As we wave fondly at the retreating backside of another week, it has not escaped my attention that I've been neglecting this thing to a criminal extent. This week's fun list is my 5 top excuses for doing so:
1. Our good friends at the Gates Foundation kindly requested a checkup on the budget status of our grant, which my PIs even more kindly forwarded to my inbox with a cheery "Take care of this please!", giving me the pleasure of several late nights trying to figure out what nether regions certain numbers and assumptions had been pulled from by whoever wrote our grant.
2. My project had the privilege of hosting a graduate student from the University of Buffalo these past two weeks, who spent a lot of time going over about a dozen different ways of measuring handwashing behavior with us. Basically, we are learning how we can be better at stalking people. In a totally ethical, IRB-approved manner.
3. Having sprained my wrist several weeks ago under ambiguous circumstances (meaning I can't remember if this particular sprain came from playing soccer or from using it as a shield against marauding matatus), I have finally decided to help it heal by wearing a brace (actually a children's size large roller-blading wrist guard purchased in Kisumu, because apparently there are enough people in Kenya with money and inclination to afford roller-blading safety equipment for their children but not enough health care money or political capital to make orthopedic braces available in small-town clinics). The point is that it's hard to type now. For me. With the whole roller-blading thing on my arm.
4. As part of my project's expansion into other parts of the country, I have to do a lot of meeting with various government officials, which basically means I get to wake up at 4 AM and drive 5 hours to sit in a tiny office for half an hour, hand the official a brochure, and hear about how happy they are to have us in their district and how important this is going to be for their constituents and would we please consider giving their brother a job? This week, I've been schmoozing in Kisii for the last three days, which is a very ugly town in some very pretty hills, and I am very glad to be home now.
5. Umm…didn't really put much thought into this one…power outages? Yes, let's go with that. Terrible power outages.
These are all terrible excuses. You should not accept them. There's too much to write about here to let it all slip by.
In a fit of generosity (or perhaps penance--sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, especially when you work in foreign aid), I have instead decided to start sharing more of the small stories that make life here...let's say "flavorful." "Piquant." "Almost but not entirely unlike America." Insert your favorite antonym for "boring" there. Take-home message: this is good news for you, because I have been enormously successful thus far in evading any real explanation of what I actually do every day. Or who I do it with. Or who I do it for. Or why it is in any way significant. But no more! I have this terrible condition where I convince myself that you, as intelligent readers longing for insightful & educational commentary on poverty alleviation (albeit lazy intelligent readers who have inexplicably decided to settle for this blog rather than putting the 0.003 seconds into a google search for more cultured fare), require lengthy, immaculately structured, hard-hitting posts on the fascinating intricacies of aid and development, and that sort of thing smacks of actual work. Instead, I have decided to rip a few vignettes out of context every now and then and write about them anyway, because they are worth remembering, and because I like you guys. So expect more short posts on a more frequent basis, punctuated by longer manifestos on my job and the importance of randomization in economic field experiments and the justification for chlorine as a sustainable water treatment program. You can direct any protests to the comments section, where they will be duly ignored.
The inspiration for today's sliver of life in the developing world comes partially from a few recent incidents from my field work, and partially from a favorite writer of mine named Chris Blattman. He blogs thoughtfully and extensively on development, aid, and conflict, and if you want to follow his work, it is accessible, clever, and available at chrisblattman.com. The following is drawn from an entry dated August 7:
Is aid depressing?
Aid is the most depressing topic in economics. I don't know how William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs stand it.
That is Meg McArdle reacting (in part) to my pointer to evidence that NGOs might be killing entrepreneurship in Africa.I have good news for Meg (sort of). Aid is only depressing if you start off with the wrong expectations.
Aid is not a mythical goddess, walking through a barren field, greenery spouting in her wake. None of us, including McArdle, really believe such a thing, but we do approach charity as though rapid transformation is possible.
It's uplifting (well… less depressing) to remember a few things.
1. This takes time. Once upon a time England was the one developed country and a respectable thinker could write a book wondering when the backward nations of France and Italy would ever catch up. The decades that separated growth in Britain and the European continent are mostly forgotten now. But it helps to remember that the accumulation of capital, the diffusion of technologies, and innovation and adaptation in social organization can take generations.
2. Aid can only speed this diffusion or accumulation a little. Ultimately it's up to the Africans or South Americans or Central Asians. If you're not from there, the best you can do is help those willing (or unable) to help themselves.
3. When you throw gobs of money and people at an economy, there are going to be side effects. Some of them will be bad. Some will surprise you. The main difference between prescription drugs and aid is that, when we give countries aid, no one makes us give them a four minute speech telling them that aid may cause rashes, stomach pain, and erectile dysfunction.
4. Failure happens. In all big systems. Hollywood brought us Star Wars Episode One. The private sector brought us Google Wave. Western medicine brought us bleeding. In aid, the state of our knowledge is a little closer to bleeding than web programming. That's actually what makes studying aid so different: we're going to learn a tremendous amount in our lifetimes.
5. Most of the failures are small, while the victories are huge. Think the falling cost of AIDS treatment. Other important discoveries (they really were discoveries) were "don't have 200% tariffs on capital goods," and "Don't print money to pay your bills." Lant Pritchett compares aid to piano recitals: "kind of boring and it's tedious and most of the people are wasting their time. But every now and again by God we make a difference and when we do make a difference it really transforms economies and lives for a very long time". (Yes, we also have innovations like "let's displace large populations to new villages!" but these seem to die out faster than the good kind.)
Think about working in aid differently. Aid is hard and messy. But so are a lot of jobs. Example: You can start working in a rich-country finance ministry your whole life, suffer the slings and arrows of excessive partisanship and, if you're lucky, you'll tweak the growth rate of your country a notch. And at the end of the day you can go home and tell your kids: "I helped the citizens of this country afford to buy a second flat screen television." Now THAT is depressing.
Give me aid any day.
Words like that tend to make me think too highly of my job, but it's good to hear them every now and then. You may have picked up on the fact that he's an economist (in fact, he heads up some fascinating research projects for IPA in Uganda), but everything he says translates easily into other spheres of development: health care, environmental sustainability, education…we're on the steep part of the learning curve here, and it's exciting to see so many discoveries and so much progress being made despite the financial, cultural, and infrastructure-based challenges and inefficiencies that pervade systems and networks here.
I will second everything he says, and add that for me, working in aid has a profoundly redemptive, spiritual component that makes it a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself, regardless of the end result. Granted, well-intentioned governments and agencies and aid workers have wrought disastrous results in many contexts (the U.S. "Food for Peace" program; Operation Mils Mopti in Mali; countless agricultural and livestock interventions in the Sahel region of West Africa; and many, many more—for a sobering look at how aid can harm as easily as it uplifts, see the cleverly-titled book "The Road to Hell" by Michael Maren or William Easterly's "The White Man's Burden.") But I would argue that the past failures of aid mean we need to get better at delivering it, not stop trying. And we are getting better.
There are heartbreaking moments here every day: mamas in rural villages telling me they can't afford to feed their children more than once a day; people with obvious symptoms of mental illness on the street who will never receive anything resembling proper care or social support; and just last week, a member of the local soccer team I play for saw his two-year-old son die from an illness that is entirely preventable. But for every village that tries to run your field officers out of town on suspicion of trying to steal the blood of their children (ooh, teaser!), or every day you spend in front of a grant budget spreadsheet instead of out in the field pursuing more rewarding activities, or for all those times when you just can't possibly see how your project is actually going to make a difference to anyone…for every single one of those times, I can point to stories of Kenyans stepping up because they believe in working for a better future for their country, like two of my field officers: Vincent, who is so passionate about our sanitation interventions that he rushes home to try each one out with his 2-year-old daughter and take detailed notes on everything he observes, and Phabian, who uses his time going to and from the field each day to study microbiology textbooks and disease transmission pathways in hopes of becoming a medical technician or public health officer someday. Or my colleagues Ted & Aleem, who both gave up lucrative private-sector jobs in the States to come to Kenya and apply their business expertise to scaling up our most successful projects so that they reach all of Kenya and even the world. Or the pregnant mother in Koyeyo last week who was so thankful for the $2 handwashing station we gave her that she decided to name her unborn child after me. Give me aid any day.
This didn't end up being short at all. Blast.
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