtrusive. I’ve seen the benefits of this approach – more responsibility for Government in the administration of resources ensures that Government can more directly control their use, while also building capacity to spend effectively. This is definitely a positive trend.

Predictably, though, I don’t think it’s that simple. Firstly, while support to education and health is generally a good thing, and well administered, it’s not without its problems. Donors know that these are the areas in which their aid has been most effective. As a result, they have heavily skewed their spending patterns to concentrate where they can easily demonstrate results – health is far and away the best funded sector in Malawi. What’s more it’s not just the actual funding that is skewed to these areas, but the available funding as well. This serves to skew Government’s priorities as well, as we tend to chase these available funds. Important areas, as I argued last week, are not being pursued with sufficient vigour.

Secondly, while it cannot be disputed that aid is delivered in more unobtrusive ways than before, there is still a long way to go. There are still very restrictive accounting and auditing requirements associated with untied aid, understandably. However, these procedures would not be a priority for Government in the absence of this aid – it distorts Government activities. Secondly, the assessments that determine how much budget support the Government will be allocated by donors remains heavily skewed towards social sectors and governance, again providing a distortion to Government activities. This is particularly true of the governance indicators – democracy, while a good in its own right, has nothing to do with the improvement of material wellbeing, the primary concern of most Malawians.

None of this should be read as unduly harsh or critical. I genuinely do believe that there are success stories in development support. But even in these successes we should point out the flaws in the way things work. No country has developed because of aid yet. That’s not to say it can’t work – but if we want it to work, we need to constantly think critically about the way it’s administered. Both Government and donors are learning how to use aid as we go along. Blindly celebrating every half-success will not help us.

The Famished Government

2007-06-21T21:49:00.000+02:00

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

* * *

Now, anyone who's been reading the Ramble will know I’m not capable of prose of that quality. They’re the first lines of The Famished Road, by Ben Okri (if you’ve not read this, shame on you. After you’ve finished the Wretched of the Earth, go buy a copy of it).

They came to mind when I was discussing one particular aspect of the aid relationship. I’ve Rambled previously about why Governments don’t just reject aid that isn’t designed to carefully match it’s priorities. Back then, my focus was primarily on what it is about Government’s relationship with donors that makes it very difficult to reject aid. Put briefly, it was because we are worried about alienating the same donors who will be bankrolling the vast majority of our budget come July. Recently, though, we’ve been discussing this inability to say no to aid frequently in our meetings, and I’ve come to realize that there’s a much more basic (and, as ever, controversial) issue that remains unresolved.

One ‘truth’ in development that has remained more or less unquestioned in the last ten years, as development has come to occupy a more prominent role in international politics, has been that it is massively under-funded. Most of what you read concerns this: Gordon Brown’s plan for Africa, NGOs fund-raising, those ludicrously unhelpful statistics like ‘people spend more on cosmetics each year than would be required to eradicate world hunger’ (really? For how long?).

This is also reinforced by the tenor of most development economics, which argues by omission that the socio-economic fundamentals for a successful economy are in place, and what is now needed is fine tuning to make things run efficiently. Developing countries have now bought into this, aided by the persistent sidelining of the heterodox economics. The practical result is that many developing country Governments spend more time chasing funds than thinking about how best to use them. We spend our time in meetings with donors finding out what reforms would persuade them to give us more money, more directly. We spend weeks drafting strategies for these reforms and months or even years implementing them. Behind all of this is the desire for more money.

More money wouldn’t be a problem. But the process of chasing it is. We may have a team of six competent people working full time on trying to unlock the extra hundred million dollars available if we were at the cutting edge of financial management practices. But the same kind of effort is rarely spent on trying to work out what it is about the distribution of land, capital and other assets that is retarding the capitalist development that should be at our fingertips, with so much cheap labour available. This should be what we spend our time on first; and then we should start thinking about reforming all of our systems to suit donors. Actually, many of the most important reforms for stimulating capitalist development don’t require much money at all. What they require is political will and the willingness and ability to make unpopular choices.

Ultimately, let’s be serious. In a world without aid, where would Government’s efforts be going? Economic governance – accounting, audit, budgeting? Nope. Not for a long time. First up would be private sector development, increasing incomes across the board, increasing taxation. Only after all of this has been achieved and a significant volume of domestic revenue was being raised would the economic governance side of things be pursued with any vigour. I highly doubt that in the midst of the industrial revolution or during Japan’s initial boom in the inter-war period, anyone said ‘well, this is all good and well, but before we develop the economy, we should have a world-class accounting system’.

I do understand that donors need to account for where their resources go. Their electorate, that of a much more developed country, demands this. That is precisely why developing countries should stop chasing aid, and start rejecting it. We need some, especially humanitarian aid. But it cannot be allowed to remain the focus of Government activity.

* * *

There’s another, very different impact of the focus on the under-funding of development in the Western media. It fosters the idea among those who donate money or are concerned about international development that it is something that we can throw money at to solve. As I’ve said above, this is not true in the least. Live 8 and similar events were amazing in the way they encouraged so many people to consider the problems of development. But they would have been so much better if they’d focused more on the substansive problems underlying development and not the need to give money to buy a treadle pump for a village somewhere.

* * *

Quick poll, if anyone cares: if I had the choice to introduce a number of people to a new film that they might not otherwise see, should I choose Shanghai Triad or I Vitelloni? Advice gratefully accepted.

What is to be done?

2007-06-08T23:24:00.000+02:00

The gaps are getting shorter. Pretty soon the Ramble will be worthy of it’s name again!

* * *

Regular readers of the Ramble (assuming, that is, that there still exists such a thing these days) will have noted that I’ve become increasingly critical in the standard approach to aid. This approach is the one which takes the path of least political resistance with regards to the Western nations, focusing on the easy sells of education, health and water supply. Now, only a fool would dispute the importance of these issues, but as I’ve said again and again, the real issue in development is the development of capitalism. Once it’s established and functioning, these issues can be resolved from within the domestic resources of the country, through Government taxation and expenditure. I’m not saying in the mean time that we should ignore these issues; each can have an impact on the formulation of a capitalism, and they are goods in their own rights.

What we do need to do, however, is look very carefully at the means through which we seek to improve health, education and the like, and consider fully how these methods are likely to impact on the development of capitalism. This is a test most donors fail. For most, it’s simple enough to argue that a healthy and educated workforce is good for the economy and leave it at that. This is not in dispute. Even where the economic structure is not conducive to or harmful to the development of capitalism, a healthy and educated workforce will most likely make whatever form of economic structure that does exist more efficient. Even where donors do contribute directly to

But there’s a fundamental question that is often left unasked. What impact does the structure of aid delivery itself have on the economic forms in the country? There are two elements to this. Firstly, we have to consider how the aid itself changes the way in which the economy and Government functions, and secondly, how the organizations set up to administer the aid change the economic landscape.

Both have enough impact to fill several Rambles, but let me give a flavour of what their impact is here. First let’s briefly consider the impact of the aid organizations themselves. The most obvious way in which the organizations have an impact is in attracting many of the best and most able professionals away from Government, with the lure of better salaries, and away from the private sector, with the lure of a stable and regular income. This is obviously a problem, and most donors recognise it and are doing their best to mitigate it, in their own ways.

However, there is much less engagement with the impact of the aid itself. The money available entices Government to change its spending plans and behaviours to unlock the resources available. This is normally borne of a short-termist mindset. Poor countries’ governments are usually extremely resource constrained, so the feeling is that any additional resources are worth pursuing. This is not the case. When the effort taken to unlock the resources available take one away from the economic policies most likely to deliver long term dividends in terms of the self-sustaining dynamism they generate, it’s not worth chasing the short term gain of greater resources. Development assistance should be sought and unlocked where it coincides with the policy direction required for the generation and sustenance of a true capitalism – not wherever it is available.

(Of course, all of this presupposes that in the absence of any distortions caused by aid, governments would be pursuing those socio-economic policies most likely to bring about capitalism. I don’t believe this is the case, a problem to do with the way mainstream economics treats the process of development).

So, what is to be done? I don’t believe that the answer is to abandon all aid. There is already a tendency to move towards ways of delivering aid that remove the problems mentioned above. Direct budget support, lump sums which are paid to developing country Governments, is a big step in the right direction. In too many cases, the volume and timing of this support is still determined by the donors concerns, the ones which they want to report back to their home Governments. But it’s undeniable that the modalities of aid delivery are gradually improving.

What remains now is for the agenda on aid to be reoriented. There needs to be a conscious decision to make economic transformation, capitalism and wealth creation the ultimate central goal of the development process, and to orient the way aid is organised and targeted around this. Not all donors will be expected to fund this directly (indeed, it’s very difficult to fund at all; this will be the subject of a future post). But all, whether focused on private sector development or HIV, need to pay attention to this in planning their activities. Aid can be delivered in a way that doesn’t cause as many problems as benefits. It just takes honesty in assessing how aid is and can be delivered, and the courage to focus on a long term goal that is far harder to sell than social development that most donors currently place at the centre of their plans.

“I think it’s turning back around… and I don’t think I like it…”

2007-05-28T21:48:00.000+02:00

The Ramble hangs its head in shame. I wish I could blame work, but that’s not the only reason. I’ve been lazy and distracted recently. Friends left Malawi and I reacted to my spare time with less Rambling, not more, as I read more books, watched more films, and spread the gospel of cricket more widely. (To sum: The Magus is disappointing, In This World is outstanding, and even during the World Cup Malawi doesn’t care about cricket).

Then, last week something extraordinary happened. AC Milan won the champions league. So overjoyed was I that I immediately thought of writing here – only to remember, this loose collection of thoughts should be about development and political economy, not football. So cap in hand, and with suitable contrition, I have returned.

* * *

The last section was a little bit wilfully disingenuous. There’s another, good, reason why I haven’t Rambled much recently. I’ve come the point where my job has started to repeat activities that I did last year; as a result, I’ve felt that fertile new topics to Ramble on were thin on the ground. That said, I realised that one of the most interesting things I could Ramble about was now possible: progress.

Two major events have dominated the last couple of months: a joint review of donor and Government performance and the budget. Chronologically, the first was the repeat of the review workshop, emceed last year by a low-rent Jerry Springer. This joint review is meant to be means of promoting mutual accountability in development, with donors and Government assessing the portfolio of development activities and seeking improvements.

On the whole it was quite positive. We got better reports than last year, giving us some concrete information as to what resources went into each sector and what results all of this achieved. Despite this, though, it went some way to confirming two unpopular opinions I’ve come to form.

Firstly, true mutual accountability is impossible in development. Donors can hold Government accountable by letting it be known that assessments such as these inform their funding decisions for Malawi as a whole, and also for each sector individually. Government, however, cannot effectively turn the tables on donors – we can’t make any credible threat to them. Except in the case of truly spectacular under-performance, Government will not realistically ask them to leave the country. The only thing we can do is shame those who are performing badly by publicising their poor performance. This will only work when the donors in question care what the rest of the development community thinks of their performance and when they agree that their performance has been assessed in a fair manner. Without naming names, not all donors will meet these requirements.

At the same time, even donor attempts to hold Government to account are hampered by a civil service low on capacity. Some sectors failed to report effectively and are likely, in the long run, to see less funding because of this. It’s not that the civil servants involved don’t care: many of them do, deeply. But they simply aren’t enough qualified people to do this kind of work to a high standard, and still deliver the core functions of the Ministry. The facile answer to this is to ‘build capacity’. What this means is less clear-cut, however. More training results in the trained people leaving Government. Technical assistance is a stopgap measure. Funding increased salaries would make a difference, especially if it contributed to the hiring of better managers by Government, but donors won’t go near salaries – it’s too difficult to justify to their own electorates.

Despite these problems, mutual accountability is an important principle. If a development partner agrees to support Government’s development programme, that donor needs to know that the programme is effective. At the same time, donors have a responsibility to administer their aid in a manner that makes it as easy as possible for Government to use their aid to achieve desired results.

Which brings us to my second opinion that was strengthened through this review: poor countries do not develop because of aid. I’ve Rambled about this previously, so I won’t go into detail here. But the focus of most donors on the social sector at the cost of near-complete neglect of economic growth and private sector development was brought home starkly when our review split into two rooms, one to look at economic growth and the other to look at social development. About 80% of our development partners joined the social development room. It’s not just about funding – it’s about interest. And in my view, all donors – whether focused on governance, education, health, whatever – should be paying attention to how their activities can stimulate capitalism. It is only through capitalism that development can be sustained.

So progress since last year? We’ve done quite a lot in some sectors, like health, but in terms of really developing the country for the long term, I’m not so sure. And until economic growth is more of a priority across all sectors, I’m not sure how much more progress we will make.

* * *

And the budget? That deserves a post of its own sometime in the future…

A Fistful of Dollars

2007-03-29T23:24:00.000+02:00

This weeks Ramble is aware that A Fistful of Dollars came before For a Few Dollars More, but forgot when it published last week’s Ramble…

* * *

Last week’s Ramble ended mid-argument, and stimulated four post-length comments from opposing viewpoints. To recap, the basic thrust was that corruption itself is not necessarily a bad thing for development, defined in primarily material terms. It can, in fact, have a positive effect, if it acts to stimulate the socio-economic transition to capitalism. This all depends on the form of corruption seen.

Now, at this juncture, it’s probably helpful to clarify what I mean by the form of corruption. A lot of argument last week centred around kinds of different levels of corruption from the petty (policemen asking for a thousand Kwacha to let you pass a roadblock) to the grand (millions being siphoned off from the Government coffers). That’s not really what I mean. For one, the former kind of corruption is pretty much inevitable during development. It’s a by-product of high poverty and high inequality. I’m really talking about the second type of corruption. Within that, there are many different forms it can take, and some forms serve to power transition, while others keep a country mired in unproductiveness. Which type obtains in a given country depends on the social and political makeup of the country, and is the focus of this week’s Ramble.

Consider one of the examples last week, South Korea. As mentioned earlier, post-war economic development was powered by the Government’s policy of focusing subsidies (often with illicit incentives) on a select group of large conglomerates, who correspondingly grew extremely rapidly. A couple of aspects of this relationship are crucial for understanding why this contributed to rapid growth. Firstly, there was a small group of conglomerates upon whom Government could focus its rewards, allowing for fairly detailed intervention in the economy in the initial stages.

Secondly, and crucially, the power in this relationship was asymmetric. Government was in a position of unchallenged power vis-à-vis the Chaebol, a legacy of the war. Put simply, the Chaebol were seen as collaborators during the war. As a result, they had very, very little popular support. If they tried to lead an economic or political backlash against the Government they were never likely to get the kind of mass support they would need to win any significant victories. As a result, Government was in a position to offer subsidies (and accept bribes), but more importantly, it was in a position to remove these subsidies without political repercussions. This meant that if a conglomerate was unable to meet the targets that Government set, it could easily be disciplined through the removal of subsidies. So, to sum up: a small number of groups were able to access Government patronage, but on the Government’s terms; most grew rapidly, and those that failed to were removed from the Government’s patronage, and the resources available were focused on those who could deliver. The corruption that accompanied this facilitated the process of resource transfer to the productive and rapidly growing economic sector, but was not the root cause of growth – indeed, one can see it as almost incidental. (In the British example, it was far more central, but the basic structure of relationships involved was similar, though not the same).

Compare this with the situation that obtains in many African countries. The political structure is relatively young, as is the post-colonial socio-economic structure. In most cases, they are characterised by complex patron-client networks, in which a number of groups (often defined by ethnic and regional differences) vie for the patronage of a Government with a weak power base vis-à-vis these groups. As a result, the Government cannot cut the two-way, corrupt relationships that exist between them and any of these groups, as the spurned group frequently has the political power base to successfully challenge the Government (or more likely the individual MP concerned). As a result, the Government distributes its favours widely and accepts monetary returns from a number of groups. The element of the relationship that powered transition in South Korea is absent, namely the ability of Government to focus returns on a few groups and to effectively discipline these groups if they did not provide the returns required. The complex web of corruption and reward is an unproductive one on two levels: firstly, there is a static economic loss (one which, as MC pointed out last week, cumulatively adds up to a significant loss to the economy). Secondly, it not only fails to contribute to any economic transformation, but plays a part in the prevention of it.

So, there you have my take on corruption. The impact of corruption depends on much deeper factors, which are more important determinants of the path development takes, if it takes one at all.

I also mentioned that you can still argue for the eradication of corruption despite it’s potential ability to contribute to corruption. Quite simply, make the equity argument: I’m all for free and fairer societies. Just don’t pretend you’re improving the prospects of development by doing this. It’s dishonest. The direction of the impact of eradicating corruption is incidental to the act of eradicating it. I feel the same way about arguments on democracy – it’s a good thing in and of itself. But there’s no evidence to suggest it speeds up the process of development in material terms.

* * *

And a word on the cricket. Sri Lanka are still in with a chance. We’ve got a tough team, with a varied attack and a potentially explosive batting order. For us to win the whole thing, we’d need everyone to click at crucial moments, as opposed to a couple of bowlers and a couple of batsmen, as happened against South Africa. Malinga’s four in four was stunning, but he was still bashed around the pitch too much with the new ball. Murali was a class act as usual, but the batsmen were terrible. We need at least one big score from our top three in every game if we want to advance, and we’ll need everyone to fire if we’re to stand a chance against Australia. No chance of Punter’s men collapsing like Smith’s.

For a Few Dollars More...

2007-03-20T23:24:00.000+02:00

Finally, the Ramble has come back … to Blogspot.

If anyone is still visiting this page, the first thing to do is apologise for my long absence. The major reason for this was the death of my laptop, which has risen, Lazarus-like, thanks to the good (if over-priced) men of Tottenham Court Road.

In any case, I’m back, and hoping there will be no more absences. If anyone’s still reading, there’s a lot more Rambling to be done in the coming months.

* * *

I promised in my previous post a controversial topic, and here it is: corruption. This topic can’t be handled in a single Ramble, so I’ll be splitting it in two (that’s right, a cliff-hanger!)

This post isn’t a piece of investigative journalism; it doesn’t seek to expose any corruption or voice any suspicions I have. Rather, I want to take a dispassionate look at what corruption is, and what impact is has on the early process of development, which I define in primarily (but not entirely) in the achievement of material outcomes: food security, shelter, good health and a good education. This definition is important to my argument, and I’ll come back to it later in the post.

The standard position in development, and more widely, is that corruption is bad for development. These arguments are either based on an economic efficiency point of view (corruption increases the cost of doing business) or from an equity point of view (corruption denies talent and instead focuses rewards on those already blessed with resources).

My basic position is that corruption is not bad for development.

This position has been the source of hundreds of arguments, so let me rephrase that: corruption itself is not bad for development.

I am primarily addressing the economic argument here, but will come on to the equity argument next week. Virtually every currently developed country in the world has, during its early and middle years of development, been characterised by large scale corruption. I’m not just talking about recent success stories, such as South Korea and Taiwan, where corruption was widespread for many years. I’m also talking about countries such as England and the US, in fact most of the currently developed world. The economists among you might already have shouted ‘aha! Even though the development process of these countries was characterised by corruption, they would have developed faster and more efficiently in its absence!’ This isn’t necessarily true, and to see why, one needs to study a little history, and at the same time take a more dynamic view of the economy, recognising that the transition to a true capitalism is the turning point in the development process.

In England, agrarian capitalism, one of the pre-conditions for the industrial revolution, was based on the enclosures movement, in which landowners essentially annexed public land for their personal use, with the tacit approval of those in power. There is no doubt that this was the manifestation of corruption, in it’s broad sense, as the rule of law was circumvented for the benefit of a select group, which, in turn, provided material benefits to those in power. There can be equally little doubt that the enclosures movement made a significant contribution to English economic development, creating as it did an entire class of landless labour that was so critical to the industrial revolution. In this instance, the corrupt practices of a small group of powerful people consolidation of landholdings, allowing for the efficiency gains required to feed a nation, and also created a class of landless labour, which played a key role in the industrial revolution.

In post-war South Korea, a few large conglomerates used means foul and fair to win the contracts and subsidies from the Government that allowed them to grow rapidly and invest in technology, until their technological and scale advantages made their efficiency in-built and no longer dependent on subsidization. It was these conglomerates (known as Chaebol) which powered the rapid growth evident up till the 1990s. Corrupt practices allowed economic power to consolidate in the hands of a few businesses, allowing them to expand at a rate that soon led them to realise efficiencies of scale that made them internationally competitive, and the bedrock of a booming economy. This was a critical stage in the transformation of South Korea’s economy. This could have occurred without corruption, but it happened faster due to these corrupt practices, which also allowed those awarding subsidies to sniff out the most efficient of the Chaebol. They were after the largest kickbacks, and naturally, the companies that could provide the largest kickbacks were the ones who could make the largest profits.

Now, I’m fully aware that many African countries are very corrupt indeed and are not undergoing any kind of economic transformation. But the argument is that it is not corruption itself, but the form of the corruption, dependent on the actual political, social and economic milieu in takes place in that determines its impact on development. In some cases corruption has a neutral effect, in some cases a very negative effect, and in some cases a positive effect on material development. It’s not corruption that we should be focusing on but the underlying socio-political structure that determines the structure of the corruption that arises from it. This is a difficult thing to say, because it is inherently unfair, but most processes of development around the world have been ugly, painful, unequal journeys; to deny this is dishonest and does more damage than good to those countries still to develop.

But this Ramble is far too long already, so next week, I’ll go on to explain why I believe the socio-political structures in South Korea and in other countries meant that corruption was either neutral or actually a boon to economic transformation, and why the different structures in other countries have had different effects. I’ll also explain why despite this, one can still argue that corruption should be targeted for elimination, but just on different grounds.

A Thousand Apologies...

2007-02-07T14:11:00.000+02:00

Sorry, all, for the lack of a Ramble recently. My laptop is still dead and it doesn't look like I'll be able to fix it here. As I remain reluctant to post a full Ramble from work, I'll try get to an internet caff in the next few days to get my next post out. I'll be back in the UK for a while shortly, too, and will try and get the computer resuscitated there.

Either way, keep your eyes peeled for a post sometime soon.

“Round up the usual suspects!”

2006-12-21T22:37:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble starts with a rhetorical question. Do we really have Paris?

* * *

Let me explain. I’m not entirely mad, although Casablanca is one of my favourite films. In 2005, a large meeting of donors and governments took place in Paris to thrash out the future of development assistance (that’s ‘aid’ to you and me), and make one of those Declarations that these gatherings are so fond of.

I won’t bore you with the details of what was agreed, but in a nutshell, governments agreed to get their houses in order, in particular with regard to financial management, corruption and the like, while donors agreed in turn to use the reformed Government systems more and more, particularly through the use of direct budget support and basket funding. A previous post has gone into more detail on this, but budget support and basket funding are the two forms of support that give Government the most freedom to use the funds provided in a manner consistent with Government aims. Additionally, donors also promised to start working together much more effectively to make sure they get as much common ground as possible before coming to Government, so that we don’t have the burden of discussing the same thing with each donor in turn or dealing with ten different systems for dealing with the same issue.

These are all good things that we agreed, even if the fundamental problem of development (how to create or foster a dynamic economy, since you asked) was left unaddressed. However, after the big wigs got back from Paris, fresh from signing the declaration, the plebs in-country were left trying to implement it. This has proven far more difficult than signing it.

The basic problem is that as with most exercises like this, everything that matters in the Declaration is vague. Sure, we’ve unambiguously agreed to set up robust budgeting, monitoring and procurement systems, and donors clearly state they will use these robust systems more and more, rather than burdening us with the task of dealing with each of their own individual systems, as I say above. There are even some global targets and indicators for 'development partners' as a group.

This is all great, but what lacks definition are the crucial questions that need to be asked on the individual level: When will you change and how will you change? What are the preconditions? Government and donors might have completely different ideas of what a strong monitoring and evaluation system is, and even if they were in agreement, a donor could act in bad faith and simply claim that what Government has put in place just isn’t good enough, and until it improves they won’t play ball. This isn’t really unusual. More than one donor organisation has centrally determined policy that explicitly declines to support government, due to political and economic orthodoxy at home. It’s difficult for us to do anything about this. Money flows from donors to Government and not vice versa, so we have no real way of holding donors to account for their actions.

Well, no foolproof ways. We do have one weapon, one that we’ve been using since our adolescence: peer pressure. We can get those donors who really do intend on strengthening Government to do so, and then scream to high heaven about how great they are. We publish reports and tables that place them at the top of the donors league table, lauding how lovely they are to work with, and then boo and hiss at those donors whom we don’t like.

Sound’s a bit weak doesn’t it? It is. This method works with those who care about what other donors think and who generally support the idea of a strong Government. As for the others, well, how do you shame someone who has no shame? It’s early days for this method, even in more advanced countries than Malawi, so time will tell. I suspect that for some donors, it won’t have any significant impact. For them to change, we need to change the content of their economics of development. Indeed, this has to happen everywhere, but in some places more than others.

* * *

No Ramble next week – I’m off for a short Christmas break to Vic Falls, the Zambia side. Aiming to do some serious birding our there, thereby boring the pants off all my friends. It should be an interesting drive. Have a great Christmas, and if anyone watches the dead rubber fourth test of the Ashes, I’d appreciate an account of Shane Warne’s 700th wicket. I hope he does it like McGrath, who predicted his 300th would be Brian Lara. He was right – the middle wicket of an incredible hat trick.

“Know your role … and shut your damn mouth!”

2006-12-12T22:18:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble has been having development-existential thoughts. Nothing to trouble Kierkegaard, mind, but I’ve been thinking.

* * *

Specifically, I’ve been ruminating on what I am, and why I’m here. Not quite in the ‘what is man, and why is he on earth?’ manner, but more in the ‘what is a development economist technical assistant, and why is he in the Ministry of Finance?’ vein of things.

When I arrived in Malawi, it wasn’t really clear exactly what my role would be here. I knew where I would be working, I roughly knew what the key issues our division needed to address were, and I even had a vague idea of how my terms of reference might evolve over my stay. The one issue that wasn’t clear, however, was in many ways the most important: am I here to build capacity or not?

A quick note on capacity building: it’s one of the most misused terms in development. Donors and Government both bang on about capacity incessantly. We all agree that capacity is weak, and it’s easy enough to spot where there are capacity constraints. What’s much more difficult is to work out how to address these constraints. This is where my existential navel-gazing comes in. If I am here to build capacity then obviously, my key function is to ensure that what I do work on is carried on when I leave, that none of the reports are discontinued, and none of the policies and strategies are unimplemented and forgotten.

In an ideal world, this is exactly what I would do. With my feet on the ground, however, it becomes much more difficult. It’s not that I think that my colleagues are not capable of doing what I’m doing and following through what I’ve started to its logical end. The problem is that for these people to take over what I’m doing, a few conditions have to be met. Firstly, they have to know exactly what it is that I do – not just what outputs the division gets, but the process by which they are produced. Secondly, they have to have be interested in the work, understand what it contributes and be willing to fight to make it happen, which normally depends on being involved from the start. Finally, they have to have the motivation to spend the often boring hours of poring over data or chasing people on the phone for information that most work in this field requires.

All of these preconditions are problematic. Firstly, the best way of learning the processes that go into producing one of the reports we’ve done recently, is to shadow the work of someone who is already doing it. Otherwise, the new person needs to find his or her way to the same output by trial and error, a significant waste of time and effort. This doesn’t really happen in Government because we lack the staff to fill all of our existing holes – so shadowing another Government official is rarely a priority, even when they will only be in place for a short period of time.

The second issue is less of a problem for me. I’ve been lucky in that most of what I do has been planned in close cooperation with one of my most committed colleagues, so we’ve built the importance of our work in monitoring donor practices into our division to some extent, even if the detail of the data collection and analysis we do might not be embedded in the same way.

The third issue is the most difficult. I can work twelve hour days and weekends when need be, because I’m doing a job I love, and my conditions of service are good. My less fortunate colleagues might have trouble making ends meet and may even be running businesses on the side to do so. They understandably find it harder to devote the same amount of time to work that I do.

These three issues are beyond my realm of control, and they mean that in practice, I’m not really building capacity here. I’m trying, and I think some of the things we’re doing now will last well beyond my tenure in Malawi, but for the most part, I don’t think my precise role will be replicated by a local civil servant. It’s frustrating, but when I think about it, what I’m doing in Malawi, working for Government directly, without any donor managing me, isn’t really capacity development. It’s something more akin to gap filling: I’m doing a job that the Government can’t do with the current establishment in the civil service. Any capacity building is an added bonus. But essentially, my role is to fill a position to the best of my ability to allow the Government to function better that it would with that position unfilled.

It’s not ideal. I’d prefer to think that all of what I’m doing is making a permanent impact, but much better to acknowledge the limitations of what I’m doing and try to push them as far as they will go.

* * *
I hope the length of this post makes up for the long silence. I’ll try be more prompt, but work pressures make it harder and harder.

“Y’all heard him! Y’all heard him! Just say ‘No’!”

2006-11-27T22:00:00.000+02:00

Well, the Ramble is back in earnest after a long hiatus. Well, as earnest as I’m capable of being.

I’ve been back at work for about two weeks, and some things just don’t change. I’ve still more things to do than time to do them in. I’m still making a mockery of the title of this blog with my tardiness. And I’m still having far too many arguments about development in Malawi with colleagues in Government and among the donor community.

* * *

One such argument has been preying on my mind recently. I’d been complaining about a particular project that had been, in my opinion, forced upon us as a Government; the donor involved put pressure on us to agree to using a non-resident expert to undertake a study we didn’t particularly have pegged as one of the key issues for Malawi. As I ranted and raved to the tune of ‘so typical… aggressive selling… went over our heads…’, my friends interrupted me:

‘Why don’t you just say ‘no’, if you think it’s wrong for the country?’

This had me stumped for a moment. Our Minister is very able, and very strong-willed. He’s not the kind of man that donors can bully into submission. So why didn’t we say no on this occasion, why do we so often say yes in that reluctant-seven-year-old-boy way? Even when donors are pushy, we should be able to say no.

Well, not entirely. There are two situations where it becomes very difficult to say no to support you really don’t need. Firstly, the support might be tied to a large money grant or a project you really want to see implemented. This isn’t uncommon at all; often a large cash grant will be tied to a financial management or project implementation expert, who has to be used by the Government to implement the funding, while training a local civil servant to take over his job eventually. This is a reasonable practice. After all, if you put millions of dollars into a programme you do need to ensure that the money is being used for what it was intended. Problems can arise when the expert doesn’t actually train any local civil servants to continue his work, but this is often as much the fault of Government, who rarely ‘double up’ a position for shadowing, regardless of whether its filled by a permanent member of staff or not.

The other reason why so many Governments can find it difficult to say no to donors is less obvious. Even when saying no doesn’t directly result in kissing ten million dollars goodbye, every move Government takes in relation to donors has to be thought of in the context that these same donors will be bankrolling ninety per cent of our development budget come July. Quite simply, we can’t afford to offend them. By saying no to something that the donor thinks is necessary for Government, even if they’re profoundly wrong, we reduce their confidence in us, and in the short term, that may translate in a reluctance to move on other projects or forms of support that Government does need.

It all becomes Catch-22, however, when you think this all through to its logical conclusion – by accepting projects which aren’t right for the country, Government is accepting support that is likely to fail from the start. Donors see money producing no real effect in the country and may decide to scale back involvement, rather than pour good money after bad.

Frankly, though, the first situation is preferable. If we stick to our guns and tell donors what we do and don’t need, after a few years, if we’re proved right, donors will trust us far more. If, on the other hand we’re wrong, at the very least we failed with something that was locally designed, and we can learn from our lessons. And we definitely will be wrong quite a lot; but then, so are donors. It’s preferable to fail from your own mistakes.

* * *

Since the Ashes started, I’ve noticed quite how many cricketisms I use these days. So many are such an everyday part of the language that you forget their sporting connotations. There’s one above, can you spot it?

However,I’ll thank you not to discuss the actual cricket in my presence. At least not until Adelaide.

"I woke up this morning with a frappuccino in my hand..."

2006-11-13T10:04:00.001+02:00

Well, all good things must end.

The Ramble is about to return to Malawi, and re-enter the fray of civil service life with his own brand of enthusiasm. Apologies for the lack of a culture shock post, as promised. Truth be told, there was none. I'm home.

Highway Kind

2006-10-20T09:49:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the silence - the Ramble is travelling to Hong Kong today, for a three week holiday; the first time I've left Malawi since I got here in October '05. I'll be working for a day or two, then watching football with The Daily Hairdryer and eating my way through the outlying islands.

Brace yourselves for a culture shock post...

“Start, you vicious bastard! Oh my God! I’m warning you…”

2006-10-10T23:06:00.000+02:00

Well, I’m back from my travels, and in the words of Chief Bromden, it feels like I been away a long time.

But before getting on to this week’s work-related nonsense, a brief rundown of the trip: First stop was Mumbo island, to which we kayaked from Cape Maclear. Well, I say ‘we’ kayaked there, but my lovely kayak-mate suffered from a fit of motion sickness half way there, leaving me with the task of propelling her to safety. Naturally, when she recounts this story she omits this heroism and focuses on the *one* time we nearly ran aground while I was looking at the hornbills in the trees.

After a few days lazing around (and kayaking around the island), we transferred to Liwonde, the national park that long time readers will recall I visited some time ago, for another fabulous spell, complete with a warthog charging one of my companions and an elephant attempting to eat our chalet. I slept through the second of these events, an act of prodigious laziness.

Final stop was the Zomba plateau, where we trekked for seven hours, resulting in severe sunburn on the part of my companions, which, as the only one unaffected, was totally worth it for the pair of Purple-crested Turacos I spotted.

And no account of our journey could be complete without a description of the bundle of joy that was our rented 4x4. After reaching Cape Maclear, both the battery and the starter engine decided that enough was enough and spluttered their last, ensuring that every time we wanted to start the damn thing, we needed to get it towed until the engine kicked in. Hours of fun. We named it Mavuto (literally, ‘problems’) and it was put down upon our return to Lilongwe. Brutally.

* * *

After a couple of days back at work, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things. We’re just about ready to print and distribute one report we’ve been working on, the fruit of almost eight months work, from data collection to analysis to arguments over the drafting. Our other major piece of work, the all-important strategy that I so love, but which is danger of stalling will shortly get an almighty kick up the backside, with a meeting of all the most senior Government officials to make final comments on the draft scheduled for Thursday, so there’s hope it will get the Cabinet okay before the end of the year. Then the real work, implementation, will begin, but even with it in draft form, we’re still getting the first few things done, and with a bit of stability in the Ministry and hard work from both ourselves and our development partners, I’m still confident it will have a real impact on the effectiveness of Aid in Malawi.

* * *

One thing I noticed when travelling was the extent in Malawi of what is normally described as the ‘informal economy’. This is the very misleading name given to the sometimes complex and large economic relationships and activities undertaken under the radar of Government, meaning that the people working in these activities do not turn up in official statistics of employment, while the goods they produce and sell do not bolster GDP or national income statistics. I prefer calling this section of the economy ‘unenumerated’ rather than ‘informal’, shamelessly plagiarising an ex-lecturer of mine, since the activities lumped together as ‘informal’ might be as complex and profitable as anything in the ‘real’ economy.

In some parts of Southern Africa, the unenumerated economy has been estimated to be about 40% of the size of the ‘formal’ economy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the figure was around this level in Malawi. Everywhere I went, there were people engaged in economic activities, selling or buying goods, and never appearing in the tally-books of any Government bean-counter.

Some people take this for the sign of a deceptively healthy economy – if so many people are selling things in an entrepreneurial spirit, then capitalism must be relatively healthy, right? Not so. Markets are not the same thing as capitalism. Feudal societies had markets and entrepreneurs. What makes capitalism distinct as a form of socio-economic organisation is the relationship between those who have capital and those who don’t. I could write for hours about this, but the basic point is that the use of capital to generate and appropriate additional value from fixed-price labour is at the root of the dynamic form of economic organisation that is capitalism, not the desire to sell goods and services. Confusing markets with capitalism is a common mistake among economists, and serves to mask the structural problems that need to be addressed before really dynamic growth becomes possible. The formal / informal or enumerated / non-enumerated dichotomy is one of a number of red herrings we tend to chase far too often.

* * *

I could run with the red herring theme for a while – there are lots in this field, but I’ll save others for another time.

"There’s no prettier sight than looking back on a town you’ve left behind…”

2006-09-26T00:23:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble takes the theme of travel.

* * *

Anyone who has ever worked in or with Government in Malawi will tell you that one of the most acute problems we have is the incentive structure in place that encourages civil servants to abandon their posts at any opportunity to travel for meetings outside of the office. I’ve already written about the poor pay available to most civil servants on standard contracts, the source of much discontent and the root of much of the poor motivation that plagues Government; travel is one of the outcomes of this.

Naturally, over time, various coping mechanisms have evolved to mitigate the effects of poor pay. The most prevalent of these coping mechanisms has been the exploitation of opportunities for travelling on official business. Whenever a civil servant travels outside of Lilongwe, he is entitled to an allowance, to cover costs of accommodation, food and the like (transportation is almost always covered separately). These allowances are high for internal travel within Malawi, much more than one actually needs to spend; when travelling abroad, they become astronomical, relative to the basic salary. As such they represent a rare opportunity to substantially augment the meagre income of a civil servant.

This has two obvious effects. Firstly, civil servants have an incentive to plan as many workshops outside of Lilongwe as possible. While many workshops are legitimate, though they don’t need necessarily to be outside of town, many are simply cobbled together, as an opportunity to get allowances. Donors are at least partly to blame here – it’s not too difficult to write up a decent proposal and get funding for a workshop where very little gets done, and nothing that couldn’t be done during routine work in the Ministry. My friend, Snowball (named not for any Clerks-related reasons, entirely down to the Simpsons), has been subject to a number of these frivolous workshops, in locations seemingly chosen primarily due to their proximity to popular drinking spots.

These completely pointless workshops are the exception; often, workshops are necessary for a particularly large piece of work, and in honesty, I’ve attended more useful away days here in the Ministry of Finance than I did in my previous incarnation as a UK civil servant. However, the decision to locate them outside of town is almost always purely driven by the desire to generate allowances. To make matters worse, in some cases some civil servants find themselves having to undertake important work as part of a specially organised retreat as the culture of allowances is so deep seated that the only way of guaranteeing attendance from a wide range of stakeholders is to ensure that there is a financial incentive.

What’s more, especially where international travel is concerned, there is competition within a Ministry for the rights to attend a workshop – so much importance is attached to getting the okay from senior management to attend workshops that the decision of whom to send depends more on who is in the right place at the right time, rather than who will benefit most from the training or who will contribute most to the work. A person may have spent months working on a project, only to find a colleague who has done very little similar work has been selected to attend a conference on the topic. It can be very frustrating, not just for the potential attendee, but also for a good manager who wants to get the most value from each of his or her employees.

So what’s the solution? The obvious way of dealing with this is to eliminate the concept of allowances altogether and build the average value that can be expected from allowances over a year into the basic salary of the civil servant. It’s not that simple, however, as resistance would be fierce from those individuals who have mastered the art of travelling. The system is also embedded; with so many civil servants looking to allowances for income, it is very difficult to get momentum behind any attempt to reduce or change them.

Large scale pay reform is already under way in the civil service here, but at a basic level, problems will crop up repeatedly until donors show a greater willingness to put support into the recurrent budget, and tie that support there; the complaint that donors have a comparative advantage in development and investment projects only holds water if we assume that Government will withdraw from this area as far as possible. For political reasons this will never happen, so donors need to act to support the areas that remain underfunded. Pay is one of the major ones.

* * *

And on a second travelling note, this bumper edition of the Ramble will have to suffice for two weeks. I’ll have some friends visiting next week and have a packed schedule to show them around the southern part of Malawi. I’ll be away for a week, and can’t say I’m not looking forward to the break.

“There’s a thin line between clever and stupid…”

2006-09-16T00:08:00.000+02:00

Okay, this tardiness is getting ridiculous, so I’ll give you a brief rundown of the reasons:

My car was smushed in an accident, and I’ve been dealing with the insurance company for about two weeks, sending stress levels sky-high. They should be taking the car away for repairs tomorrow. Yes, it took that long.
I’ve had a minor iTunes disaster. Somehow, a friend of mine who was borrowing my laptop has managed to delete the folder (“My Music”) that seems necessary to run iTunes. If anyone knows how to resolve this, I will be extraordinarily grateful.
Two of our major donors are preparing their assistance strategies for Malawi, requiring significant input from my division.
At the same time, we’re completing two major documents, one of them being the strategy I’ve been banging on about incessantly, and the other being a report looking at donor activity over the last fiscal year.
Malawi reached the HIPC completion point about two weeks ago.

* * *

This last one is the big news. HIPC stands for Heavily Indebted Poor Country, and reaching the HIPC completion point was probably the most significant event in Malawi’s economic history since independence. This is not an exaggeration.

Basically, under the HIPC framework, the Government of Malawi agreed to a number of structural and economic reforms, and to keep to relatively strict standards of fiscal prudence. Our adherence to these conditions was closely monitored, and once we had met them, with the exception of a couple of conditions we were granted clemency from, we were rewarded with a massive amount of debt cancellation. The main point of the whole exercise was to ingrain fiscal prudence into the Ministry and, once this and a couple of other structural targets were achieved, to reward Government with a huge amount of debt cancellation.

With the completion point reached, our debt burden, unsustainable and the source of a large volume of interest payments, was rendered relatively manageable at a stroke. This is obviously an extremely good thing for a poor country. At the same time, it provides us with the ultimate test of the durability of our new-found prudence in matters of external borrowing: reaching the HIPC completion point has widened the range of loans we are eligible to contract, in terms of the creditor and in the terms of the conditions of the loan. In the words of one of my colleagues ‘this scares me. Deeply.’

You see, as Spinal Tap so memorably put it, ‘there’s a thin line between clever and stupid’. It’s one thing maintaining the discipline required to stop contracting new debt when you’re barely allowed to look suggestively at a potential creditor, but its quite another when those same creditors are banging on your door, queuing up to lend you money. What we need as a matter of urgency is a clearly articulated policy on the contracting of new debt, the drafting of which will fall to my division. One might legitimately ask why this hasn’t been done already. After all, completion point wasn’t a sudden occurrence. The answer, inevitably, is muddy. A policy was drafted about two years ago, since when politicking and staff turnover have conspired to keep it unimplemented. To avoid these problems this time around, we need to start the whole thing again. It’s going to be a long process, with much consultation, much drafting and redrafting and many, many arguments.

So don’t bet on a timely Ramble any time soon.

“Early morning sunshine tells me all I need to know…”

2006-08-28T22:43:00.000+02:00

When the Ramble was a student of development, way back in the day, one of the most frustrating things about study was the seemingly interminable timelag between breakthroughs in academia and their impact on policy making in the developing world. A widely deployed policy from one of the major multi-lateral organisations is proven in a number of journals, from the esoteric to the mainstream, to be a costly failure - but implementation continues for five, ten years before it is abandoned. It was the source of much gnashing of teeth and much wringing of hands. Other times, it might be that a growing body of work persuasively argues that a positive policy change, for example towards consolidating farmholdings, has beneficial effects. Yet, the policy isn’t implemented or even discussed at the level that matters, the practical level, for years.

Why this inertia? Partly, of course, it has to do with people; new ideas take time before they become wider currency. When people stake their reputations on the realisation of a policy they have been championing, they resist pressures to abandon these ideas for new ones. Even when the pressure tells, it takes time to wind up policies and implement new ones. The other major reason is quite simple: most people who have worked in a civil service can tell you that the mixture of fire-fighting and large projects tends to consume your working day, and for many of us, spills out even to those days when you really shouldn’t be working. As a result, it’s very difficult to keep abreast of the latest happenings in the Journal of Peasant Studies or Development Policy Review.

This is frustrating on a number of levels. A lot of what academia is producing in this field is immediately and directly relevant to the work we do in Government, and the more conversant we are with recent publications the more effectively we can argue our viewpoints with donors. Even if, like me, you think the best economics of transition was done in the 19th Century, you need to keep on top of things – much of the most interesting development economics these days is revisiting old ideas in new contexts.

* * *

This isn’t a completely random rant. Recently, we’ve been dealing a lot with donors who are in the process of developing their assistance strategies for Malawi. These strategies govern the spending patterns of donors for a multi-year period, and their formulation should involve significant Government input.

Looking over some of these programmes of work, you rarely feel that any individual projects are ill-advised, but you struggle to see the unifying theory, the vision that underpins these programmes of work. Of course all of these documents, like all strategies these days have ‘vision statements’ and ‘narratives’, but beyond trite sloganeering (‘eradicating poverty in a sustainable manner, through gender-sensitive policy making’ and the like) it can be difficult to spot a rigorous theoretical framework. Such frameworks are often agreed and produced by the central office of a donor, but these are not really translated to individual countries in a meaningful way. Most donors are now, rightly, taking the lead from Government when planning their activities. It thus falls to Government to provide the coherent theoretical framework underpinning development policy. And when Government tries to do this, politics is as important as evidence and logical reasoning.

Which brings us neatly back to academia – work which attempts to look at economic growth and transformation in isolation from politics and the social makeup of a country are never really going to capture the reality of development. So policy-makers really need to keep up with the latest in academic work to criticise and introduce a dose of realism to augment the good work many people are devoting significant periods of time to.

* * *

Yes, I know I’m late again. More car trouble. Will elaborate another time. In the meantime, a little patience, and please excuse my shoddy grammar and any inconsistencies until I proof read this post.

“Ain’t got time to bleed…”

2006-08-17T20:55:00.000+02:00

As usual, this weeks’ Ramble is tardy. Sorrow for this would be greater if I wasn’t so tired. At first, I thought it was malaria. Fortunately, I was wrong, but it still knocked the stuffing out of me – especially given that I couldn’t take any time off work…

* * *

It’s been a busy week, both in and out of work. Every year, the Ministry of Finance engages with donors to agree on a system of assessing Government on progress against major development aims, and more specifically, on whether appropriate processes to achieve these outcomes are being followed. This isn’t as intrusive as it sounds; these donors provide a significant amount of aid to us, and the least they can ask is that this aid is being put to the uses for which it was requested (or in some cases, foisted upon us).

But target setting has to be very careful. On the one hand, donors need to know that the money that is being pumped through Government systems is being used for the purposes it was provided. On the other, they have to be very careful not to take a dictatorial role. The aim of the entire international development system is a state which governs an effective, prosperous country in which people have a reasonable standard of living from its own resources in a positive and beneficial manner (there is no country in the world where no one suffers from deprivation). For this to become a reality, Government needs to take the lead in developing policies and setting the development aims it wants to achieve; if it doesn’t, as soon as donor pressure disappears so will the impetus to achieve the positive aims that have been foisted upon the Government.

Very few people would dispute this when it’s put to them. However, after working for a few years with the often inefficient and sometimes corrupt Governments that do rule over the poorest countries in the world, many people in the development agencies lose sight of this. It’s not that they stop caring about Government, but they can get very frustrated with the difficulties of translating support to a Government into real gains for the poor and deprived people the support is meant to be helping. This is made much worse when they know that their organisations could dispense the aid directly and see improvements in the standard of living of a target population much more quickly. A half-way house to this is to impose multiple conditions and attempt to dictate policy through these conditions.

It’s difficult to be too critical of these approaches; they are borne of frustration and a desire to improve the living standards of people more rapidly. Nonetheless, it’s important to stress that this is not the way forward. It will make more rapid changes in the short term. But when people feel coerced into doing something, their natural reaction once the threat that fuels the coercion is withdrawn is to stop taking that action. As a result, if we are implementing a policy only because funding is tied to its implementation, if the donors who make this condition try and withdraw it in the future, they are very likely to see Government let the policy slide into disuse. The donor then either has to maintain the conditionality or see the policy waste away. Of course, this isn’t inevitable, and I’m overstating the case somewhat, but the basic point is that if the impetus for a positive action derives from a donor without being embedded in the development plan set by the Government, it won’t be sustained beyond the involvement of that donor. Donors need to take the long view of building Government – slower progress now, but the ultimate aim of completely withdrawing will come faster.

To their credit, a number of donors now recognise this at the corporate level; at the individual level, these opinions have been held for a long time. The challenge for bilateral donors now is convince their political masters that they need to take this long view, which will prevent them parading their ‘quick wins’ to their electorate. The challenge for Government is to ensure that we stand up to remaining pressures to institute policies we don’t agree with – we need to reject conditionalities and, if need be, aid, when it doesn’t square with out own development vision. If the donor can convince us that something is worth doing using evidence and reasoning, fine – but it shouldn’t be done out of fear. It’s eventually self defeating.

For Government to keep to this, it needs a strong, competent Minister of Finance. Just like the one we’ve got now, in fact.

“… and He’s on your tongue, every time you lie…”

2006-08-03T23:05:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble has come to a cliché. The Devil is in the details.

* * *

First off, an apology. The Ramble comes late this week due to an extremely hectic work schedule.

This is why: About three weeks ago, I mentioned that plans were underway for a rather important meeting, bringing together the some of the most senior representatives of all sides of the aid relationship. This meeting suffered from delay after delay, partly due to the packed schedules of the attendees, but also because of the problems we’ve had getting the budget through parliament.

Late in the day, though, word came through that the meeting could take place on Wednesday morning, leading to a frenzy of invitation writing, presentation finalization, agenda tweaking, briefing of senior official and the like. Anyway, after a few days of rapid greying of the hair, the meeting finally kicked off, with near perfect attendance, on time. Even more miraculously, we managed to wrap everything up at just ten minutes over our self-imposed two hour time-limit. Of course, the projector didn’t work until we were well into the meeting, but these things never go entirely smoothly.

But what of the content? Well, it wasn’t the revelation I’d secretly been hoping for; no donors threw themselves to the floor and begged for our forgiveness, and none of the Government officials slammed their fists on the table and screamed ‘no! this will not do!’. Despite that, it was still a great first step, an achievement. It was, on the whole, candid and constructive. People spoke their opinions, being careful not to name the organisations they were criticising (except my boss, who rather wonderfully named and shamed two donors, both present, for particularly bad practices – with a perfectly judged tone, to avoid offending). There were, inevitably, a few exceptions – people who said one thing while you suspected they were thinking another entirely.

For most of the meeting, we discussed the strategy the Ministry has been working on in some depth, and it quickly became apparent, to me at least, that for all I think it’s an excellent document, a lot still needs to be done. We’ve set out what we expect from our donors and what they can expect from us in return, and while this is very useful, it’s not enough. We need to really dig down into the specifics, rather than talk in broad terms. If anything is going to come of this, we need firm commitments, not encouraging noises. And no-one is going to firmly commit to anything unless they can really see all the implications of making that commitment. I doubt everyone will get behind us fully, but I think with a few tweaks and a bit of work, most of them will. That’s a start.

* * *

During the meeting, I also had a dilemma. I was sitting just to the side and slightly behind the head of one major development agency, listening to events unfold and furiously scribbling down notes when I noticed something. A small spider was slowly climbing up the back of his suit. Horrified, I watched as it continued it slow ascent until it reached his collar. Then, with a little hop, it leapt into his hair. I was now faced with a choice. Do I do my best to get rid of the spider, which would have involved slapping the cranium of a man who controls millions of dollars that are potentially at the disposal of our Government? Or do I let the spider be, and wait for it to bite, causing the poor man to scream in the middle of a meeting with all of his contemporaries?

The decision was eventually taken out of my hands by the spider’s decision to hop on to one of my colleagues, from whom I happily extricated it. But I’ve been thinking – if it hadn’t jumped, what should I have done?

A Confederacy of Dunces

2006-07-25T21:45:00.000+02:00

Much like Fox News, the Ramble likes to think it provides you with a fair and balanced view of the world. So, having given you the sad stories of competent, able, young(ish) civil servants who are working for a fraction of what they could earn elsewhere, and the massively underpaid (very) young men and women who struggle to find motivation to complete work, I now present the flip side.

* * *

A recent late night discussion with one of my friends turned, inevitably, to work (we’re an exciting bunch), and in particular to some of our more frustrating colleagues. The labour market in Malawi is a peculiar animal. Many of the very best professionals from the country have emigrated in search of a better life, something particularly problematic in the health sector, and not just in Malawi, as anyone who has been treated in an NHS hospital can attest

Alongside this exodus of the medically trained, there has been a smaller outflow of men and women particularly suited to the multi-tasking, semi-specialised life that is a civil servant’s lot. Correspondingly, there is a smaller pool of highly qualified, competent individuals in the civil service than would otherwise be the case, leaving key posts unfilled at most Ministries. At the same time, Malawi has a surfeit of donor agencies with large budgets, who sometimes struggle to spend all the money they’ve been allocated in a financial year.

Among the remaining potential civil servants, there is a class of individuals who have taken advantage of the combination of their scarcity value and the existence of cash-rich donor agencies by excluding themselves from Government labour searches and instead declaring themselves ‘consultants’. They win lucrative contracts, paid for by donors, and work on basic development projects: reports, strategies, think pieces, commissioned either by the donor themselves or by a Government ministry. The real problem, however, isn’t that this segment of the labour market exists. If the consultants are of a high enough quality and produce useful outputs, then they are well worth it. In fact, I’ve worked very closely with one such consultant, and I can say with all honesty that this individual has completely transformed one major part of our Ministry, and all for the better.

No, the problem is that so many of these consultants are actually rather mediocre – and donors continue to pay exorbitant sums for mediocre outputs from them. Even worse, many of our crucial development strategies and plans are being produced by these consultants, to the extent that the Ministries themselves never build the capacity to write and implement such documents, even though the best people within each Ministry are more than capable of doing so. Since donors are funding consultants to produce them, Government tends not to use its scarce personnel to do the work in-house. As a result, a kind of consultancy-dependence develops in Government. If we don’t have the consultants, we’re unable to write our strategies or carry out our major projects with efficiency; but if we continue to use them, we won’t be developing the ability to do any of this work internally.

The friend with whom I was discussing this had a rather nifty analogy for this, involving Angkor Wat, trees and a Catch-22 to end all Catch-22s. I was planning on plagiarising and mangling this analogy for my readers, but fortunately I can’t quite remember the details that made it so apt.

* * *

A quick rant: the budget is looking like it won’t be passed in a timely manner after all. Parliament is blocking it until MPs are granted an enormous pay rise, to go with the increased allowances they have already been given. Rightly, the Government is refusing to cave in. It’s incredibly frustrating that in a country with such deep poverty, so many of the elected representatives treat their positions as a private source of income rather than a means to develop their country. These budget problems have caused the Ministry to slow to a crawling pace – also frustrating when we’re trying to finalise our strategy for interacting with donors.

“So cunning it’s just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University…”

2006-07-18T22:25:00.000+02:00

This Week’s Ramble has a cunning plan.

* * *

Actually, I don’t, but our division does. At least, we hope so: we’re taking two days this week to plot out what we need to do over the next year and beyond to achieve the targets we’ve set during our recent frenzy of strategizing, negotiation and brinkmanship with donors.

It’s something we’ve needed to do for a while, so we’re looking forward to it. Making plans and sticking to plans is one of the things Government has found most difficult in recent times, so just having this meeting is a good first step. We’re going to try and clarify the role of each officer, what needs to be achieved on a corporate level, and by extension, on the individual level.

Seasoned Ramble-readers will know what comes next: the catch. I’ve previously written of my respect for those capable and committed senior Government officials who work for substantially less than they would be earning in the private or NGO sector. What I’ve rarely touched upon is my sympathy for my more junior colleagues, who often earn far, far less than they can reasonably live on, and get asked to perform rather labour intensive and difficult tasks, to boot. It’s not uncommon to field a phone call from one of our more junior officers, telling us that they can’t come to work for want of the K 50 (approximately 30 pence for my British readers) that it costs to take a minibus into town. On salaries like that, what are the incentives for the long hours of boring data-entry that power Government analysis and therefore policy making?

In such circumstances, planning is tempting fate; how to make the Gods laugh. Basic things like asking for questionnaires to be filled in become problematic for the simple reason that when they’re done, they may be left on desks rather than entered into the relevant database or filed in the relevant folder. Every workplace in the world has people who are working at less than full capacity, but where the conditions of employment are so poor as to essentially inform an entire grade of staff that their work is not important, you’ll find organisational paralysis.

There are no easy solutions to this. Increasing salaries across the board is simply not an option for a country as resource-constrained as Malawi, so you’re left trying to play a zero sum game. Someone recently suggested to me that the key to an efficient civil service was to sack half the staff and then double the salaries of the rest. That would make an enormous difference to the motivation levels of each member of staff, making their jobs that much more valuable, but it’s easy to see the downsides of it, too. You’d be sweeping away the livelihoods of many families, and the attendant labour unrest hardly bears thinking about.

No one is going to grasp the nettle of this particular problem any time soon, and until someone does, the only partial solution is for those officials who have the time, motivation and inclination to work their socks off, to do so, and hope that conditions improve in time.

So, planning will set our direction, but getting to the destination won’t be all that much easier.

* * *

This week’s Ramble is a bit late, partly because a few of my best friends here have had the temerity to leave Malawi. Leaving do’s, farewells and the like have taken up many of my evenings recently. Moving to a new country for a finite period of time does that: most of your friends will either have left before you or will be left behind when you leave.

Thirteen Conversations about One Thing

2006-07-10T23:13:00.000+02:00

It’s the little things that drive home the difference. Thursday was to be a holiday, as scheduled. Then the decree came down that Independence was important enough for Wednesday and Friday to be holidays, too. There was much rejoicing, only for word to filter through on Wednesday evening that Friday was being called off as a holiday (still with us?). Most of us had already made plans for the day off (such as loafing around and wasting time), and some, including the rather foolish Ramble, made the mistake of working on Wednesday and Thursday; as a result, about three people turned up to work on Friday.

I wasn’t one of them, having already left for a forest reserve called Dzalanyama, where we trekked (Rambled?) up a mountain. Beautiful, but not enough birds.

* * *

Not much to talk about insofar as work goes. Even if the five-day weekend existed only in theory for me, the absence of colleagues made for a slow week. The major event of interest was the first signs of a concrete result from the Strategy we’ve been working on. We’re holding a meeting soon, bringing together senior representatives from all the major players in the aid relationship to air grievances, discuss solutions and generally be open about what they want and what they’re willing to do.

Doesn’t sound too complicated, does it? But my experiences here have opened my eyes to the importance of getting the ‘simple’ things right, because they’re often far more difficult than they seem, and when they fail everything else becomes even more difficult. In theory, open dialogue, honest discussion and constructive criticism shouldn’t be too hard to achieve. All you need to do is put people with different opinions in a room and get them talking. Unfortunately, where theory is neat and tidy, practice is rather more convoluted.

We all know that our donors have a number of issues with the way Government does certain things, and we all know that donors disagree with each other as to what the Government should be doing and what the donors should be doing. The difficulty is that while many of the individuals we work with are open, clear and straightforward when expressing their opinions, their organisations are usually less so; for essentially political reasons, both Government and donors feel the need to keep their cards close to their chest, at least officially. As a result, working with some donor organisations can be a little like the early rounds of a boxing match – the signals from each side give you an idea of their intentions, but neither one is really ready to commit just yet.

The main problems from the Government point of view are that until all donors are completely explicit as to what they want to see, we can’t really begin to address what we feel we need to address, and present explanations as to why the rest isn’t a priority for us. Further, until donors work more effectively together and present a more unified view, we will always be forced to discuss the same issues time and time again, explaining our position to each donor or group of donors individually. We’re never going to get uniformity of opinion, but a greater degree of consolidation would certainly help.

I should point out, however, that these are institutional problems, rather than problems concerning individuals. Many of my colleagues on both sides of the aid divide are painfully honest. Naturally, some are less straight talking than others, but the basic problem here is in the way in which organisations relate to each other, rather than people. It’s much easier to tell an individual to stop obfuscating and to get to the point; much harder to get the same message across to multi-million dollar organisation.

I’m not really sure of the extent of this problem, and whether its equally severe or even present in all countries. What I do believe, though, is that the lack clear and unambiguous discussion represents a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma – both Government and donors would benefit from it, but there’s a collective action problem preventing them from actually working together and achieving it. I could go on for days about collective action theory, but I’ll spare you: all I’ll say that there is a need to develop social norms of openness, no matter how long it takes.

* * *

And of course, the World Cup Final. Well, Malouda dived, and whatever Matrix said to Zizou, he shouldn’t have gone all Rhino on him. All in all, an engrossing ending to an engrossing tournament. Can’t wait to go through it all again in four years time.

Things put back together?

2006-07-04T00:05:00.000+02:00

What can I say?

Quarter-final. Scolari. Penalties.

Zimachitika.

* * *

Things are picking up at work, right in time. A lull was welcome after the budget, but two slow weeks were enough for me. The next few weeks should be busier, with the finalisation of the strategy that we’ve been working on, and a planning meeting to map out what we need to do over the next year or so. Before that, though, we’ve got a public holiday on Thursday: Independence Day.

Independence Day, shockingly, is the day that Malawians became independent from colonial rule. Colonialism has always been a very tricky topic to analyse dispassionately, being so fraught with emotional significance. Working in development it’s impossible to avoid the issue, though; so much of the political, geographic and economic landscape of the countries we work in were moulded by colonial rule and the equally damaging process of decolonisation. Take a look at a map of Africa – how many straight lines are there? It was literally divided up with a ruler, especially in the north-west. That’s one of the physical results. There were and remain deep emotional scars, too. Anyone who doubts the intense psychological effect of colonial rule should read The Wretched of the Earth.

My grandfather was an anti-colonial activist, well known enough for our house to be decorated by a number of fading photographs of him with some rather famous politicians and poets, fellow campaigners. He changed his name from the Anglicised one he was given at birth, and devoted most of his youth to working towards securing independence for his homeland. By the time he died, though, he hadn’t voted in the free country he’d campaigned so strongly for in years. He used to say he would only leave the office long enough to vote if there was a party who promised to bring back the British, so disillusioned had he become with the misrule of his country.

The point of this story is not to say that colonial rule was a good thing (though undoubtedly, for their own, usually selfish, reasons, some colonial administrations did do things that benefited the countries they were in). The point is that the winning of independence was only the start of the process of nation-building, not the end point. Of course, no-one was ever really naïve enough to think that it would be. But, for most countries, the legacy of independence has been a struggle to construct and assert a national identity that was denied by foreign rule. The upshot, in many cases, has been violence and war. More subtly, a great deal of damage has been done by the desire of so many Governments to assert their national identity through major economic projects, usually designed more as a display of strength than as something that will enable the poor to climb out of poverty. Even the best and most successful Governments in the developing world have been guilty of this, and it has not been restricted to Africa. Governments of countries everywhere, developing or affluent, undertake major prestige projects every couple of years to ensure the votes keep coming in, and to assert their differences from their political opponents. The problem is, in poor countries, everything a Government does has to be considered in the context of scarce resources and a population for whom food security is precarious and poverty rife – prestige projects come a distant second to addressing these issues.

It would be great if amid the celebration, all of this was raised and discussed, but something tells me that none of the political parties here will be keen to grasp this particular nettle.

* * *

As for me, I’ll be spending the weekend in a forest reserve not too far from here. Brace yourselves for another post about birdwatching.

“Oh man! Look at those cavemen go!”

2006-06-26T20:45:00.000+02:00

I’m reasonably certain the Ramble isn’t the only person whose productivity has nosedived during the World Cup. Frank Lampard, for one, has clearly been absent from work in the last couple of weeks.

Of course, passion hasn’t been in short supply. The brawl between the Netherlands and Portugal demonstrated as much. The Ramble hasn’t seen so much brutality and cravenness since the last Management Meeting.

* * *

A combination of incipient football (Ukraine v. Switzerland – that semi-final might still happen!) and a post-budget lull in Government conspire to deliver a shorter Ramble than usual. Not much has been happening at work; a few odds and ends being tied up on the budget, waiting for comments on the strategy I’ve been working on, and the odd meeting.

Governments around the world work like this. We tend to structure the year around big events, and fill the lulls by writing strategies, policies or ‘think pieces’. I love think pieces. At least half of them denote nothing more significant than the author having a couple of days with too little to do.

* * *

One interesting conversation I had this week, though, was with a friend who works on the other side of the aid relationship. He was explaining to me quite how much politics invades the work they do. Now, having been a civil servant in two countries, I know how much of the supposedly technical work that we technocrats do boils down to pleasing a Minister’s desire for votes. But this time, I was hearing how a Minister in some far away land finds it easier to sell spending on distributing drugs to the poor than to sell economic growth and income enhancement. This isn’t news to me, as I’ve been shouting long and loud about this fundamental flaw in the development system for some time now, but it did get me thinking.

There’s a problem, that’s reasonably clear; but how do we fix it? The basic problem is that the politician’s need for votes compromises their role as the head of a development agency: rather than doing what’s best for the poor in the developing world, they need to do what’s best for themselves, pandering to their electorate. In normal circumstances, the electorate are voting on policies that have a direct effect on themselves, so they broadly reap what they sow, and can act to rectify mistakes. In this situation, however, that doesn’t happen. What they vote for affects people in another country, not themselves.

Two kinds of solution immediately suggest themselves to me. Firstly, removing the political element of the development agency; some countries have done this by contracting out the provision of development aid. This could potentially create its own conflicts of interest, but these haven’t been very obvious to me when working with these agencies. Another approach to this is to make development agencies multi-lateral, like the World Bank. This dilutes the influence of individual politicians, making each relatively freer to pursue what’s right, rather than what’s popular.

The other kind of solution is the one I would favour. Educate the electorate. Politics is not a one-way relationship, and the politician has the power to influence the way their electorate thinks. People are tired of being patronised by their representatives, and I think a parliamentarian who was honest enough to say that he put greater stock in increasing incomes than short-term poverty alleviation would be well received. I might be naïve, but I think there is a genuine desire to learn more about what’s happening around the world, and Live 8 isn’t going to satisfy that, with it’s platitudes, slogans and easy answers. It was amazing how so many people had their eyes opened to the problems in the developing world by that event, but a chance was missed, with the lack of real engagement by politicians and the media with an interested and primed public.

* * *

That seems like a good place to stop. Which is another way of saying that kick-off is in twenty minutes.

“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy…”

2006-06-20T19:13:00.000+02:00

This week's Ramble has a confession to make. I was ill on the weekend, but if I’m being honest, the real reason for the tardiness of this week’s nonsense is that the World Cup games start at three and continue pretty much unabated until eleven; not much time is left over for Rambling.

* * *

That’s not to say things are uneventful. I don’t think that’s possible here, but things have been a bit slower since the Budget was more or less finalised. There are still a couple of things to do, including printing and distributing a report I’ve been working on, but the main parts have all been presented to Parliament. Despite gloomy predictions that the opposition parties would team up to sabotage it, the Budget seems to have been received well; civil society, donors, opposing politicians, all seem to be broadly in agreement with what has been pledged. The catch, and you knew this was coming, was how to ensure that what we pledge is actually undertaken. Past Governments have been happy to publish a budget without any real intention of implementing it. That’s no longer the case, but this is one case where good will and honesty aren’t enough. You can’t implement a Budget that you can’t monitor, and you can’t monitor a Budget without an effective way of tracking your spending. This has been a weakness of Government in the past, and it’s something we all recognise the need to improve. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done: a shortage of qualified accountants in the country makes things difficult.

Of course, we can ask how our development partners can legitimately demand the level of auditing they seek. It’s entirely understandable that they want to see how the money they provide is being spent; but they and their headquarters aren’t usually able to produce the same level of auditing, so how can they really expect a country with far fewer human resources to be able to? The flaw in this argument is that many of our neighbours have managed it, but nonetheless it reveals one of the basic problems in the international development system, namely that the advice given is nearly always of the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ variety. I bang on about it interminably, but if one studies the varied paths of development across the world, I doubt you’d find many that matched the dominant paradigm of development espoused by the many these days. In a nutshell, if so-called ‘Good Governance’ was good for development, as is argued, then you can put a cross next to China, South Korea, even Japan (the seeds of whose rapid post-war development were sown in the repressive ‘30s), the UK (the enclosures movement) and the US (land grabs, widespread corruption in the 19th Century and early 20th). Similarly, free trade – even those countries who claim to engage in free trade these days are just more intelligent about how they market their protectionism.

So, what am I saying? I think the primary criticism I have is not of the development organisations per se, but of the discipline of economics. I’ve spent the spare time between football matches studying both history and economics since I was about fourteen (not telling you how many years that is), and with each passing year, I become more disillusioned with what passes as the mainstream of economics. My primary concern is how economics as a discipline has evolved over the years. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, despite coming to completely different conclusions, went through a process that looked at the mechanisms of the economy as an interactive part of a wider society, one in which culture, demographics, history and politics occur not in a vacuum, but as parts of an integrated whole. They specified the structures of the economy as part of this, and made it clear in their original writings that they were talking about specific places, specific worlds, even if they were hypothetical sometimes. Where Marx failed, tellingly, is when he tried to create a theory that transcended the specific historical concerns of real societies, a theory of Socialism.

As economics changed over time, it became more and more specialised, with an ever-increasing interest in precision and universality. Both were manifested in a tendency to present economic theories as scientific formulae that purported to give a precise relationship between variables which would, allowing for random variation, hold everywhere. At the same time, as these theories gathered proponents, the whole business of history was removed from economics, to the extent that economic history has become a separate discipline, closer to history faculties than economics ones. Indeed, most these formulae ignored social factors altogether at first; when it became apparent that they weren’t working, especially in the developing world, where the social, political and economic are most closely intertwined, well intentioned and intelligent men like Joe Stiglitz started to look at the ‘omitted social variables’, reincorporating them. But this reincorporation gave them the form of variables in a universal relationship. This economics still works from a theoretical starting point. They are beautifully constructed theories that make brilliant sense; but that doesn’t make them true.

Stiglitz and his contemporaries have taken economics forward from where it was ten years ago, but its still far, far behind where it was one hundred years ago. If you want to replicate a well functioning economy you don’t start by looking at where it is now; you need to look at how it got to where it is now, where it started from and what it used to get there. Until we start doing that, the development policies that are so strongly espoused are based on shaky foundations.

* * *

This Ramble is far too long. But it’s one I’ve wanted to get out for a long time.

And Now for Something Completely Unoriginal...

2006-06-11T23:20:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble is ill. Very, very ill. You see, I have World Cup Fever (boom, boom).

It’s spreading, too. On Friday, the day it all kicked off, pretty much my entire Ministry* forgot about budgets, aid, poverty and other insignificant matters and turned its attention to the only thing worthy of worry this month. With the budget almost wrapped up, and the final touches being put on our strategy paper before circulation to donors, time should be available to watch most games, and by beautiful circumstance, Wednesday is Freedom Day, the day Malawians voted for a multi-party system. This will allow me to watch Shevchenko rack up his first couple of goals as Ukraine piss on Spain’s parade.

My colleagues have varied predictions as to the eventual outcome. Confidence in the Ivory Coast team is high, and naturally for a country where the vast majority of football fans regard Ronaldinho as a friend rather than an idol, Brazil are hotly tipped. Maybe its bias, but my own view is that England will come good this time.

* * *

Of course, as Anon said in response to last week’s Ramble, goals in Malawi are rather more important than those in the World Cup. So, to stretch a thin analogy thinner, where are we in relation to our aims? More than seven games and one month away, that’s for sure, but it’s still a question worth asking.

First, the aim: Surprisingly difficult to define, especially after some of the conversations I’ve had recently. Two weeks ago, I’d have been asserting my materialist world view here, saying that what matters is income and food security, and these should be pursued above all else. But talking with a friend who has a rather different outlook (and an extensive repertoire of withering put-downs), I’ve been thinking about broader definitions of development. Where do safety, the right to a good education and freedom from persecution for political or religious beliefs fit in? Frankly, it demands more thought than I’ve put in to it, but these are all obviously important components of a high quality of life. The question is one of sequencing – can we pursue these after the material concerns of the population have been assuaged, or need they be pursued at the same time? Most aid organisations these days seem to feel that they are a precondition for improving material living standards, but looking at the way other countries have developed, that doesn’t seem evident to me. I think they can be pursued concurrently, but the first thing is to address those material issues that are putting the lives and livelihoods of the very poorest at risk.

If we accept that the primary aim is improving material livelihoods, Malawi has a long way to go. Food security is precarious; bad rains guarantee starvation unless there is a rapid and large-scale intervention, a situation that just isn’t acceptable in a country whose geography is so dominated by a lake. The Government have made irrigation and reducing the dependence on rain-fed agriculture a priority, but we’ve a long way to go. I’m no agricultural expert, but we can all see the need for a concerted effort here.

Alongside that, there doesn’t really seem to be the kind of vibrant and flourishing private sector found elsewhere in the region. Part of this is down to macroeconomic conditions – high interest rates and the like. But a more fundamental reason is the lack of real substantial entrepreneurial class who can effectively lobby the Government for a system of incentives of the kind found in Korea and Taiwan when they were growing at their fastest. These systems usually foster corruption. I think that’s inevitable, and the focus of Western Governments on reducing corruption is out of all proportion to the problems it causes. What’s more, a cursory glance at the economic histories of Europe and the US will reveal widespread corruption that was only gradually reduced.

And finally, there’s health. The healthcare system in Malawi seems okay, but is massively understaffed, partly due to the Diaspora of the trained. What’s more, basic supplies and medicine are difficult to come by, and expensive for the very low levels of income most people have. Again, outside my area of expertise, but to my untrained eye, we need extensive spending to ensure that hospitals are run, not just built, and if we can encourage the production of generic drugs (campaign, people!), so much the better.

* * *

This is not meant to be a bleak assessment. I see a lot of potential in Malawi’s natural resources, and I’ve met enough people who are capable and passionate about changing things to be hopeful about our prospects. What’s left is for Government to take a leading role, as I believe it must, in ensuring that what is to be done is achieved.

* * *

But back to the football. Angola just went down to Portugal, 1-0. Ivory Coast lost to Argentina, 2-1, but both teams have pretty definitively put to rest those irritating cliches about tactically naive African sides. I hope they manage a couple of wins, maybe even a run to the quarter-finals. And I really hope Togo don't let their shambolic preparations ruin things for them.

* Excepting the three people who are paying more attention to the battle between Dirk Nowitzski and Shaquille O’Neal, and the lone warrior concerned with the relative merits of Nadal and Federer. Truly, our sporting cup runneth over. For what it’s worth, I predict Nowitzski will be triumphant.

“It gets late real early round here…”

2006-06-06T20:54:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble has had a mixed week. Exhaustion brought on by overwork has been tempered by the warm glow that comes with a sense of accomplishment. All shall be revealed.

* * *

First, the exhaustion. I’ve been working on a strategy paper over the last four or so weeks, which has involved intensive discussions with our major donors, officials from the various arms of Government and representatives from the NGO sector. It’s been brilliant to work on, getting all of these people together to discuss the way aid is delivered in Malawi and how it can be improved. As I’ve said before, there are number of problems with the way donors administer the money they pledge to Malawi, and a number of these problems are in reaction to real or perceived weaknesses in the way Government uses the funding which we manage ourselves.

It’s been instructive to be part of all of this, really getting to grips with the problems on both sides of the aid relationship that need to be addressed, and starting to come up with a way of doing that. The flip side is that it has involved an extraordinary amount of work: organising meetings, writing the various papers that will go on to form the strategy, seeking comments, consulting important colleagues who have been unable to attend meetings, redrafting, briefing senior officials and so on and so on. This all came to a head this week, when we realised that our tentative deadline for producing a draft of this strategy (about five minutes from now) was looming, and senior figures were not willing to countenance a slippage against this deadline. As a result, the Maradona has been spending those hours normally reserved for sleeping and dreaming of football in front of the computer, frantically tapping away at his keyboard.

The strategy will be circulated for comments later this week, and the reaction of stakeholders within and outside of Government is going to be revealing, as it’s the first time we’ve really set down what we want to see from them. They’ve been asking us to do this for some time, and now that we have, it might leave some wishing we’d left it alone. We’ve tried to corner our development partners into committing to improve their practices by also committing Government to undertake the reforms that they say we need. There’s a suspicion that, sometimes, the slow pace of reform is an excuse for non-optimal forms of aid delivery, rather than the reason.

That’s not to say that donors want aid to have a small impact; that wouldn’t be true at all. Donors want aid to have a large and immediate impact. To achieve this, most feel happier when they are spending the money themselves, so they can control what’s happening. I sympathise with this outlook, to an extent. The fact remains, however, that capacity within Government will be strengthened faster if donors used Government systems more. As an example, donors might not use Government auditing procedures because of a shortage of qualified accountants in Government. The problem is that when donors don’t use our audit systems, we have difficulty recruiting or training accountants, as there’s insufficient demand to justify spending scarce resources on them. Catch-22, Mr. Heller described it as.

* * *

And now, the euphoria. Well, euphoria might be a bit strong, but there’s definitely a sense of achievement among my colleagues and myself this week. Readers may remember that we spent quite a lot of energy and time trying to ensure that the support that we get from our donors shows up in the coming budget. Well, last Friday, we finally got a look at the budget, more or less in the form it will go before Parliament in. It’s not perfect, and a lot needs to be done for the next one, but its much, much better than it has ever been before. All those meetings, those arguments, those long afternoons poring over excel spreadsheets and beseeching recalcitrant colleagues to provide information have paid off. We’re all very proud of the effort. What’s left now is to start planning for the next one, to improve and make sure that we do it even better next year.

* * *

Three days until the World Cup. I’m so excited I could cry. Looking at the odds one can get, I’d recommend a modest punt on Ukraine to make semi-finals. They’ve looked superb in their warm-ups, and that’s without the One Who Broke My Heart. A relatively easy group, coupled with the best forward in the world, means that they may surprise us.

A long time ago, in a Government far, far away…

2006-05-28T18:36:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble would like to stress that he is not a Star Wars fan (particularly when referring to the spectacularly bad trilogy of the boring that was recently completed).

* * *

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: in many developing countries, the most capable people in the civil service are praiseworthy and dedicated in a way that most people never imagine. One of the vagaries of the donor system is the way it distorts the wage structure in a poor country. Donors and NGOs pay their staff well, and its easy to understand why, when they have resources to burn and poverty is so great. There is usually a two-tiered salary structure in donor organisations, with international salaries significantly higher than the salaries on local conditions. Even these local conditions, however, tend to be more attractive than the terms on offer from the civil service. So, those well-qualified, hard-working, passionate individuals you find scattered through the civil service are not only doing their best to make the lives of other people in the country a little easier, they’re doing this when they could be earning significantly more in the private sector, or among the donor community, where many of the best qualified individuals are to be found.

You do get many people in the civil service who are stuck in their ways or who don’t realise how their work can impact on the wider population, but you also get many people who are dynamic and bent on doing what they can for the country. The problems in effecting reform that my last post touched on are often found because reform can’t be pushed by a few people – there’s a critical mass that needs to be attained, a momentum that needs to be built among the many for reform to be successful. Indeed, a few resistant people can do a lot to derail a process that many are trying to push through, so strong and charismatic leadership is probably one of the more important factors in processes of reform, one that hasn’t really been looked at in enough detail.

* * *

I’m not going to go into that now. It merits a post of its own one day. I’ve previously mentioned, in passing, that one of the great frustrations of many of my colleagues is that not all that long ago, Malawi was considered an exemplar for our neighbours in terms of Governance and organisation of the state machinery. Now, though, we go to Tanzania, to Uganda, to Zambia to try and learn from their systems of governance. Somewhere along the way, we slipped behind. For many, this is as inexplicable as it is frustrating. It isn’t remotely uncommon to hear comments along the lines of: ‘why don’t these meetings still occur? I remember, not fifteen years ago, we had them every month, and they worked very well’.

I’m sure that a great deal of this reminiscing is simply an idealisation of a past that never really existed. But it’s so widespread that it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t have some basis in reality. If that’s the case, what caused the deterioration in our relative position? Was it the rapid improvement of our neighbours, or did we regress? Listening to my colleagues, it seems like the latter was at least as large a factor as the former, and most can’t really put a finger on why. Coordination meetings gradually died out, target monitoring was gradually abandoned, and fewer senior figures stayed in post for a prolonged period of time. I don’t have an answer for why this all happened, but it has put the wind up me. It’s made me realise that everything that I’ve been working on in the last six months is fragile unless I spend the time required to ensure that it is embedded in the way our division is working. No structures in an organisation whose membership is as transient as a civil service should depend on individuals.

* * *

I don’t want to talk about Shevchenko. I just hope that Roman Abramovich goes broke before he can buy him.

Another Promise Sworn and Broken…

2006-05-20T21:20:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble has been thinking. Those of you who know me will attest that this is something worth reporting. It’s rare that my mouth gives my brain time to catch up.

Much like the Ramble, Governments around the world are very good at talking. We discuss and consult, then make assurances, promises and commitments at will. But as anyone who has ever worked in or with a Government before will know, we don’t tend to act quite as authoritatively as we talk.

This is a problem at the best of times. It reduces the trust citizens have in their Government, and since a lot of governance is based on trust (at least that part that isn’t based on coercion), it reduces the effectiveness of the state. In a country like Malawi, which most certainly isn’t in the best of times, the problems run deeper than this. Since we’re so dependent on donors for the money we use to run the country, anything that reduces the trust they have in us has pretty severe ramifications. In the UK, when the electorate stops trusting Tony-tone, they vote for someone else, or send him a message in the local elections. That’s about the extent of it. Apart from a few pensioners, they don’t normally stop paying taxes and get away with it. The odd strike occurs, but its been a while since a strike has been able to bring a Government down. The electorate here has the power to react pretty much the same way with Bingu wa Mutharika. If he was seen to be failing, which he isn’t, he’d be voted out. However, the donor community doesn’t vote, so it has to send its message using the only real lever they have over Government: money.

When a Government like Malawi sets itself a target or promises to implement a reform and then fails, it not only gets egg on its face, it reduces the confidence that donors have in its systems; as a result they’re less willing to spend their money here as opposed to, say, Ghana. What’s more, each failure increases the cynicism of these donors when we, with good intentions, promise further reforms. Donors constantly tell us not to set our sights too high, to do things little by little, pang’ono pang’ono. One understands where they’re coming from; they’ve seen us write out a lot of ambitious targets for reform and development and fail more often than succeed.

But are they diagnosing the problem correctly? I think they might not be. I’m not certain that the targets we’ve set ourselves, at least as far as reform of Government systems is concerned, have been unachievable. Yes, reform is difficult, and requires careful planning, something that hasn’t always been acknowledged within Government, but for the most part, there aren’t large technical problems that need to be overcome in the reform process.

The difficulty usually isn’t that the target is too hard to achieve. It’s that once the target has been set, the people who set them and the people who are meant to achieve them seem to suffer a collective amnesia or failure of will. This problem isn’t limited to Malawi. It’s found in other countries as well, and not just developing ones. The critical question is how to motivate people to undertake difficult, time-consuming reforms, particularly when their own behaviour is what needs to change. Making the target easier might be part of it, but my experience tells me that when someone is lazy, they’ll only do just enough to keep their job; in fact, an easier target will reduce this level and actually make it harder to make any changes. What I’d like to see is a system where for every reform agreed, there are named individuals who have responsibility for seeing them through, and these people are checked up on at regular intervals. If the reforms don’t move fast enough, they’ve got to have a pretty bloody good reason or they get moved out. I know, I know, civil services don’t tend to be that flexible, but we can dream, right?

* * *

Car’s in Mozambique; local police are lazy and incompetent. Interpol seem to have their act together – I don’t know what that means in terms of when I’ll see the damn thing again, but at least someone seems to be working on it.

* * *

One of my colleagues lost his wife last week. The most depressing thing about living in a country as poor as Malawi is the frequency with which funerals occur. You don’t get used to it, but you do have to think back to living in England to remember how infrequently one was confronted by a death within ones circle of acquaintances.

How to be a Millionaire

2006-05-14T13:28:00.000+02:00

Over the last six months, I’ve been immersed in the politics and practicalities of development aid, hardly surprising, given that something like 80% of Malawi’s development budget was financed externally last year. One thing I’ve not really been able to do, amid the fire-fighting and constant negotiation that characterises the aid relationship, is what the role of foreign aid in the development process actually is.

So, now I’m going to say something a little controversial.

Poor countries do not develop because of aid.

Aid can be used to do those things that will help countries develop, like strengthening their government, their private sector and their tax collection mechanisms. But the critical factor is not the aid, though this is important, but the programme of work owned by the Government that the aid supports. That probably doesn’t sound too controversial, so let’s take a practical example.

Foreign aid probably shouldn’t be used to distribute anti-retrovirals, unless there is a short-term and pressing need to do it this week, this month. Because, to quote directly from a friend of mine, the challenge in international development is not to distribute ARVs or buy fertilizer. This isn’t difficult. You just need to spend, spend, spend and you can achieve it. The challenge is to ensure that the domestic Government has the capacity to buy these ARVs from its own domestic revenue, and distribute them effectively. And of course, recognise that this is an important thing, worthy of their spending.

Not too many aid delivery agencies recognise this, though the individuals working in them usually do. One of the fundamental problems is that many aid organisations are political in nature: they are branches of a benevolent Government, or simply so large and so important that they need to play a political game to ensure that they have enough support to continue to operate effectively. This has positive effects (accountability is a good thing), but also negative ones, most obviously, the need to make politically acceptable policy. Development processes across the world have rarely been pleasant. I’m not just talking about recent success stories, like those from East and South-East Asia, but also the first round of developing countries: Britain, America and the like. But aid delivery agencies can’t go to their electorates or audiences and say ‘we’ve had a great year consolidating resources into the hands of an incipient class of capitalist entrepreneurs, which may well help power significant economic growth and increase income across the board, though inequality will treble over the next few years.’

Much easier to say ‘success! We’ve distributed loads of ARVs, stimulated discussion and debate and have given a few farmers small plots of land!’

Most aid agencies are doing a good job, and alleviating poverty with good results, and I don’t mean to criticise the good work they do. But the next step is to grasp the nettle and start funding politically tricky areas and, more importantly, just supporting a country in its efforts to stimulate its incipient economy, despite all of the difficulties and inevitable pain that process will involve.

* * *

I’ve found a couple of blogs which (who?) are running an interesting experiment: for every comment posted on their blog, they will deposit one pound in the coffers of a charity they’ve nominated. I’m not going to do the same here, as I don’t get enough comments to make it worthwhile, but I’d encourage you to visit the Urban Chick, who has a list of participating blogs, and do your best to bankrupt her. (How did I find this blog? Well, once upon a time, I wasn’t quite as overworked as I am now, and had time to browse through thousands of blogs on blogspot.)

Look upon my Works, ye mighty, and Despair…

2006-05-07T15:32:00.000+02:00

Once again, I must open with apologies for tardiness. I should rename this blog The Occasional Ramble from Malawi. On Thursday, the day I normally sit down and Ramble, I was working until midnight on our strategy for aligning donor aid to our national development plan. Naturally, at the stroke of midnight, when I had just finished everything to my satisfaction, there was a power surge, wiping my computer clean. Despite the best efforts of one of my few computer-literate friends, I was unable to recover the work, and wound up continuing through the night to redo it.

As a result, this week’s Ramble has enormous bags under its eyes.

* * *

Still, even when I’m in the office on a Saturday, like I was today, I thank my lucky stars for this job. I’m working on something that will change the way the way aid is delivered and utilised in a country whose state expenditure is almost entirely dependent on it. It’s really quite amazing, when you think about it. And since so much of the work is negotiation with our donors, it exposes you to the politics and working practices of the myriad aid delivery agencies. Well, I say ‘myriad’, but actually, there are relatively few Aid delivery agencies active in Malawi at present, with about ten to twelve major ones. This compares to a country like Mozambique, where there are more than fifteen who contribute untied budget support alone.

For the uninitiated, there are three broad modes of aid delivery: budget support, dedicated grants / SWAps and project support. The most common in Malawi is project support, where donors plan or sign up to a plan for a specific activity, i.e. building a road, and provide the funding for it. With project support, donors often administer the funding themselves after setting up Project Implementation Units which operate outside of mainstream Government systems, making this the worst method of aid delivery, from the Government’s point of view, excepting that funding that goes straight to NGOs, ensuring that no Government capacity building occurs at all. Malawi also have one Sector Wide Approach (SWAp), which is where donors provide financial support directly to the Government without any restrictions on how this is spent except that it must be within a specific sector, in our case Health. This is a much better form of support to the Government, as it allows us far more flexibility in our spending, and it also goes through our financial systems, enabling us to develop and strengthen these. It also allows us to fund those important projects that donors can’t sell so well to their employers and electorates at home; it’s easy to boast about how many anti-retrovirals you’ve distributed over a year, much easier than boasting about the consolidation of agricultural holdings or the successful promotion of private sector development. Finally, we also receive budget support from certain donors. This is where the donors provide a large grant to the Government, without any restrictions on how we spend it. We love this.

Now, while everyone accepts that budget support is the best way to provide support to a Government, we can’t expect all of our donors to sign over millions of pounds each year without having some confidence that we’re going to spend it wisely. This means we need a plan for what we want to spend on that is broadly acceptable to all parties, and we must be able to trace how the money we get is actually spent. The project I’m working on now is basically a road map of how to get from where we are to a where we are now to where we want to be. This involves commitments for improving practices from both donors and Government. You really get a good idea of the constraints and limitations of each donor organisation and Government doing something like this. It’s not going to be easy, but if we come out of this process with a document that everyone can sign up to, I’d like to think it will reorient the way donors interact with Malawi.

* * *

Things have been so busy these last few months that I’ve not really had a chance to assess everything I’ve been doing recently; so caught up with work I’ve almost lost track of where it all fits, in the grand scheme of things here. Thoughts on that next week, as soon as I’ve had a chance to think.

“There’s nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop, and an illustrated book about birds…”

2006-04-26T20:07:00.000+02:00

Zomba was eventful: very relaxed, but at the same time depressing and at one point profoundly terrifying.

The Zomba plateau is one of the major tourist attractions in Malawi. It’s beautiful, with an incredible view from the top, even when overcast, as you can see. The plateau itself is actually a raised forest of sorts, being covered in thick foliage, which makes it a great and unusual bird-watching site (and indeed, my first visit was the only time I’ve seen a Turaco). Unfortunately, the pace of deforestation in Zomba is absolutely mind-boggling. Without exaggeration, if you drive up to the plateau at 8:00am and then down again at 4:00pm, as we did more than once, you can actually see the difference in tree cover. There are apparently no restrictions on logging there, and with property rights unassigned, the result is deforestation at a rate that will soon wipe out the economic potential of the area, both in terms of natural resources and as a centre of tourism.

While that was depressing, terror came on the drive back to Lilongwe. We’d just stopped to buy some vegetables by the side of the road, pausing to chase off a shameless teenager trying to nick our hubcaps, when, travelling at about 80km/h (as you do in Malawi), we rounded a corner to find that a couple of inattentive children had let their cattle wander into the middle of the road. Snowball, who was driving, slammed on the brakes and spun the car around. As we skidded to the side, the car filled with the smoke of burning rubber from the tyres and my life flashed before my eyes, with highlights including Phastard Wednesday winning the Island School Six-a-Side Football Competition, lunch at Oriental Condor in Oxford and AC/DC at Wembley Arena. All this reminiscing was brought to a halt by the realisation that Snowball had actually saved us with a piece of driving worthy of Michael Schumacher. Thankful that I hadn’t eaten my last hamburger, I resolved to stop my constant teasing of her and to tone down my criticism of her taste in music. This nonsense lasted about five minutes, roughly the length of one of those mind-numbing Coldplay ballads she loves so much.

* * *

I’m once again rambling with a time lag this week, because my internet at home conked out. This time, though, not even my phone is working. A fair proportion of Lilongwe have had their phone lines killed by some bugger who’s gone and stolen a bunch of wires from Malawi Telecom. One wonders what the black market rate for used telephone wire is…

* * *

I’m still trying to work out how to actually ensure that people come to meetings here. I know its possible; last week I attended a meeting at which around 30-40 people from around Malawi turned up. Meanwhile, the strategy paper I’ve been working on has suffered from mixed attendances at key meetings, though we’ve tried every method of invitation delivery bar carrier pigeon. Today, I used e-mail, hard copy (hand delivered), fax and telephone invitations. I’ll let you know how it works out.

The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-Time

2006-04-13T20:13:00.001+02:00

Eagle-eyed readers will notice the disappearance from my sidebar of a blog posted about three weeks ago. No need to call in Poirot: I shall reveal all now.

Recently, I installed a Statcounter on this site. This rather interesting device allowed me to see how many different people were reading my humble little masterpiece. After a few days of getting rather excited (who knew anyone in Venezuela was interested in what went on in my corner of the world?) it began to cause me more and more anxiety. Firstly, I was beginning to get jealous of the globe-trotting ways of The American Geordie. More than that, however, the facility which allowed me to see the referring link to this blog started to worry me. It became abundantly clear that just about any Google search involving the word Malawi eventually led to this blog; if you add any number of basic economic terms, then it may even come up on the first page. One specific Google search I used as a routine course of my work led to the top result being a link to the now-deleted post.

Now, none of my colleagues know of my secret life as the Maradona; even though I have taken great pains to avoid mentioning anything that could compromise the Ministry's position, I'm not too keen on any of them discovering my flagrant disregard for the Official Secrets Act. I'm not sure how they'd react, but I don't want to find out.

Fortunately, the only colleague I've singled out for criticism, Oblomov, will never find this. He uses his computer solely for the use of Spider Solitaire, I've heard, and besides, he'd never Google anything work related...

* * *

Well, enough navel-gazing. The work week is being truncated by the Easter holiday's tomorrow. I'm going to Zomba to recharge the batteries and do a spot of bird-watching (I have also located a satellite TV on which I may be able to watch the Milan derby; be still my heart).

This week has been tiring, as we've stepped up our efforts to engage our donors in our drive to reform the way aid is managed in Malawi. We set up what would have been a large and extremely important meeting for earlier this week, but the vagaries of the post office ensured that most of our colleagues from the donor community didn't receive their invitations or the supporting materials. As a result, when we called around to confirm attendance the day before, most promised to send a representative, but these poor people had no idea what we were about to spring on them. Our guests, understandably, got rather confused as to what we were trying to do, and we spent most of our time resolving that confusion. As a result, we have to have another meeting after the Easter break to actually give them our detailed plans and ask for their support.

We're hand delivering those invitations.

* * *

I'll try and post some photos of Zomba next week; I've worked out how to upload pictures from my phone onto the computer. If you can handle the dodgy quality, you might be interested to see what this paradise looks like.

“Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish”

2006-04-06T21:36:00.000+02:00

If anyone can tell me where I nicked this week’s title from without recourse to Google, I shall be profoundly impressed.

* * *
Leaving aside matters of provenance, the quote implies that the best way to take control of, or lead a large collection of people or groups is to do as little as possible to them. (As an aside, one wonders whether the author thought that the converse was true; if boiling a large state is like governing a small fish. Both must be rather complex procedures).

Now, I appreciate that this is utter nonsense, but it seems to have been taken to heart by the leaders of many organisations I’ve encountered. How else can one explain the utterly uncoordinated and chaotic manner in which so many function? I speak with direct experience of three large organisations, each of which was organised into a number of divisions and teams. Such divisions are always at least partly forced, because the actions of one division always have some impact on the activities of another. In many cases, the effective operation of the whole depends on the divisions working well together.

I’ve never been anywhere where the divisions are actively trying to harm one another, but equally, I’ve never been anywhere where they really seem to be on the same wavelength. In most cases the heads of one division honestly don’t seem to have a clue what any of their colleagues are doing, and have even less desire to find out. Of course, in every organisation there are exceptions to this rule, and this person often finds him or herself expending vast amounts of energy and time trying to motivate people to work together, often while smart-arsed observers watch from the sidelines, sniggering and making snide comments about the futility of it all.

Is it futile? It might be my Socialist tendencies, but I genuinely do believe that groups of people, motivated by a common cause and tied together by a sense of identity are far more likely to achieve positive outcomes than atomised individuals blindly following their own best interests. When the organisation in question is a Government, then this is pretty important. Each ministry and division blindly pursuing its own interests doesn’t do much for the needs of the country, and in a place like Malawi, we need to do as much as possible as fast as possible for the country. Any opportunities we have to improve things, we have to take.

In this vein, for the last three months I’ve spent hours of my time in meetings with my Director, and those of other divisions and ministries trying to get everyone on the same page, and working together. It’s hard work, but we’re beginning to see progress. Enough people are exasperated enough to forcibly pull their colleagues together. Perhaps it’s because we’re in such a difficult position as a country that people are able to decide that enough is enough in a way I’ve not seen before. It’s almost inspiring. Obviously the litmus test will be when we graduate from just having meetings to actually getting people to do work for each other, but it’s a start.

Does the private sector experience the same problems? Somehow I doubt it.

* * *

Well, Milan did their best to give me a heart attack, but Superpippo came through. It takes a special kind of genius to achieve so much without any apparent skills.

* * *

And, as if you needed to ask, the car is still in Mozambique.

Oblomov Reincarnated

2006-03-30T20:31:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble begins with a literary reference. Now, I know you’re all well acquainted with 19th Century Russian literature, so I’ll be brief. Oblomov is the titular character of a novel by Ivan Gonchorov. Without giving too much away, he’s lazy, incompetent and knows it. And, of course, he’s a civil servant.

Last week I introduced our very own Malawian Oblomov, albeit in passing. He’s a colleague, working for another Ministry, and loyalty to the Government prevents me from talking too much about him. I had another meeting with him earlier this week, and once again he displayed a stunning lack of knowledge. It wouldn’t be so shocking if he at least pretended to give a s**t about it… but actually, he’s perfectly happy sitting in on meetings and deflecting any requests that he do any work.

Does every workplace have someone like this wasting space?

* * *

Speaking of wasting space, an update on my car. It’s still in Mozambique, and is now the centre of a minor diplomatic incident. Apparently, the Mozambican police don’t want to release it until the Malawian police give them back a piece of evidence they’re holding to use in a trial in Malawi. So my car is now a pawn in a strategic battle between police forces. The Commissioner for police in Lilongwe put a call in to Interpol to try sort it out.

And you know, it’s just a bloody Toyota Corolla!

* * *

A short survey.

Which cliché do you most ascribe to? ‘Walk before you can run’ or ‘Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars’?

This is a very crude representation of two conflicting opinions over our recent and ongoing attempts to create a Joint Assistance Strategy that gives a sense of purpose to the hundreds of foreign-financed activities in Malawi. Both views have proponents within both the wider Government and the donor community, and to be honest, I can see both sides of the argument. In the past, its true to say that we’ve not had any semblance of donor coordination, so to try and rectify the situation at one go is very ambitious. And with Government still staffed by Oblomovs in many posts, do we have the people to do it?

On the other hand, we now have momentum, and the right people are in key posts, so if we wait a year or two, the circumstances may have changed, and may never be so favourable again. And, every month and year we wait is a year in which someone’s quality of life makes no discernable improvement, or even gets worse. Think of the children! Won’t somebody think of the children?!

All in all, I’d rather be a noble failure than unambitious. It’s the difference between Lomana Lua-Lua and Emile Heskey. Lets see whether Portsmouth or Birmingham stay up.

Down for maintenance; and why Ice Cube had it right…

2006-03-18T13:48:00.000+02:00

Apologies for those of you who, like myself, were unable to access the blog for the last couple of days. I know the panic that this must have caused, but please file any claims for emotional damage against blogger.com and not against the Maradona.

* * *

That’s part of the reason why I’m late with the Ramble this week. There are two others. Let’s start with the bad news.

The police finally got their act together and went to Mozambique to get my car back. They had a car to get there, a driver to bring the other car back, fuel; everything they needed. Well, almost everything. The bright sparks somehow forgot to first contact the Mozambicans and let them know that they’d be coming and could they please have the car ready?

You can guess the rest. They arrived in Mozambique, remembered that they had to apply for the release of the car, did so, ran out of money and came back here empty handed. They have to return next week, or whenever the release forms are signed.

Ice Cube said it best. Since this is a family Ramble, I’ll merely link
it, with the warning that those under sixteen should really shy away from it.

* * *

The good news is that the other cause for the tardy post is entirely positive. I’ve spent the week drafting and redrafting a proposal paper for our Joint Assistance Strategy, and this afternoon finally sent it out to a selection of Government officials and donor agency chaps for comments. Once its broadly acceptable, it goes to the Cabinet for approval, which is rather exciting.

On top of that, I also just finished drafting a speech for our Minister of Finance for delivery at a meeting I’m attending on Monday morning. It will be interesting to see how much improvisation he allows himself. It’s not the first speech I’ve written here, having drafted one for the President a few weeks ago, but it’s the first one I’ve drafted and been able to watch the delivery of.

* * *

Lastly, I finally saw a couple of African Paradise Flycatchers in my garden. There were two, a male and a female, absolutely stunning birds.

A week of important meetings awaits, so next week I’ll Ramble at a bit more length.

Tsalani bwino.

“Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”

2006-03-09T19:21:00.000+02:00

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.

“Our Father, who Art in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development…”

2006-03-02T19:36:00.000+02:00

I just got back from a fantastic meeting, which began and ended on a slightly surreal note. We have a new Principal Secretary (I’ve only just found out we actually have a PS and an Secretary to the Treasury – the roles are normally kept separate, and our outgoing acting PS was unusual in that he was also acting ST. Confused?). Another tough lady, though this time not quite so hard-as-nails as the Director of my division. Still, she’s lovely and it’s already apparent that she’s very competent.

Anyway, she chaired this meeting, about plans for a Joint Assistance Strategy, in essence the Debt and Aid Policy I so covet. After thanking us for our presence, she said something that really threw us: ‘Normally, at this stage in our meeting, I pray for strength and wisdom from the Lord; would any of you like to lead us in prayer at this moment?’ Even though I know that most of my colleagues are religious, and indeed, the Director loves to quote from the scriptures, we all reacted in the same way, like first form students who don’t want to be called up to the blackboard. Everyone was furiously studying their shoelaces. Eventually the PS recited a short prayer herself, as the rest of us respectfully bowed our heads and clasped hands.

Many of you know that I’m a committed atheist. This is something I have actually kept hidden. Malawi is a very religious place, and most conversations eventually get to the question ‘mumapemphera kuti?’, meaning ‘where do you pray?’ The question not only assumes that you do pray, but also that prayer is a regular part of your life, as it’s posed in the present habitual tense. No one minds if you’re not a Christian, as most Malawians are, but the assumption that you must believe in something divine is very difficult to disabuse most people of, and can lead to some very long and frustrating conversations. So, like many atheist foreigners here, I normally tell people I pray in a temple in London, for which there is no Malawian equivalent. This is always accepted and the conversation passes without blows being exchanged.

At a meeting, though, in a country which separates Church and State, and is tolerant of religious diversity, I did find it a bit odd though my friends had warned me that this might happen. It wasn’t meant badly or to exclude anyone, but was done in the unspoken assumption that everyone must be a Christian. I really wanted to do a Richard Pryor, and offer to give a reading from ‘the book of Wonder! A boy was born… in HARD TIME MISSISSIPI! Surrounded by! Four walls! thatwerenotpretty! His parents – that’s two people – gave him love and affection. To keep him going, goingintherightdirection!’

* * *

But why was the meeting fantastic? Primarily because we finally explicitly stated our desire to create a Joint Assistance Strategy, got almost all of the key players together and finally got the ball rolling on starting it. We’ve already hit a donor-shaped brick wall, in that they think we can’t do it, but its within our compass to prove them wrong. It might simply be a case of getting someone other than ourselves, like an independent development capacity expert, to say we’ve got the abilities and will to do it. When the donors are on board, and when our concept paper gets cleared by Cabinet, we’ll be able to move at pace. I hope.

BTW – I’m hopefully going to be drafting this concept paper next week. All depends on whether I can finish our manual for operations in time.

* * *

Well, I’ve bought another car. And as luck would have it, on the same f**king day, they’ve found my old one! Unbelievable. It’s in Mozambique. When I get it back, I’m selling it, and should hopefully recoup the cost of the new car. What a pain.

I understand the Germans have a word for ‘the secret feeling of disappointment one experiences when things don’t turn out as badly as you expected’. If that’s true, I need to find out what word that is; it pretty much sums up my feelings right now.

* * *

Finally, may I point out that Joe Cole was simply fantastic for England this week? He’s surely got to be one of the first names on the team sheet now.

“No, man, it’s not L.A. …”

2006-02-23T21:03:00.000+02:00

Famous last words.

I was car-jacked by proxy last week. Now, most of you probably know I can’t drive, and in fact, cannot be trusted on anything faster than a bicycle, so you will have sussed that I have a driver. Cantona, so-called for his passion for United, was driving after dark (at 7:45pm) on his way to the orphanage run by the Sisters of Mother Theresa, from where I’d asked him to take one of the Sisters on an errand she needed to run, while I stayed at home working. This is a journey he makes very often as night, as sometimes when we finish late, he takes the car back to the orphanage and parks there. But this time, as he was on one particularly quiet stretch, he noticed some people lying on the road. Naturally, he hit the brakes to avoid running over them, at which point a further 3 people came and barricaded the car in using large stones. They forced their way into the car and attacked him, leaving him with some nasty bruises and a deep scar across his neck. He’s lucky; these carjackers don’t always leave witnesses.

Having been relieved of his shoes, phone and, bizarrely, tie, he ran the distance to my house, from where we called the police and an ambulance. Even the policeman realised that Cantona had nothing to do with it, though he still gave him a pretty vigorous interrogation. I’d call the cop Columbo if I thought his image of incompetence had been a clever disguise, but no such luck – just more incompetence underneath; and under that, probably a burning core of stupidity.

In any case, Cantona’s recovering, though still very shaken, which is the important thing. The car won’t be recovered, and the insurance company have kindly told me to go stuff myself, as my policy didn’t cover carjackings. The upshot is I’m looking for a new car, and accelerating my own driving lessons at the same time.

The whole thing is, as my colleague described it, ‘a total fucker’.

(btw – those of you who know my family – please don’t mention this whole episode. They’d worry themselves to death, even though this is a very rare occurrence here, and we can avoid that road in the future. They think the car was stolen from a carpark, so lets keep it that way, eh?)

* * *

Fortunately, work continues to make up for such bad luck. I’ve spent the week preparing for the arrival of the latest IMF Mission to Malawi. Honestly, you’d think it was the Second Coming the way we’re preparing. I don’t understand what they’re going to do with these reams of statistics they’ve demanded. The whole Ministry seems to have ground to a halt as we’re scrabbling to put together all of these figures.

In any case, I’ll be glad to see the back of them. While they do keep us on our macroeconomic toes, their stringency is a bit obscene, and they could really do with a broader focus than they currently have.

Besides, in the next couple of weeks I’ve got to try and motivate our Budget Director to get our donor funded projects into the coming budget. If they’re excluded they won’t be able to access Government funding, which most need in addition to the donor's money, and the donors will be very reluctant to spend so long providing us with information in the future if we don’t actually do anything with it. It’s going to be a battle, but I’m looking forward to it more than I’m looking forward to haggling over cars…

* * *

And, finally, did you see Ballack’s goal against Milan?! What a shot. We should sign the guy up right now – he’s free!

“I been away a long time...”

2006-02-15T22:45:00.000+02:00

Many apologies for the lack of a Ramble last week, but my internet connection failed completely. I’ve only just been able to get back online, and even now it’s constantly failing. I’m not certain I’ve definitively fixed the bloody thing, so we may get further unexplained silences. All I can say is pepani. I know the Ramble is the highlight of your week...

The timing couldn’t have been worse, either, because these last couple of weeks have been massively eventful, so this is, I’m afraid, a bumper edition of the Ramble. Clear the next fifteen minutes, because these last two weeks have been the most interesting of my time here.

Let’s start with what would have been last week’s Ramble. One of the major international donor organisations recently paid a visit to our offices, and made a very interesting proposition: how would we feel if they used their technical experts and funding to help smooth the operation of our many stalling projects here in Malawi? Avid readers will recall that my team recently carried out a similar exercise, running frantically from project to project, troubleshooting and trying to get unlock the foreign exchange we so desperately need in our Reserve Bank. The exercise met with mixed results. We managed to liberate a significant amount of money, but an equal amount remained tied up, due to problems that were either beyond our control or would take longer than the lifespan of our project, time limited by our need to meet IMF targets. What our new friends were suggesting was a nine-month exercise to comprehensively solve the problems of a wide selection of our projects.

You’d think it was a no-brainer, right? While I believe it’s a great deal for us, there’s a bit more to it than that. We’re very aware that we have systematic failings in the way projects are initiated and managed. Precisely because we’ve recognised this we’re no longer really interested in the quick fixes, short term target-meeting exercises apart (as an aside – this really does demonstrate the perverse incentives of a strict target system. It’s only now that we’ve given up on the Q3 target that we’re actually addressing the long term, underlying problems). A nine-month programme of action to help us on a failing project by failing project basis will help those projects deliver benefits to poor Malawians, but it won’t help us prevent the same problems cropping up time and time again.

We need to overhaul our system of planning, co-ordinating and governing projects from start to finish, and that is something we would love to have concerted donor support for. In other words, instead of having experts and extra money troubleshooting smaller problems like the failure to open a bank account, we need the same experts to help us put in place a system that will prevent these problems arising in the first place. And that system needs to be built into the Government machinery, so that when the donor experts leave, as they inevitably must, the system doesn’t wither away. We raised all of these issues in our meeting with senior figures from the donor agency, who were sympathetic to our reasoning. It remains to be seen whether or not we can come up with an appropriate extension to the project, because it its short term or nothing, we’ll take short-term. It will make some impact on a very poor population, and that can’t be a bad thing.

A particularly cynical question was also asked by one of my colleagues at the meeting. If this organisation is going to provide manpower and money to us as a grant, and a grant used to solve problems on projects run by other donors, well, what’s in it for you? Pretending altruism doesn’t exist (I’ve got to behave like an economist sometimes, don’t I?), there’s a simple answer. The organisation has a salary allowance and a budget set from their HQ’s central budget. If they can’t find a way to spend it this fiscal year, then their budget for the next fiscal year will be slashed. So, if they can’t get any new projects started quickly enough, they can instead throw money at other projects to get rid of it. Is this such a bad thing? As long as the projects go through Government and are vetted appropriately, then the money can probably be used wisely. But if the projects go through NGOs, many of whom are just competing to get their name known, and will slap it on any initiative, then we could start running into problems.

* * *

If you’re still reading, we now come to the really interesting stuff.

Any of you who have read more than one post here will know that I’m constantly moaning about the need for a comprehensive, start-to-finish system of managing projects. This will allow us to co-ordinate projects, weed out the unrealistic ones and rationalise our approach to managing them, while simultaneously demonstrating to donors that we’re responsible with aid money and they can therefore move away from project-specific funding to non-tied aid, which is money that is just handed in lump sum to the Treasury to use however we like.

Well, earlier this week I finally put all of this down onto paper for our Director. I made a number of strong criticisms of the way we’re working now, which I knew she agreed with, and then laid out a broad action plan for changing these working practices, starting with data collection and ending with a radical revision of the way individual units in the Division operate.

She read the paper over lunch, and then called a meeting of all of our senior officers at 3:00pm, inviting me to present this paper to my colleagues. Before I started to speak, she silenced the room and said: “I’d like you to pay close attention to this, because this paper is going to form the basis of how we will reform the way this division is structured and operates”. I nearly danced with joy right then. I presented the paper, doing my best not to make the criticisms too personal, and we agreed that we would all make comments on it, adding further issues that we need to resolve and other ideas on what else we could do to reform. After collecting these comments, I’ve been tasked with producing a manual on how we should be operating as a division, looking at every unit and making specific recommendations. This, with the Assistance Strategy we are looking to draft in the near future, will be the backbone of our Debt and Aid Policy. It could change the way millions of dollars of aid money is handled.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a more satisfying week in my working life (no offence to those of you I used to work with!)

* * *

I’m about to wrap up; don’t worry. I just wanted to mention that I had my first brush with illiberal and ham fisted policing since I arrived here. Last week, the Old Town in Lilongwe was the site of running battles between the police and the vendors who sell everything from tomatoes to umbrellas outside the various shops selling the same goods at inflated prices. The Government want them to move into a specified market area, but the vendors are aware that this will lower their revenues by taking them further away from the rich azungu. Noting their reluctance, the police and army started to attack them. As far as I’m aware, there were no fatalities, but I hear that a number of vendors were shot in the legs. One poor chap was pictured on the front of the Nation newspaper with a heavily bandaged posterior, in which a particularly sadistic policeman had delivered a round of his pistol.

As usual in the region, nothing will be done to question why such extreme measures were taken. I wish I was angrier about it, but speaking to my friends from Zambia, I’m just pleased that the police here are better than those in neighbouring countries.

* * *

Hope you all had a good St. Valentine’s Day. Mine was spent eating a dodgy pizza by myself in my garden, but thankfully, the whole thing is less of a big deal here than it is in the UK.

Tsalani bwino.

Cat scratch fever…

2006-02-02T21:54:00.000+02:00

My attempts to keep busy at work have borne more fruit more quickly than envisaged this time last week. The upshot is, this has been the busiest week I’ve had since coming here, and I’ve been trying to find enough hours in the day to finish my work, get to my Chichewa lessons (dzulo madzulo, ndinali ndi phunziro, koma ndinali wopepera chufukwa ndinayiwala bukhu langa), unpack my belongings and get my house in order and still get enough sleep to be in the office by 7:15. So apologies in advance for the brevity of this week’s Ramble.

Anyway, I’ve been writing a paper on how we can move towards a system of what my Assistant Director likes to call ‘Institutional Debt and Aid Management’. This paper will be circulated for comments and will hopefully be a forerunner to the Debt and Aid policy I dream of getting signed up by the Cabinet. A good policy, well implemented would transform the way the country currently plans its development. More honestly, it would mean that we finally actually try and plan development meaningfully. All of our Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and think-pieces aren’t worth much when we don’t know what we’re currently doing. How can we prioritise future spending between sectors without knowing how much activity is being undertaken in each one at present? The creation of a signing-to-closing system of monitoring projects and allocating them between sectors is vital for the country, given how much aid we receive. It needs to be co-ordinated.

I realise that this is more than a couple of years work. It’s something that will move slowly and needs someone to push it every step of the way, and to make sure that it gets implemented, and doesn’t just sit on a shelf catching dust. That person needs to be far more senior than me (and needs to be a Malawian civil servant), but the way things are going, if work continues to be this interesting and my bosses don’t change too much, I’m very seriously considering extending my stay for a year or two to try and help see all of this through. If our Director doesn’t move on, I’ll at least have one sympathetic and senior colleague eager to push the work forward.

* * *

I’ve inherited a cat with my house; her name is Banjo. Those of you who met my previous pet, a violent terrier with a Napoleon complex, will know that I’m not really a pet loving person. That said, in less than a week Banjo has actually grown on me enormously. The only thing that irritates me is that she constantly tries to jump on to me when I’m sleeping. I’ve started to lock her out of my bedroom at night.

* * *

I have to ask, though – did anyone see Duncan Disorderly punch Paul Scharner in the Everton v. Wigan bout? Someone told me it was a punch Floyd Mayweather would have been proud of. I’m gutted to have missed it. I wish Dunc would pick one someone like Papa Bouba Diop and get his just deserts. Diop would roll him up like a pair of socks.

I was in the bath one day, when I realised I was destined for greatness…

2006-01-25T18:25:00.000+02:00

Another day, another headache (…and another cliché).

If there’s one thing working here will teach you, its how to be proactive. If you sit around hoping that some interesting and important work will fall into your lap, you’ll wind up twiddling your thumbs more often than not.

We had our meeting with our donors yesterday, and I as I predicted, we met with a fair bit of resistance to our proposals. It must be said that some of the objections were reasonable, most boiling down to ‘he would one day fly must first learn to stand and walk’ (and yes, that’s Nietzsche by way of Coming to America – you can’t accuse me of being highbrow). Our titular response was plagiarised from this Joker.

In seriousness, though, it is true that we’ve never had any system for capturing even annual donor inflows effectively, so our drive to monitor on a monthly basis does seem to be a bit sudden. We have our reasons, though.

Firstly, the reality of the situation we’re in is that to hit IMF targets we need to monitor what happens in the economy each month. We need to know in the middle of a financial quarter that our project grants aren’t coming in as expected so we can start to try and resolve this before we miss our quarterly target.

Secondly, we have momentum on this now. A new director, people in key posts within government who get along with each other, people in key posts in donor agencies who are capable and helpful; the fear is that if we move too slowly this favourable confluence of circumstance will dissipate.

We explained all of this to our donor group, and though they have reservations, we made a few compromises and reached broad agreement about what we can request, by when and from whom. We were all in agreement that all of this needs to be driven by the Ministry of Finance, and key decisions should rest with our Director. Hopefully a system of sorts will be running by mid February, which we can refine in the run up to the 2006/07 budget.

Which brings us to my comment about being proactive. Having helped to clear a path on this work, I suddenly realised that since this was resolved faster than I expected, I’ll soon have no active projects or assignments on. To forestall this, I spent the afternoon I made a list of all of the things the division still needs to do in the next six months, starting with the formulation of a Debt and Aid policy. I’m having a meeting with my boss tomorrow morning, after which I’ll run all of this by the Director and hopefully a couple of these projects will get of the ground soon.

* * *

The Africa Cup of Nations is starting to hot up. After yesterdays cracking 1-0 between Nigeria and Ghana, I watched the Ivory Coast beat Libya. The Ivorian team is physically imposing and technically adept, with a few players who are clearly ready for a move to major European clubs, not least Didier Zakora and Yaya Toure. What really surprised me, though, was the flair with which Libya undertook their infrequent forays forwards. I’ve not seen so many accurate backheels and flicks since Jay-Jay Okocha seared himself into my consciousness in the 1998 World Cup.

It’s also refreshing to listen to commentary that doesn’t refer to every piece of poor defending as ‘naïve’. In fact, the giants of African football, teams like the Ivory Coast, boast of defences as reliable as they come. To take just two examples, the Ivorians feature Kolo Toure and Marc Zoro of Messina and Ghana’s defence is marshalled by Sammy Kuffour, a bit past his best, but on his day still impassable.

* * *

I may not be able to Ramble next week as it might take a bit of time to get my internet connection sorted out when I move into my house. If I don’t turn up, don’t fret; I’ll be back soon after that.

Tionana.

Haggis McMutton and LeChuck

2006-01-19T18:57:00.000+02:00

I find myself apologising for the tardy Rambles more and more as time goes on. It’s due to a combination of things: taking more work home, Chichewa lessons every other day (ngakhale ndilibe phunziro la Chichewa lero) and finally finding a decently equipped gym. A big reason, though, is that a friend returning from the UK has brought me a couple of computer games, which have gradually started to siphon off all of my free time. This is exactly why I stopped playing these childish things before I came out. Since I got here, though I thought it would be a way of passing the time on the less busy evenings…

Big mistake. The Curse of Monkey Island is now constantly running on this computer, and I find myself wondering how I can get Haggis McMutton to join my pirate crew even while I’m having lunch.

Anyway, this weekend, I’m taking a break from it all and going down south to a lodge in the tea estates in Mulanje, which should be great. I’ve been overcome with guilt at the prospect of missing two Chichewa lessons, though, and to compensate, have organised a two hour lesson on Sunday – but still, the guilt persists. I haven’t felt like this since I was student.

* * *

Things at work have been hectic. I’ve been working on a system to capture all donor aid inflow to Malawi, so I’ve spent most of this week working on how best to design this, while simultaneously coming up with ways of selling the idea to the major donors. We’re meeting next week, when I’ll be giving a presentation aimed at getting them onside. So, my break to Mulanje isn’t exactly ideally timed, but it’s a good opportunity to go, and I’ll take my files with me.

While working on this, I’ve also been using the information we do have to see how we’re performing against our PRGF targets. The main message of this frustrating exercise is that we desperately need a new system to get all this information in, as the current one has more holes in it than the Middlesborough defence (yep – even in Malawi we’re laughing at that 7-0, and the same thing happened to us last year).

Our Director has been away all week as well, with an illness, so the other work we’ve been doing, freeing up resources that are tied up in underperforming projects hasn’t been moving as fast as we’d hope. We’ve got a list of actions we’re recommending she take, but until she okays them, we can’t do anything. So here’s hoping she gets better soon.

* * *

I’ll be moving into my house next week; I just told the lodge staff. I’m going to be very sad to leave my friends behind. Maybe I can take some of them with me…

“Salvation sat and crossed herself; called the devil partner”

2006-01-14T09:52:00.000+02:00

A really busy week; apologies for not getting this out sooner.

Post-Christmas lethargy is dissipating and momentum is gathering on my pet project, designing an ideal system for recording donor activity in Malawi that meets all our needs at the Ministry of Finance. It’s an ideal system in that it’s what we would want to have in a perfect world, a system that captures the information we need to monitor our progress against our PRGF (Poverty Reduction Growth Facility) targets set by the IMF, while also allowing us to keep an eye on every project being undertaken in the country, spotting problems as or even before they arise.

But as much as I love it, Malawi isn’t perfect. There is no way we’re going to get this best case scenario off the ground any time in the next two years. Donor’s will balk at the information requirements (though in practice they won’t have to provide much at all) and will also be wary of publicising their spending patterns. On our side, I’m not sure we have the capacity within the ministry to make sure that the system is maintained, so a less ambitious version will have to do for now. But that doesn’t mean the position paper I’ll be writing over the next couple of days is an academic exercise; with any luck it will allow us to define our position when negotiating with donors before we sit down and finalise the design of the system.

This isn’t a minor consideration. Until now we have tended to go into meetings without a clearly articulated position to use as a starting point from which to make compromises. As a result, the agenda tends to be dominated by the donors. This can be problematic for two reasons.

Firstly, no matter how well intentioned they are, donors have a different agenda to us. This is set partly by their home government(s), who invariably have pet projects and hot topics that the donor is obliged to pursue, and partly by a wider desire in the development community to see a particular type of growth. Most development economists and aid workers these days go misty-eyed when someone mentions ‘small holder agriculture’ or ‘medium-sized businesses’. Of course, none of these countries developed using either of these two forms of production or and pretty much every success story of the last 50 years has relied on either large scale enterprise like the zaibatsu in Japan and chaebol in South Korea or a politically powerful emergent capitalist class, but lets not mention that. In the current climate, a desire to grow by encouraging capitalism despite the inevitable relative inequity and consolidation of wealth that this entails is treated like a suggestion that heroin be introduced to school lunches.

Secondly, donors squabble. It’s as simple as that. Most donors have a deeply ingrained superiority complex when dealing with the host government, and as a result, most operate on the assumption that they are always right (when in fact, it’s me who is always right, don’t you know…). This attitude is carried over to their dealings with other donors in multi-lateral talks like those we’re about to start over this information system, with the result that unless we can provide an agenda and a starting point, the whole exercise could descend into an extended argument between donors over what font to draw the title page in…

* * *

The good news is: ndili ndi nymuba! I have a house. I’m moving in at the end of the month. A colleague has decided to leave Malawi early, and I’ll be taking up her vacant Ministry of Finance house. Although I’ll be very sad to leave all my friends at the lodge, I can’t wait to have my own kitchen.

Pang’ono Pang’ono

2006-01-05T20:24:00.001+02:00

Don’t you just hate the holidays?

I got back to the office after my sojourn in Liwonde eager to get back to freeing money up to bolster our rather precarious foreign exchange reserves. To my dismay I found almost all of my colleagues away on leave, with those that remained so over-burdened with other people’s unfinished work that they couldn’t spare a second for our attempts at troubleshooting for projects in dire straits.

I do realise that my desire to work over the New Year marks me out at as incorrigible geek, as did my insistence on staying in with a friend and a couple of drinks on the eve, thus avoiding the social commotion of a party. But things were going so smoothly before my departure, I’d actually spent part of my time in Liwonde thinking up new ways of getting information from a couple of truculent projects, so imagine my dismay at the lack of progress that greeted my return... That said, things are starting to pick up again, as witnessed by the files I’ve been obliged to take home. The problem is that with our momentum dissipated, we’ve been finding it harder to find fruitful avenues of approach with some of the projects we’re working with. A number of them have problems so intractable that we cannot do anything except recommend to the PS that we never agree to the same conditions again. Others are running into problems to do with the lack of capacity within Malawi (how do you spend money earmarked for construction when there are no qualified civil engineers in your district?), things we need to change over the long term. In the meantime, we need to be more realistic about what projects we can actually institute.

While this project is ticking over slowly, I’ve been working on an audit of how we work with donors and how we need to reform our data collection practices. You can be assured that when that swings into top gear, you’ll be treated to an industrial-strength rant regarding the poor practices donors think they can get away with because we haven’t been chasing them up with the vigour we should be. That should change when we finish this review, however. I’m very tempted to name and shame a few right now, but I’ll bite my tongue till we see how they react to our requests for reformed working practices.

* * *

So, with work a little slower during the festive period, I’ve started my Chichewa lessons, having hit a wall in my attempt to learn through osmosis. My teacher, the brilliant and cheerful Keating (and yes, I hate that bloody film, too) has already improved me no end. I can already insult people pretty effectively: sindimakonda Diouf; amanyansa kwambiri (I don’t like Diouf – he’s always being a shit). More prosaically, I can now communicate relatively effectively when talking about people, though inanimate objects (requiring the memorisation of noun groups and associated rules) is a bit trickier. All in time, all in time…

In the meantime, a prize (or, rather, praise) to anyone who can translate the following:

Ndikanokhala ndi ndalama, ndikanopita ku Nyika

“I tawt I taw a puddy tat”

2005-12-27T19:38:00.001+02:00

This week’s blog takes an ornithological theme, so if, like Snowball, you can’t tell Kingfisher from the Fisher King and have no desire to, I’d suggest you look away.

Just got back from five amazing days in Liwonde National Park, staying at Mvuu Camp - pricey, but staffed by some of the friendliest and most helpful people you could hope to meet. I could write about the trip all day, but rather than try your patience too much, I’ll restrain myself.

We got up most days at dawn to walk through the national park, ideal for birding, before going on a boat safari after breakfast. In the evening, we went on a game drive, stopping for drinks by the river, before driving back in the pitch black with our guides, Angel and Symon, pointing out the various creatures of the night. We were lucky enough to see some gorgeous animals, including a few Sable Antelope, a couple of Black Rhinos, a few enormous crocs and innumerable hippos, one of whom decided to go for a wander right outside our chalet. Having heard that they can bite a human in half, I kept a safe distance, though Snowball wasn’t so shy.

We met some really interesting people as well: a Mozambican couple working to develop trade unions in the area, a fantastically friendly and interesting American doctor seeking to improve the standard of paediatrics in Malawi, and a couple of ‘white hunter, black heart’ types – the kind who go on hunting tours. Despite this unsavoury fact, they were really good company.

But the real appeal of Liwonde is the bird watching. Both Angel and Symon were avid birders and so we managed to see an amazing array of birdlife, giving me the opportunity to bore anyone who would listen with my rather exaggerated descriptions of some of them (“It was, like, four metres long!”). My eight hundred page guide to the birds of Southern Africa rarely left my side. A much edited list of the sixty-plus species we spotted (I’d link pictures, but its been a long day):

African Fish Eagle (so many they got boring)
Tawny Eagle
Brown Snake Eagle
Gymogene
Osprey
Red-necked Falcon (in pursuit of another bird!)
Dickinson’s Kestrel
Palm-Nut Vulture (juvenile)
Pel’s Fishing Owl
Malachite Kingfisher
Woodland Kingfisher
Pied Kingfisher
Giant Kingfisher
Marabou Stork
Goliath Heron
White-Backed Night Heron
Red-billed Hornbill
Trumpeter Hornbill
Green Wood-Hoopoe
Common Scimitarbill
Burchell’s Coucal
Bohms Bee-eater
Little Bee-eater
Lilac-breasted Roller

…and on and on and on. Next visit will be to the Nyika Plateau to see the Secretarybird.

Hope I didn’t bore you too much. Next week, we'll be back with the more exciting fare of economics and the civil service.

Quick and to the Pointless

2005-12-21T19:12:00.000+02:00

A very rapid Ramble:

Had a really, really long day. Tsiku lodapayza! Wearisome. Spent it number crunching in advance of another IMF meeting tomorrow morning, at which the new Director should be locking horns with the IMF head honcho in Malawi. Unforunately, I won't be witnessing those fireworks, as I'm off to Liwonde in the morning. Can't wait.

Anyway hope you all have a fantastic Christmas. I'll probably Ramble before New Year's eve, so will let you what's happening in the city that's always sleeping for that.

How many donors does it take to screw up a light bulb?

2005-12-14T20:26:00.000+02:00

One week might be a long time in politics, but it’s about a minute in the civil service, so as a rule things move slowly here in the Ministry of Finance. This past week has been a welcome exception, however, and one of the projects I’ve been working on has been flying since the last Ramble.

Essentially, what we’re doing is going to the various multi-million dollar projects being funded around the country and finding out exactly what is preventing money from being released to them. Most projects are currently using between five and eighty percent of the funds donors had promised to make available to them. Eighty percent is a respectable figure, but we want to be closer to ninety, and anything under sixty is pretty much unacceptable. A lot of times the problems are on the Malawian side, often out of the control of the project teams, but something that a few senior officials could fix in no time. This is where we come in. When these problems are identified, we take a report of what the problem is and how to solve it to our Minister and Principal Secretary, who make the proverbial and literal phone calls to solve them. Voila – money in the Reserve Bank.

Some of the problems turn out to be far beyond our control, however. Often these have to do with inflexible donor practices and bureaucracy, with some donors rather more culpable than others. Just hearing about some donor practices can be infuriating, so I can’t begin to imagine how pissed off the actual project teams get. For example, one project manager explained to us how, before hiring any staff, he has to send a hard copy of the advertisement to the donor’s head office in its home country. When this is okayed, they have to send the CV’s of the candidates under consideration. After these are cleared, they can interview the candidates, minus those who have found alternative employment in the meantime. They then offer the job informally to candidate and send the proposed contract to donor HQ for clearance. This can take up to three months. If the guy/girl is still interested in the job, they can then secure his signature.

If I had heard all this three weeks ago, I’d have had an aneurysm. But last week, something changed. We got a new Director to run our division. This lady is nails. She’s risen to the top of a male-dominated world in Malawi, has a very close working relationship with our Minister, a clear idea of what she wants our division to achieve and exactly how to do it. She came in, set the agenda, set deadlines and made a point of soliciting opinions from everyone, regardless of seniority. She wants to manoeuvre Malawi to a position from where, instead of accepting any pet projects a donor wishes to fund and meekly agreeing to every condition they set, we decide what needs to be done over a multi-year period and then set about securing funding for it. We get the donors onside by irrefutably linking each strand to a Millennium Development Goal, and underpin each proposal with analysis of how it will contribute to the goals. Its ambitious, but she’s already set out the first steps we need to take before getting there, starting with building our own knowledge base and recruiting new members of our team. If she stays in post for a reasonably length of time, say four or five years, she could transform our division.

* * *

I’m in mourning for the loss of Richard Pryor. I still listen to his concert CDs regularly, and one of the things I miss most about home is my collection of his concert DVDs. It’s not possible to recreate his humour on the page, so important is hearing or seeing his astonishing mimicry, so I’ll simply recommend that you get your hands on his concert album '...is it something I said?'. The truth will make your sides split.

* * *

I’ll be in Liwonde in just over a week. I’ll try get a Ramble out before then, but if the rush at work prevents me, have a great Christmas and a fantastic new year.

“There’s nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavour out of a peanut butter sandwich…”

2005-12-07T18:10:00.000+02:00

This week’s Ramble is attempting to type with a cat on the keyboard. It’s the second biggest challenge of the day.

The biggest was preventing myself from physically assaulting a member of the IMF mission this morning. I know the Weekly Ramble is in danger of becoming Weekly Rant, but I really need to get this off my chest. Our distinguished colleagues from the Fund seem to believe that anyone who doesn’t work for them has an understanding of the economy gleaned from the Gospel According to Peanuts. This morning I attended a meeting with my Assistant Director where the most recent IMF mission to Malawi presented the findings of their work with the Reserve Bank of Malawi. As tempted as I am to betray the official secrets act (if indeed we have one) and reveal the content of the meeting, I shall bite my tongue. Essentially, the IMF are all but demanding that we take a very controversial action designed to satisfy their free-market ethos because, as the leader of the mission told our Principal Secretary, ‘until you do this, industry in Malawi won’t be able to grow. And we don’t want that, do we?’ If I was in PS’ seat I would have slapped the beard off the condescending hyena’s face, but he settled for patiently explaining that, yes, we do want industry in Malawi to grow, but our concern right now is the fact that the vast majority of the country is still at risk of famine and diseases related to undernutrition. Taking the actions the IMF suggested would make it more expensive for these people to purchase food. And as much as industry matters, that is what we really want to avoid.

Of course the Fund doesn’t really think about all that. For them the be-all and end-all of development is the achievement of macroeconomic stability, i.e. low spending and low taxation. No matter how much you explain that, actually, you need to spend to increase agricultural and indeed industrial productivity, how you need to nurture these industries, they stubbornly refuse to budge from that basic position. When the leader of the mission left the room one of his colleagues, who only recently joined the Fund from the private sector, acknowledged that our position was a perfectly reasonable one. If I wasn’t such a cynic I’d go so far as to say he was implying that he wouldn’t take the Fund’s advice if he was in our shoes. But no. They’re not human, are they?

* * *

Lilongwe is an amazing city. Just the other night, driving home with Cantona, we saw an impala running across the road in front of Capital Hill. A more pleasant surprise than the snake in Snowball’s driveway.

* * *

I have a moral dilemma, and any advice would be muchly appreciated. I recently found out that a friend of Cantona’s (nom de blog, Hobbes, mainly because I wanted to link that page) is going be out of a job soon. He’s a fantastic guy: honest, hard-working, and endlessly good natured. He’s going to lose his job because his employer is seeking greener pastures, but told me this in the strictest confidence (yes, yes I know, I am fully aware of the irony of publishing the information on the internet). This person has begged me not to let this information out among our small circle of friends, and would never forgive me if I broke this promise (she doesn’t know about the blog. So lets keep it quiet, eh?). Unfortunately, one of the people I’ve been explicitly requested not to tell is the only person I know who can find Hobbes a new job. Hobbes comes from a really tough background, and he’s incredibly honest. He recently turned down a better paying job out of loyalty to his current employer. And to top it all off, his wife is ill.

What do I do?

"Look Yonder! A Big Black Cloud Come!"

2005-11-30T18:39:00.000+02:00

A prize to anyone who gets this week's titular reference.

Just when we were starting to get worried, the sky opened and the rains fell. Not the biblical deluge I’d been hoping for, but rain nonetheless. Only time will tell if the rainfall this year is enough to produce the bumper crops we desperately need. It’s certainly brightened up Lilongwe a bit – the flowers are a bit more plentiful, grass slightly greener and birds in just slightly better voice.

Or maybe that’s just how things seem to me. The project I’m working on seems to be making enough progress to have a tangible effect on our most important set of IMF targets, and this is no small event. Failure to meet these targets could seriously damage the economy by preventing us from accessing millions of dollars of debt relief.

We’ve been working pretty strenuously these last 48 hours to get our side of the work complete, and now the ball is in the donors’ court. I have to say that since I’ve arrived here, my estimation of most donor agencies has been falling by the day. We’ve been trying to set up a system of obtaining information on donor’s spending projections and the actual amounts they’ve disbursed to us. This is vital information. Almost all of our debt relief targets are dependent on our ability to secure such funding, so obviously having an idea of how much donors are planning to release is pretty useful. I rather naively assumed that donors would be only too willing to provide this sort of information to us. After all, knowing how much money we can access by meeting project conditions is a powerful spur to action for a cash strapped ministry. We recognise that a lot of our projects have stalled due to problems of our own creation. The information we’re after will help us identify where the biggest problems are and hopefully correct them. And surely that’s what the donors want, right?

This project has made me think that maybe they don’t actually want us to make this kind of progress. There is simply no other way of explaining how much effort these donors make to obfuscate the issue. A colleague (from one of the largest donor agencies) gave me a pretty good explanation as to why this might be the case. When a donor government pledges $50 million to Malawi, this gets splashed across the papers (alright, it gets a small article on page 7 of the Guardian – but the point is, they get the kudos for helping out a poor LDC). Once this money has been pledged, however, it isn’t normally just sent out to the Ministry of Finance to distribute via the budget, which is by far the best way of coordinating government activity. Usually, and quite understandably, they release the funds in segments. These segments are normally contingent on specific actions on projects being undertaken, for example, production of a detailed plan of action for setting up a microfinance initiative. If we at the Malawi government don’t hold up our end of the bargain, the money never comes to us, and the same money can then be spent by the donor on another country, generating another positive headline without actually spending any extra money.

I should hasten to add that the most of the donor agency staff in country don’t seem to be this cynical. They want the money to get through to the projects and help people in this country. They are, however, wary of being named and shamed for the poor disbursement records of their own headquarters (be it a government or international organisation). The upshot is that the information that was almost certainly produced last year has been mysteriously misplaced. We’ll have to work with projections for the future and try and build an understanding of how we can improve our own performance over the next year or two.

Ach. I’m turning into a cynic. Hopefully my Christmas trip to Liwonde national park with Snowball will cheer me up.

“Who knows? Not me. We never lost control…”

2005-11-24T20:54:00.000+02:00

Looking over a list of the foreign loans that the Government of Malawi is currently paying off, and it really is striking how uncoordinated it all seems to be. Fragmentation of donor agencies and government ministries has led to a proliferation of useful projects without much thought as to what combination of activities will have the greatest impact when taken as a package.

Part of the problem is that while we know what outcomes we want to achieve, we don’t have a clear visualisation of what changes the economy and society will have to go through to achieve them. We all know we’re after ‘development’, and we want life expectancy to increase, infant mortality to decrease, and quality of life generally to improve. We know we want food security, and higher literacy. What we haven’t asked is what kind of society and economy will be most adept at achieving these ends. At the moment, the development community is operating on the assumption that the basic economic and social structure doesn’t need to change: if we privatise or improve access to credit, and build more schools, things will improve.

Is this really the case? What good will microfinance do in a region where everyone owns a small plot of land? They’ll be able to purchase fertiliser, but can farmers mechanise when their plots are too small to make a tractor worth the cost of upkeep? How can they rotate crops or diversify in a farm only large enough to support one crop? And when smallholder farming predominates there isn’t much potential employment for the young men who don’t inherit land. They instead move to the cities, where worklessness is already a big problem. It might be that the only way to generate the potential for growth is a move to large scale commercialised agriculture. This wouldn’t be a painless process, but pretty much every developed country has gone through it. Until we’re willing to look at patterns of inheritance and the social and economic barriers to accumulating land, we can’t begin to understand whether this process would help Malawi.

Similarly, it’s assumed that the economy already operates as a functioning capitalism, so simply removing those barriers that prevent capitalist economies from flourishing can stimulate growth. Leaving aside our imperfect understanding of what those barriers are, the premise may well be flawed. The majority of employment in urban areas seems to be family-based, rather than making use of a pool of unattached labour. Of course some industries do unambiguously conform to the capitalist model with its division of asset rich owners and asset poor labourers, with the former paying wages and using mechanised processes to generate profits that increase at a faster rate than wages. What we need to understand is how extensive this model of production is, because our macroeconomic policies assume that it is pervasive. It’s clearly not dominant in agriculture, and if isn’t pervasive in urban areas we need to think about how to make it so, because history has shown it is by far the most dynamic form of economic organisation. If we accept that the economy needs restructuring, we also need to look at what social changes will facilitate these changes and result from them.

I’m not suggesting that these are easy questions to answer, or even to ask. Malawi is a unique country, and the changes we will need to go through won’t be the same as those experienced elsewhere. Nonetheless, until we start asking questions like this, we’re sailing without a compass.

* * *

Another Hoopoe in the Ministry gardens yesterday. Apparently they’re daily visitors, but not visible from my window.

* * *

On the weekend I went to a bottle store (bar) with one of the Ministry drivers to watch the traditional dancing, and saw what can only be described as a reverse minstrel show. After some hours of fantastic performance, the dancers dressed up in white and began to move in unnatural and uncoordinated spasms, unrelated to the beat from the drums. Through the hysterics Cantona explained to me that they were imitating mzungus (white people) dancing. I nearly died laughing.

I’ve also found a school run in one of the poorer parts of Lilongwe that I’ll hopefully be able to help out with on weekends. Last week I ran training session for those students interested in football (i.e. all of them). By the end of the year, one of them will be in the national side, just you wait…

If Not Now, When?

2005-11-18T22:39:00.000+02:00

Sorry for the tardiness of this week’s ramble, but things have been hectic these past few days…

Lets start with the economy shall we? With the hot, muggy breath of the IMF Country Mission on our necks, we at the Ministry of Finance have been desperately scrabbling this week to prove that a large part of our underperformance against certain targets is down to the vagaries of donor funding. In particular a couple of large donors have not been disbursing the money we’ve been promised in a timely fashion (i.e., ever). It’s not all their fault; sometimes they attach quite reasonable conditions, for example, demanding the production of a project plan before they pump $20 million into an attempt diversify farming practices in a region. You’d think that this wouldn’t be too difficult to produce in a reasonable timeframe. But you’d be wrong – five years after some of these projects have gone live, not only have we not produced a plan, we haven’t actually recruited anyone to write one! So for five years, we’re paying commitment charges on a loan when the money is sitting in a bank somewhere else, and nothing is actually happening in Malawi. Clearly, this can’t go on, and its one of the things my team is hoping to deal with in the coming months. The PS is keen to see results, so these last days have been long and filled with Excel work, but it’s all very invigorating.

The political situation is equally intriguing. If you recall, a couple of weeks ago, I recounted how a number of senior UDF figures were being arrested on corruption charges after their attempt to impeach Bingu wa Mutharika. Well, late last week, he admitted these arrests were ‘tit-for-tat’. A rather worrying precedent, especially when admitted so openly, but to be honest most of these guys should have been arrested some time ago.

On a personal level, the housing situation is no closer to being resolved, but I’m confident of finding somewhere to live before the new year. Call me foolish.

* * *

The papers outdid themselves this week, reporting the resurrection of a sixteen year old girl, some eleven years after she died, aged five. What’s shocking about these reports are the way they miss the extremely obvious non-religious explanations for what happened. Essentially this girl, aged five, was declared dead by a local hospital, despite claims from local people who had visited her that her body remained warm, and she responded to external stimulation, sometimes in such obvious ways as touching those near her. Her description of ‘death’ is equally problematic. She claims she was led to a farm, run by an unkind couple who used her as slave labour, working the fields, cooking, and so on, with a number of other children working in the same conditions. They were fed one meagre meal each day, and confined to a locked room when not working. Eventually, after some time, she claims that the room where she was held was left unlocked by chance. She escaped and wandered towards town, where she was discovered in the graveyard.

Now, call me a skeptic, but I don’t think this poor girl died. I think the doctors at hospital sold her into slavery and she’s been incredibly lucky and escaped. From her account it appears that there are a number of other children who weren’t so lucky. It’s the height of irresponsibility that the papers are calling this a resurrection and not a crime.

* * *

I saw a Hoopoe outside my office this morning. I love living in a county where such exotic and beautiful birds are found in litter strewn gardens.

* * *

Just heard today about Roy Keane leaving Man U. I thought he’d leave at the end of the season, but still, what a shock that it happened so soon and so suddenly. The guy has a temper that leads him into such trouble. One day he’ll look back on his outburst after the Boro game and regret it.

Dude, where's my house?

2005-11-10T18:22:00.000+02:00

It’s been an eventful week. I went to a wedding, met the IMF mission to Malawi and suffered another setback in the struggle to get housed.

I promised last week to explain the slightly cryptic title, so here goes. One of my colleagues in the Ministry of Education (lets call her Snowball) was witness to the minor meltdown of a Japanese civil servant stationed in Malawi and clearly not used to the more, ahem, languid pace at which work tends to be done here. He had spent a good portion of Wednesday being victimized by misfortune and bad organization. The straw that broke the civil servant's back was when he turned up to an important meeting bang on time, only to be told that he had been erroneously directed to the wrong location. The meeting was actually taking place on the other side of Lilongwe. He arrived 30 minutes late. Cue breakdown. He collapsed into Snowball’s room, and seethed: ‘I feel like I’m playing an important game of catch. But I’m the only one who is willing to throw the ball! The other player will catch it, but never throws it back!’ And with that, he exited.

I do have sympathy for the poor guy. I’ve been to a number of meetings where it really has seemed like a random collection of people just wandered in without knowing why they were put in a room together. One of the funniest things I’ve seen this year is an IMF economist struggling to find out how close to our Staff Monitored Program we’ve managed to stay, while simultaneously attempting to open a foil-sealed bottle of orange juice. Eventually he gave up on the SMP, but managed to liberate the orange juice with a sharp pencil repeatedly jabbed through the foil. I’m pretty sure he considered using the same technique on the Reserve Bank President to extract information…

That said the IMF and the donor community in general are far from the paragons of organizational virtue that they seem to think they are. While the IMF incessantly demand information collated and presented to their specifications, trying to find out how much money they’ve actually disbursed to the Government (as opposed to how much they promised) is like drawing blood from a stone. Similarly, last week I was witness to the donor community’s version of a dispute over the billing, with one large donor mounting strenuous objections to a project for no apparent reason beyond the higher profile of another donor on the same project.

My colleagues at the Ministry of Finance, a passionate bunch of civil servants (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), managed to see the lighter side of this, but I doubt we’ll be laughing if donor ego-clashes derail what could be a really important project for this country.

I’m certainly not laughing after what I was told this afternoon. The house that the Ministry is meant to provide me with may not materialise for quite some time, and I’m starting to suffer serious lodge-fatigue, as much as I like Maurice and the rest of the chaps who work here. Looks like I’ll have to find a house myself and then motivate the ministry to cough up the rent. It's all very frustrating

On a happier note, my driver (Cantona - humour me!) got married on Saturday, and myself, Snowball, and a couple of friends were invited. It all got rather embarrassing when I had to dance around Cantona, throwing money at him, with an audience of a couple of hundred people and a camcorder... They then read out for the entire audience what each of us got him as a gift. Real name-and-shame potential there, but fortunately I was on generous form that day...

"Like playing catch when only one player wants to throw the ball..."

2005-11-02T23:01:00.000+02:00

At just over ten years old Malawi’s democracy is still in its infancy, but its key protagonists have been around for a long time. Many of them are in their 60s and 70s, and this in a country where the average life expectancy does not reach 40.

So for those of you not up to date on Malawi’s political situation (for shame): The previous president of Malawi was a man called Bakili Muluzi, leader of the United Democratic Front (UDF) party. Bakili and his buddies had a grand old time in power, amassing extraordinary wealth, much of it of dubious provenance. But the fun had to end some time, and so it came to pass, with the constitution denying Bakili the opportunity to serve a third term. According to one school of thought, Bakili was wary of promoting one of his UDF henchmen to the top post, and instead fished around for an easily controlled stooge to install and rule through. He came up with Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, who duly won the election on a UDF ticket.

Once he was in power, however, it quickly became apparent that Bingu was no mere stooge. He left the UDF, forming his own Democratic Progress Party (DPP), and launched a stinging attack on corrupt officials, through the snappily titled Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB). Unsurprisingly, the bulldog he unleashed starting sniffing around the UDF, finding something fishy about Bakili and friends. This was the first set of enemies that Bingu made.

The second brings us to Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP), now led by John Tembo, who initially threw their weight behind Bingu’s DPP. Their support enabled Bingu to pass the budget through parliament, but was conditional on one thing: that the proposed subsidy on fertilizer that Bingu wished to provide for small holder and subsistence farmers be made universal, so that fertilizer would be available on the cheap to all. (A completely incidental aside: John Tembo and his MCP cronies are among the largest landowners in Malawi. A universal subsidy would be a considerable boon to the personal fortunes of these men). Bingu, needing to pass a budget to govern the country, not to mention feed the hungry, duly agreed despite the massive cost of such an undertaking.

Now, this being politics, once the budget was passed, Bingu dropped plans for a universal subsidy, citing expense, and accordingly John Tembo realigned his MCP with the UDF, who had been busy drafting guidelines for the impeachment of the President. No sooner had these guidelines been pushed through the house, than specific impeachment procedures were brought against Bingu (for no good reason that can easily be discerned), much to the dismay of the donor community. They have taken an unsurprisingly dim view of the time spent on impeachment debates when a maize shortage is threatening the lives of many of the country’s poor.

And, with the timing a pure coincidence... this week senior UDF figures, including Bakili, found themselves at the centre of an ACB probe.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. I’ll explain the title next week, it’s getting late, and Lille are beating Man U.

Three Weeks In...

2005-10-27T22:12:00.000+02:00

It’s now been three weeks since I landed at Kamuzu international airport in Lilongwe, sixteen hours after I made my rushed goodbyes to my family, paid the exorbitant charges for my overweight luggage and boarded the South African airways plane to Johannesburg. Most of that flight, and my connection, was spent desperately boning up on Heavily Indebted Poor Country framework (much appreciated, Matt), so it was only on landing at Malawi that it occurred to me that this is now my home for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, the panic of the unfamiliar was kept at bay by my fellow Fellow, Paul, who patiently explained the Byzantine political situation, the geography if Lilongwe and introduced me to the language, Chichewa… and just to give me a taste of the familiar, we went to watch England under-perform against Austria in Harry’s Bar.

So, first impressions? What little I’ve seen of the country is beautiful, and populated by some of the friendliest people you could hope to meet. People open up to you so much if you make the effort of learning a bit of Chichewa. And if you can talk about mbira (football), you’ll always make friends.

The capital city, Lilongwe, is unlike any city I’ve been to before. It’s organized on South African lines, in discrete areas, with the result that expats and the rich can move from house to house, or house to work without ever seeing the very real poverty that exists within it. This, and the way in which it is split into three discrete areas to discourage mass mobilization, is a legacy of the dictatorship years under Hastings ‘Kamuzu’ Banda, from which Malawi only emerged in the mid-90s.

… Of course what its emerged into seems to be a mad jumble of factional politics, but more on that, and my first impressions of the economics and civil service, next week.