Philanthropy

Anne Applebaum is a writer that I usually like a lot,  and I usually try to maintain a more or less neutral stance on things, but this article in Slate is just wrong-headed. She attempts to make a case for a humanitarian military intervention in Burma, an argument I’ve heard others make. It is a bad idea.

Applebaum doesn’t specifically mention it, but her argument is clearly coming from a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) point of view. For those who are new to the term, R2P is a newish, burgeoning international norm that asserts that governments have a responsibility to protect (hence the phrase) their own citizens. When they can’t or won’t, it is the international community’s responsibility to do so. It has wide support, a lot of enemies, and the Security Council has cited it (among a host of other reasons) to support military interventions. Personally I think it is a pretty good idea.

R2P emerged in a 2001 report (follow the link above) that lays out in pretty vague terms the justifiable reasons for an R2P-intervention:

“Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraord-
inary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring
to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of the following kind:

A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which
is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or
a failed state situation.

B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing,
forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” (emphasis added)

I admit that you can make a fair case that the current situation in Burma qualifies under letter A. It involves a large scale loss of life and  state neglect.

But R2P doesn’t just gives a threshold for the type of humanitarian catastrophe that we need before an intervention can be launched. It also offers a set of utterly reasonable “precautionary principles”. These are so logical that even if Applebaum isn’t thinking of R2P, they should/would be part of any military planning nonetheless. They suggest that any military action should have “reasonable prospects” of success. You should have a pretty good idea that you’ll be doing more good than harm when you send in the guns. Military actions should also be the “last resort”. We don’t have either of those here.

Just to be clear. Your military intervention can do two things: kill people and blow things up. You don’t protect someone, you threaten to kill their attacker. The R2P argument is strongest when there is a group of people who are being attacked, because then you can use your military to kill the bad guys - like in the Magnificent Seven. It still makes sense when you have two or more groups fighting each other and a bunch of civilians stuck in the middle - like uh, real life. In either of those cases people are facing flying bullets anyway.

But in this case what would the military do? Use fighter wings to defend air drops of food? That seems harmless enough, but what happens when that food hits the ground and is taken into the junta’s system? Who defends the humanitarian workers then? Troops and artillery I guess, but now we’re fighting a ground war with the junta, and we’ve created a conflict where there wasn’t one before. That isn’t what the people of Burma need right now.

I’m absolutely not saying that the junta is good. They’re not. They are very bad leaders who deserve to be removed. But the norm of humanitarian intervention is best reserved for civil conflicts or other cases of violence and kept out of natural disaster response.

This report from the Center for Health and Gender Equity actually came out in April, but it just appeared in my Google Alerts today. The report argues that the US government - still one of the world’s largest providers of condoms through foreign aid - should send more female condoms. They are currently 2% of US condom buys. The Center wants this percentage to be increased so that there can be a serious effort to market female condoms and get more people using them.

The idea is that female condoms allow women to protect themselves and their partners from STIs without having to convince a many to wear a condom. It makes sense for cultures where conversations about sex are highly taboo, I guess. I still have to wonder if men in these relationships (whether transactional or romantic) don’t still have enough power to demand no condom use at all.

This is getting into a very technical area, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert. But I think it is a legitimate question if the female condom is just a bad product that people won’t use, or if it needs to be marketed better. Few people like female condoms, but it isn’t as if regular condoms are universally popular - so customer satisfaction is clearly not the only important factor. If the female condom wasn’t so weird and alien, maybe it would be used more. But what percentage of our foreign aid needs to be spent on priming the female condom supply, versus ensuring a sufficient supply of the product that people already know?

The British government has set up a new research center between six different colleges associated with the University of London. They’re going to be studying a broad range of international development subjects based in both the natural and social sciences including:

• Climate change
• Agriculture
• Growth
• Health
• Governance in challenging environment and
• Longer term development opportunities

Nice article in World Mag (Today’s News, Christian Views) about work being done by Engineers Without Borders. As a case study it works well, but EWB also makes a very good argument for building local ownership of projects.

Towards the end the article gets a little bit weird, as the author takes issue with EWB’s characterization of poverty and disease as a cause of “sin”. It seems like an interesting theological question, but doesn’t have a lot to do with the issue. On the whole its worth a read.

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, published an interesting article on African development today. The author is Deborah Brautigam, a professor of international development at American University. She makes two basic points.

The first is that a developing a more robust system of public taxation would have broad benefits for African societies. Besides the amusement of a conservative think tank recommending that somebody pay more taxes, the point is very good. Not only would increased government revenue allow for better services and stronger state capacity, but Professor Brautigam believes it would also lead to more democratization on the continent. “Democracies are built not only on periodic elections but also on a social contract based on bargaining over the collection and spending of public revenue”. 

Her second point is that foreign aid isn’t all upsides. Aid can have negative effects on the recipient country by lowering local capacities for governance, weakening institutions, reducing democratic accountability, inspiring riskier behavior on the part of governments, and even lowering tax revenues. Some of her points are stronger than others - the tax revenue point seems a little weak to me - but overall she makes a strong case, and the article is well worth a read.

Also, I noticed that she has a book out on the same subject.

I came across a video posted to YouTube today by a group called Media For Good. I couldn’t find much about them, this is their first video, and all their profile doesn’t say much. The video starts off strong. Production quality is high, and it is actually quite moving. It starts by giving poignant examples of the many problems facing the Arab world today - high unemployment and low expenditure on education or innovation. But when it tries to give a hopeful message, everything goes south.

After asking that we “give strategically”, it then suggests some bold goals for employment and education. The thing is, setting goals isn’t the same thing as a strategy. Without a plan to achieve your goals, the whole endeavor will never get going.

There is certainly a place for inspiration, but I think you have to tell people what they can do with that inspiration.I assume the video is aimed at Arabs who would like to give money to a good cause, but how does this help them? There is no contact information for an organization, not even a connection to the Millenium Development Goals, which at least have some kind of loose plan, if not a coordinated strategy.

Media for Good is new to YouTube, and may be new to advocacy as well, so I don’t want to be too hard on them. This was a good first effort and I’ll be looking forward to their next video. If nothing else it is an interesting look at what a group of Arab activists see as the major problems in the region - the economy and education.

This Wired blog post is  a couple weeks old now, but interesting if you didn’t see it. The article discusses a presentation given by Joel Selanikio of the non-profit tech consultancy Datadyne. He makes a convincing argument that cell phone based text messaging are a more important and powerful tool for development than the internet. The internet offers a much higher level of functionality - I can make this blog post as long as I like, for example - but cell phones are already pervasive in the developing world because the technology is less expensive and easier to use. The internet requires a lot more infrastructure, so you don’t get the returns to scale as quickly.

It sounds like Selanikio’s presentation was just meant to scratch the surface of what text messages can already do, or could do with some improvements, but those he listed are all good ideas. My favorite is providing parents with a text message reminder of when to get their children vaccinated. I like this because it fits into existing project models, but offers a less expensive and more effective way of doing it. It requires office support, but nothing that we don’t know how to do.

It’s more fun to think of world changing programs that take a lot of time and money to work out, but more useful to suggest these tiny changes to improve on what we already do.

PS: On a completely unrelated note, I just noticed that the spell-checker on the blogging software we use here at FPA does not know the word “blog”. How did I never see that before?

The astoundingly influential economist and development guru Jeffrey Sachs has a new book coming out next week. It is called Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, and has laudatory blurbs by both Al Gore and Kofi Annan. Sachs is a great writer, and although I sometimes disagree with him (among other issues I disagree with his assertion that poor governance and corruption aren’t a significant factor in global poverty) his work is always useful. I also think his view of a world that can save itself is inspiring.

As a further reason to pay attention to this book, Sachs is such a big name that it probably won’t matter if Common Wealth is a terrible book. It will be the biggest development discussion of 2008 anyway. The theme of the book is that humanity as a whole faces a series of potentially devastating challenges, but that each of them can be addressed if we have the will: extreme poverty, environmental degradation, population growth, and international political logjams.

His think piece for Time magazine, which is also titled “Common Wealth” and tackles many of these same issues, gives examples of human ingenuity and technology solving global problems. One of these examples is the eradication of small pox. To me this represents very well the technocratic, engineering style that Sachs advocates.

Small pox eradication was a very special case where the human technology of vaccination was well matched to the nature of the virus. By applying a lot of pure brute force (this was in the grand old days when international public health officials got to fly around in helicopters) and a whole lot of money, the problem was solved. There was relatively little need to worry about societies or their systems or ways of life. There was basically no need to worry about sustainability, or small pox coming back. The four problems Sachs takes on are much more complex.

The Time piece was pretty short, and he didn’t have the space to address every aspect of his argument. I’m looking forward to reading how he addresses this problem when he has a whole book to lay out his plans.

PS: Slate is running a detailed conversation between Sachs and Martin Wolf.

The Times of India has another example of what cell phones can do for a society. Through the website IndianBloodDonors.com people can now send a text message with their urgent request for blood. This is clearly a much more direct means of communication than first finding an internet-connected computer.

Getting the cell phone in the hand of the end user is just one necessary aspect of makin gthis work. Building the website and system of donors, screening the blood, and informing people of the available service are probably more difficult. But the new technology brings new opportunites.

Andrew Leonard, who blogs for Salon (free day pass required), commented yesterday on a new economics paper,  “Does Digital Divide or Provide?: The Impact of Cell Phones on Grain Markets in Niger”.  The article explains that increased access to cell phones in certain communities in Niger has had a powerful impact on grain prices. Giving people the ability to communicate over distance reduced regional grain price differences by 6.4%, and seasonal differences went down by 10%. The author estimates that the more regular prices meant lower costs for consumers during a period of shortages, and allowed people to buy from 8-12 days more food.

Based on this, Leonard then suggests that more Americans should donate their used cell phones for overseas use. He has a good point, and this is an example of a simple, painless kind of giving that can provide broad societal benefits.

I wonder how that would work. Mass donations from the US citizens require a high level of organization to collect, store, and distribute. It can actually be a very expensive process. It may turn out to be cheaper to market low-cost phones directly to poor countries. This is already happening, of course. There is also an apparently successful business model for selling refurbished cell phones.

As in most development effectiveness arguments, the answer is probably that both sales and donations are desirable. The sales reach a broader population, but the donations could be targeted a the people who are missed by the markets by poverty, location, gender, language, or one of the other countless variables that prevent people from fully taking part in society. Targeting these special cases would cost extra money, but would make the project fit much better into a comprehensive plan to increase cell phone use.