Multinational Blob

Few things are more challenging then negotiating a pre-natal appointment in a foreign language. I have newfound respect for people who do this kind of thing every day. The process for figuring out how to get referrals and lab work done is intimidating, even with the help of the gynecologist next door! The 'normal' scheduling and testing routine is slightly different, which leads to initial results looking a bit 'odd' to lab technicians, always intimidating.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that in India, it's illegal to tell expectant mothers the gender of their child, because selective abortions are so common. This means that the flavour of baby is going to remain a surprise, at the very least until I get back to South Africa. I've been assured that this doesn't have any impact on the baby shower being planned....you aren't supposed to get clothes for the baby before it is born anyway.

Blog Phase 2

Part of the reason this blog fizzled out is because my research in Lubumbashi fizzled out. I concluded that I had proposed an impossible project, and much of the last year was spent finding a way forward. All roads led to relocating my research in South Africa. While I am now restarting fieldwork closer to home, this is intimidating for a number of reasons.

I've always been quite happy with my clear status as an outsider. I can't vote, I've worked for organisations with an international focus, and I consider myself exempt from participating in public political debates. I'm interested in South Africa and try to keep across the news, but always defer to what South Africans think of South Africa.

I shifted my research here rather grudgingly, and still hadn't quite come to terms with the idea that I would now have to say things about the country that I live in. I find this changing rapidly, as I simultaneously come to terms with the reality of raising a child in one of the most unequal countries in the world. Somehow, having the well being of my (future) child tied up in this country gives me much more incentive (and legitimacy) to know more, and talk more, about what works and what doesn't.

Feeding the Beast

No, this isn't another post about the Easterly-Sachs mudslinging. It's a post about chimpanzees! And it belongs on this blog because MDG number 7 is about environmental sustainability. And because I got to chat to a bunch of people who know tons about what the Congolese government is doing to protect the environment.

JACK gets a nomination for the coolest place in Lubumbashi. Only opened 2 years ago, they already have 25 chimpanzees rescued from traffickers, with a rehabilitation programme and the creation of a sanctuary underway.

Did you know that there are only about 200,000 chimpanzees left, and about 40% of them live in the DRC? And you can still find chimpanzee meat in the Lubumbashi market. The elicit trade in chimpanzees is so lucrative for some that the sanctuary was set on fire, killing two babies, in the early work of the project; in spite of a tough start, they're moving ahead with an impressive project. Kudos to these guys for the great work they're doing in difficult circumstances.

Poetic interlude

Kiwis inspire
Verse to explain global trade.
Why Portuguese tea?

A street by any other name

Usually I have trouble finding my way around a new city because, first, my sense of direction is crap, but also because I don't know the vocabulary used to describe the city. Various shops/ plazas/ trees/ soccer fields become landmarks, and my foreign description of street names rarely makes sense to taxi drivers. Not the case here. EVERYONE insists on giving directions according to the name of the street. I know the downtown area pretty well by now, and if someone were to say 'across the street from the vodacom shop,' or 'next to the bank', I'd know where to go. However, instead I'm told about the office that is 'at the corner of rue Kassaboubou and Kabangu'. First of all, street maps of Lubumbashi are hard to come by. Secondly, street signs themselves are scarce. What few there are have dark yellow stenciled letters on a bright blue background with a red border (pictured. Seriously. Can you read that??). I go everywhere on foot and they're hard to read! I wonder what the motorists do. Of course, maybe I'm just making excuses for my bad sense of direction....

What Glaeser says about Indian cities

Edward Glaeser went to India, and wrote about basic services! He makes

a moderate, and only somewhat facetious, libertarian progressive proposal. Unless a government manages to provide clean water to its poorest citizens, it should refrain from any new barrier to international trade, complex nationalization scheme or draconian zoning laws.

Throughout, he makes a bunch of references to western urban planning a century or two ago, which is a no-no in my book, but I like the link he makes here and there between basic service provision, and larger transformations of urbanisation and governance. I'm finding this particularly hard to come by here, with people talking about decentralisation and public services like they're happening in different countries. All the discussions about 'governance in post-conflict DRC' would be much more interesting to me if they talked less about political parties, and more about clean drinking water.

Academia's arguments

Bill Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs are arguing so enthusiastically in the blogosphere that they are making new parts of speech out of each other. It's heartening that two such fabulous intellects are so passionate about making change happen. What's discouraging, though, is that they both seem more interested in arguing than problem solving.

Sachs says, people living in Africa are poor because of an unfortunate confluence of geography, history, and a complex mix of other things. People are literally dying of poverty. The aid that's being given isn't anywhere near enough to fix these things, that's crap. Solution: more aid.

Easterly says, people living in Africa are poor because of an unfortunate confluence of history, weak institutions, bad governance, and a complex mix of other things. People are literally dying of poverty. The aid that's being given to governments isn't making it to the people, that's crap. Solution: better aid.

Coincidentally, I find Easterly's assessment more interesting, but I'm let down by his conclusion. Giving aid to poor people (instead of poor governments) is a good way of making sure some of the short term objectives of aid are met - it's good when people can buy medicine, eat more nutritious food, and send their kids to school. But, it doesn't do much to fix the bad institutions, thus falling short of Easterly's own definitions of good aid. Even with Easterly's institutionalist understanding of the world, it's hard to argue with Sach's conclusion: levels of aid are scandalously low. When we know what works, and we can muster the political will, we should do more.

Governments have fallen radically short even of their own modest commitments. People living in many countries in the world are facing huge challenges of ineffective and corrupt governments, inadequate transport infrastructure, unfair terms of trade, gender inequality, and on and on. We need more AND better aid. The question isn't which is more important, given the information we have about the way the world works. There's a pretty high level of agreement (at least in civil society, if not in academia) about what is needed. The real issue is how we can make the change happen. Both Easterly and Sachs are disappointingly quiet on this.