development Archives - Humanosphere

development

Burma: Past, Present, and Future |

Welcome to the Humanosphere podcast, our weekly look at the world of global health and development. Tom and I begin with a discussion on the headlines – everything from May Day in Seattle and Bangladesh to abortion access in El Salvador.

Then we turn to Burma, also known as Myanmar. We speak with Pwint Htun, who left Burma in ninth grade amidst a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, and resettled here in Seattle.

Her mother, a doctor, treated wounded demonstrators, and her family was blacklisted and forced to flee. Htun was the first recipient of a Prospect Burma scholarship, established using the prize money Aung San Suu Kyi donated after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. When Cyclone Nargis struck in 2008, she coordinated shipments of over 12 million water purification tablets into Burma.

These days, she’s making frequent trips back to Burma as a telecommunications consultant for The World Bank and others. The country has embarked on a process of reforms but where will it go from here? Htun gives us an inside-look at Burma past, present, and future, including its brief stint of democratic rule after colonialism. And she explains what useful, as opposed to harmful, interventions in Burma by Western businesses and NGOs should look like.

Listen below.

Pwint Htun on Where Burma Goes From Here Download

FILED UNDER: Podcasts, Burma, development, Myanmar, poverty, technology

May 2, 2013 | 12:00 PM | By Tom Murphy |

Making a Mess of Ending Aid to South Africa |

DfID

Justine Greening meets school children in Turkana, Kenya

The United Kingdom announced this week it is going to eliminate its aid to South Africa by 2015.

South Africa is one of the world’s ‘emerging’ — or BRICS — nations. The decision follows in the footsteps of Britain’s decision to wean India off UK aid in favor of promoting domestic development to take hold. The British government says it would rather refocus its energy toward investments in these nations.

South African officials, as well as some aid organizations, appear none too happy with this turn of events. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, aid, development, Justine Greening, ODA, South Africa, UK

April 15, 2013 | 12:11 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Philanthrocapitalists propose a Social Progress Index |

: Metrics Mania; Flicky, Beto Ruis Alonso

Measurement, in case you didn’t know it, is the new black for the aid and development community.

It’s true that innovation, as a buzzword anyway, hasn’t gone out of fashion yet and social entrepreneurship is still hot – despite the fact that few seem able to define it. But measurement is definitely this year’s favored wrap for the hip humanitarian.

Bill Gates’ annual letter this year was all about the need for better metrics and data in the fight against poverty and inequity. Bono, dutifully following suit at a recent TED talk, said he is actually sexually excited by data now and considers himself less just an anti-poverty activist and more of a factivist.

Measurement is it, fo shizzle! Nobody who wants to be anybody in fighting poverty and injustice talks about doing anything anymore if it can’t be measured.

Last week, at the Skoll World Forum in London, came more evidence of this trend. The Skoll Foundation and their gathering of social entrepreneurs helped launch yet another humanitarian yardstick – the Social Progress Index.

And who could argue against such a thing? Who wouldn’t want to be able to quantify the impact of an aid or development project?

Answer: Nobody

The only problem is that it’s not that easy to actually measure this stuff – equality, opportunity, security, happiness and well-being.

“These are tough concepts to measure,” said Michael Green, a renowned economist in London who with Matthew Bishop, a journalist at the Economist magazine, is one of the leading proponents of philanthrocapitalism (which, like social enterprise, I also think is ill-defined … but that’s another story).

“We need a new way to measure social progress that is independent of economic indicators,” said Green, who with Bishop is proposing just such a new measurement tool with this new Social Progress Index. It’s still just an idea to test out, he said, but we’re clearly in need of a better yardstick for aid and development. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, aid, Bill Gates, Bono, development, Matthew Bishop, measurement, metrics, Michael Green, philanthrocapitalism, Skoll World Forum

January 18, 2013 | 12:09 PM | By Tom Murphy |

Tony Blair’s odd poster child for advancing good African governance |

: Tony Blair and Paul Kagame

Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair wants to end aid dependence by fostering better governance, especially in Africa.

Since moving off the geopolitical center stage, Blair has inserted himself into several new supporting roles that could generally be lumped together as world betterment consultant.

For one such role, there is Blair’s African Governance Initiative. One of his shining examples of good African governance is Rwandan President Paul Kagame — a leader widely credited with reviving Rwanda’s economy over the past 15-plus years and building up strong domestic institutions. Unfortunately, Kagame is also increasingly becoming widely ‘celebrated’ for fueling warfare in neighboring DR Congo, acting like a dictator at home and committing various human rights violations.

“At the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), we believe that the developed world has been quick to act against bad leaders, but slow to support good ones,” writes AGI head Kate Gross in the Stanford Social Innovation Review recently. She then proceeds to talk about the work that the AGI has done with Kagame, describing how it has “fundamentally shaped our model.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Africa, development, foreign aid, governance, Paul Kagame, Tony Blair

December 10, 2012 | 2:59 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Seattle pushes women’s rights & private sector to fight poverty |

It’s International Human Rights Day and you may be surprised to learn that the modern notion of human rights is little more than half a century old. The universal declaration of human rights was made largely due to the Holocaust, the atrocities of WWII.

Locally, the focus of two leading humanitarian organizations is on advancing women’s rights and finding more effective ways to combine traditional aid and development strategies with a supposedly kinder, gentler and more socially responsive private sector.

It’s the Seattle approach – socially liberal and business friendly, if not economically conservative.

“We are compassionate, creative and outward looking,” Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said at Global Washington’s annual meeting last week. McGinn noted how at the World’s Fair in Seattle some 50 years ago, many predicted we would have flying cars and jet packs when, in fact, today we continue to have poverty, inequity and injustice — here and abroad.

“We care about that and are doing something about it,” he said. “And that’s what it really means to be a city of the future.”

Two meetings last week back up the mayor’s claims. (Sorry I’m a bit late, but I had a family emergency and this is a one-man news operation)

Global Washington, an organization dedicated to building up the region’s burgeoning humanitarian and social enterprise community, held its annual meeting with an opening keynote talk by Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, an activist and educator who is promoting women’s rights and childhood education in Afghanistan despite threats against her life.

Sakena Yacoobi, speaking at Global Washington

“I believe education is a key issue to transform life,” said Yacoobi, who described the many obstacles she has faced and what motivates her despite the risks. Women’s and girls’ rights are critical, she said: “Afghanistan will have peace when the women of Afghanistan are leaders.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, aid, Amir Dossal, Bill Clapp, business, Claudia Paz y Paz, development, Global Washington, Joe Whinney, Oxfam, Raymon Offenheiser, sustainable

October 1, 2012 | 11:30 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Q&A with an architect of the Gates-funded ‘green revolution’ for Africa |

Flickr, agrforum

Kofi Annan and Melinda Gates at 2012 African Green Revolution Forum, Tanzania

While Bill Gates was in New York City to stump for polio eradication at last week’s ‘high-level’ side meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Melinda Gates was attending another fairly high-level meeting in Arusha, Tanzania – the African Green Revolution Forum.

One of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s top priorities is to improve agricultural productivity and the lives of smallholder farmers in Africa, where crop yields have historically been much lower than elsewhere in the world contributing to much of the continent’s poverty. Most Africans are smallholder farmers, most farmers are women and most are poor.

With former United Nations Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kofi Annan as its leading spokesman, the Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

It hasn’t been without controversy.

To begin with, the term “Green Revolution” comes with baggage. The first Green Revolution was an agricultural reform initiative led half a century ago by an amazing agricultural scientist named Norman Borlaug and pushed by the Rockefeller Foundation aimed at improving crop yields in poor countries.

That first Green Revolution in the 1950s and ’60s did improve yields dramatically in many regions of the world, saving lives and ending hunger. But it also promoted a Western-style, industrialized approach to agriculture that favored large-scale monoculture crops and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This had the adverse effect of knocking many smallholder farmers off their land in favor of corporate farming, caused environmental problems and actually sometimes increased costs for farmers. The lesson: Improving crop yield isn’t everything.

Also, Africa got skipped over in the first Green Revolution.

So when the Gates Foundation announced a few years back that it was sponsoring a second Green Revolution for Africa, many took them as fighting words. Organizations like Seattle-based AGRA Watch is a leading critic of the Gates approach and has organized protests focused on the philanthropy’s partnerships with big agri-businesses like Monsanto.

Gates Foundation

Roy Steiner

Roy Steiner is deputy director for agriculture in the development program at the Gates Foundation. Roy, who as been there since before the philanthropy dug into the dirt, has degrees in all sort of things from all sorts of major universities. He has lived in Africa and worked on a number of projects, both agricultural and technological, and went to the meeting last week in Tanzania as well.

I asked Roy to explain where they are with this ‘green revolution’ for Africa, what it is the world’s biggest philanthropy is trying to do for poor farmers and why it remains controversial.

Q Why is the idea of launching a ‘green revolution’ for Africa so controversial?

RS: I think it’s more problematic in the north than in Africa. Many African leaders want a green revolution. They want to be able to feed their people and move away from food aid. The first green revolution did cause some significant social, economic and environmental problems and we don’t want to repeat those problems.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Science, Africa, AGRA, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, development, green revolution, Roy Steiner

September 17, 2012 | 12:25 PM | By Tom Paulson |

How (repressive) Burma-Myanmar promoted grassroots aid strategy |

Google Maps

My initial goal: Describe a local organization, Partners Asia, led by some interesting Seattle folks who have long been working to assist vulnerable populations in Myanmar, aka Burma.

Delayed by confusion: I’m not sure what to make of the celebrated political reforms. Nobel Laureate activist Aung San Suu Kyi is finally free and speaking out. US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton declares the country open for business. Still, nobody agrees on which name to use, UN staffers get thrown in jail and Buddhist monks are accused of inciting riots. Is this place really, fundamentally changing? I don’t think anyone really knows yet.

But humanitarians working ‘off the pitch’ under the oppressive regime offer some valuable lessons.

NOTE: A series of Seattle lectures on Myanmar/Burma featuring Partners Asia starts Sept. 22

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Flickr, jmhullot

Ancient Bagan in Burma-Myanmar

As the Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi starts her celebrated U.S. tour this week, the story line on the country variously known as Burma or Myanmar is that it is undergoing major democratic reforms.

Dissidents have been freed from prison, opposition politicians have been elected, some members of the previous military junta have been demoted and replaced by civilians, press censorship has been relaxed, labor unions are now allowed and, most recently, as Voice of America reported, Burma releases partial list of names trimmed from Blacklist.

So wait, is it Burma or Myanmar?

“We use both,” said Paula Bock, a former Seattle Times journalist who now devotes her time to working with the poor and disenfranchised in Burma-Myanmar through the Seattle-based organization Partners Asia.

“To make a real difference here, you have to learn how to get along. We work with everybody, on both sides of the border, and we don’t want to exclude or antagonize anyone. Burma, Myanmar — I’m happy to use whatever name it takes to get things done. “

Yeah, well, it’s lot more complicated than that.

This is a story about Partners Asia, and why I think their approach should be of interest to everyone in the aid and development community, but first I need to talk about me.

Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett

Paula Bock and girl in Burma-Myanmar

I had approached Bock, who I’ve known since the days when we were both regular newspaper hacks and the mainstream media was financially healthy, to ask about Burma-Myanmar, and about what her organization does there. As I learned more, it seemed to me they had an important lesson for the entire aid and development community. I’ll get to that in a second.

But writing about aid in Burma-Myanmar turned out to be difficult for me, in part because I knew so little about the place, the news out of Burma-Myanmar kept shifting – and also because Paula and her colleagues operate, uh, unofficially there.

The people they often work with, many of them refugees or troubled ethnic communities along the borders, also have to keep their collaboration away from official eyes.

Paula and her colleagues have to be careful and didn’t want me to use words like “covert” or “secretly,” preferring I describe what they do as “discreet” or “out of the spotlight.”

Partners Asia, Prasit Phasomsap

Teaching migrant children on Thai-Burma border

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Justice, Politics, aid, Burma, development, Myanmar, Partners Asia, Paula Bock, Therese Caouette

September 11, 2012 | 12:27 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Is Africa the new ‘playground’ for Al Qaeda? |

Analysis

That’s the gist of a new report by Global Post, which says the links between local rebel movements in Mali, Nigeria and Somalia and the Islamist terror group Al Qaeda are growing stronger. The report coincides with today’s anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9-11.

It’s a good series, but I can’t help but worry that this angle will translate into a simplistic pitch for a military response to the continent’s troubles with various separatist movements. Are these conflicts really about Al Qaeda? I’m not so sure.

Here’s an artsy map accompanying the GP’s series on this thesis:

Some of these alleged linkages to Al Qaeda are not new, of course, and most are often preceded by squishy lingo such as “believed to be” linked with or “has ties to” the terror group.

It’s often not clear just how strong such ties are, or even if they mean much more than sharing a similar ideology or antipathy. Nigeria’s Boko Haram, for example, is perhaps best thought of as an Islamist separatist movement that has only recently sought to ally itself with Al Qaeda. Does that translate into anything on a material basis, or is it just a boast aimed at boosting the group’s terrorizing image?

Somalia’s Al Shabaab clearly considers itself part of Al Qaeda. But militant movements in parts of Africa and hostility to the U.S. goes way back (remember Blackhawk Down?) and it would be simplistic to think this is all due to Al Qaeda’s influence.

In any case, the possibility of a growing Al Qaeda movement in Africa should be taken seriously. Bin Laden had his base in Sudan for many years in the early 1990s. The question is how best to respond to this trend. Will we take the standard route and support a policy of responding to terror simply with military or police actions? Or will we also battle for hearts and minds?

Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command, aka AfriCom, had this to say today:

To successfully defeat terrorism requires not only the collective efforts of many nations, but it requires the combined effects of military, diplomatic, development, economic, good governance, education, food security – it requires all of those to work in concert to address the underlying causes that establish the conditions in which young people, primarily young men, find themselves attracted to these terrorist organizations.

Sounds good, but AfriCom (which was launched by Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush Administration) has yet to actually find a home anywhere in Africa. It was supposed to be headquartered somewhere on the continent in 2008 but has so far remained in Stuttgart, Germany.

Africans, and others, appear reluctant to allow the U.S. military to establish a large presence there. And a new survey indicates many Americans are also not that interested in expanding our military footprint overseas.

If Al Qaeda is indeed gaining turf in parts of Africa, the first step is make sure we understand why. Are these separatist groups joining forces with Al Qaeda for ideological or practical reasons? Was Ho Chi Minh primarily a communist or a Vietnam nationalist? Many would say the failure to answer this question accurately prompted what was, until Afghanistan, our longest war.

Al Qaeda is probably best thought of as a fungus rather than as a military force. It tends to only really flourish in places of rot – places of poverty, injustice and dysfunction.

Sure, it’s a lot more fun and entertaining to use a flame-thrower to fight a fungus. But the more reasonable approach is to just stop the rot.