Tag Archives: the guardian

The Revolt of the Pitied

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Development assistance and general engagement between the West and the developing world is often laden with a lot of both intentional and non-intentional objectification of those being “assisted” (and we academics are no exception). This is something that I have since come to accept as inevitable in cross-cultural interactions.

Others are less tolerant, and rightly so. Here is Magatte Wade writing over at The Guardian:

“Her question assumed that those of us in developing nations are to be pitied. I know as a Senegalese that her attitude is precisely what disgusts us about many who work at NGOs.

For many of those who “care” about Africans, we are objects through which they express their own “caring”.

I replied to the young woman, “If you see us as human beings, there is nothing to deal with. We like to eat good food, we love to talk and laugh with our family and friends. We wonder about the world, and why so often bad is rewarded rather than good.”

H/T: NYU Development Research Institute

Is our children learning? (Credit to Bushism)

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The Guardian reports:

More than two out of every three pupils who have finished two years of primary school in east Africa fail to pass basic tests in English, Swahili or numeracy, according to a new report, Are our children learning?.

The differences in performance vary both across and within countries:

The report found large differences in average test scores between countries in east Africa. Kenyan pupils perform best in literacy and numeracy. Ugandan children perform worst in the lower school years, but slowly overtake Tanzanian children and outperform them after six years in school.

But it is the within-country differences that are cause for a rethink of education policy in east Africa. Kids in private schools appear to do much better than those in public schools (the gap is most stark in Tanzania, 28 percentage points). The Ugandan school system appears to be the worst, with barely half of EVEN the private school kids passing.

In a finding likely to fuel the debate on public versus private schools, the report said students in private schools perform better than pupils in state schools in all three countries – a difference particularly marked inTanzania, where the pass rate among 10 to 16-year-olds for numeracy and literacy tests was 47% in state schools, compared with 75% in private schools.

“In part, the difference between Tanzania and the other countries is likely to be driven by the much smaller share of pupils attending private schools, even among the non-poor, suggesting they must be particularly selective,” said the report. In Kenya, the pass rate in private schools was 83%, compared with 75% in government schools, while in Uganda the gap was 53% to 36%.

As a product of the Kenyan public school system (and a Wazimba for life), I believe that public schools are the way to go. With some thought and innovation, public schools can be made to work – and in the process serve as the best chance for inter-generational SES mobility. The debate should be about how to improve public schools, as opposed to over the false choice of quantity vs. quality.

A possible model could be something akin to the Kenyan National Schools concept in which select schools across the country get extra resources not only to boost performance but also to act as testing grounds for new learning tools – which can then inform policy to help “Provincial Schools” catch up. Of course this would ineluctably create a multi-tier school system at the beginning, but it is arguably better than a system in which most (if not nearly all, see Uganda and Tanzania) public schools are failing.

It is important to note that in Kenya the best high schools have historically been public. With investment and openness to experimentation and innovation this tradition can be maintained.

H/T @AAA_ipregroup 

Kleptocracy and Debt: Vulture Funds to the Rescue?

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I am currently working on a project on commodities in SSA and have been amazed both by the region’s mineral wealth and how much of it gets stolen by local elites in cahoots with large MNCs. It is one thing to read about corruption from 30,000 feet. Getting an up-close view is another matter. The examples of the two Congos are instructive…

Congo-Brazzaville is one of the top oil producers in Africa. It is also a dirt poor country, with over 70% of its people living below the poverty line. Like in Equatorial Guinea (and other petro-states in the region), the ruling cabal in Brazzaville has turned the country’s oil wealth into private property – the symbol of which is the president’s son’s extravagant expenditures in European capitals (For more details see below).

[youtube.com/watch?v=VpGU1hsuSpU&feature=player_embedded]

These details of the sleaze around oil revenues in Congo were unearthed, by among others, Elliot Associates, a “vulture fund.”

Across the river in the other Congo (Congo-Kinshasa aka DRC) another vulture fund is trying to get Kinshasa to pay up. The vulture fund, FG Hemisphere, paid $3.3m for the debt to a Bosnian state-owned company, and then went ahead and sued for $100m in the courts of Jersey to recover the debt. Recently the Privy Council in the UK, the final appeals court, ruled in favor of Kinshasa. For more on this see the Guardian (here, here and here), which has been following this particularly case closely.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24 trillion. It is also one of the least and poorest governed places on the planet. A recent report indicated that as much as 5 billion dollars in revenue from minerals has disappeared from the state coffers in the recent past.

Should Brazzaville and Kinshasa be forced to pay up?

Opinion over the utility of venture funds is divided. There are those that blame them for going after the poorest countries, asking for taxpayers to pay for their rulers’ (sometimes dead and gone, like Mobutu) largesse. But there area also those who contend that the best way of making rulers less willing to steal is by forcing them to pay up their debts – especially considering that debt forgiveness alone cannot end corruption.

Eric Joyce, writing in the Guardian puts it thus:

Campaigners have always maintained that if FGH is unable to collect the debt then the money will go instead to public works in the DRC. This is simply not true. The doctrine of “sovereign immunity” applies across the world and it is therefore not possible for any creditor, “vulture” or otherwise, to access funds that have a sovereign purpose – that is, public expenditure. Creditors can only target cash being used to trade.

With this in mind, perhaps the do-gooders campaigning for debt cancellation and recovery of stolen monies could team up with vulture funds. The latter have both the expertise and financial incentive to go after monies hidden in foreign bank accounts and shell companies registered in tax havens. Just a thought.