International Development Research Network

Three representatives from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), including two members of CIDA’s Food Security program, were recently at UBC. There were several opportunities for students to interact with the CIDA representatives while they were here. Below is a compilation of 21 things about CIDA in general, and about their FS program in particular, that might be of interest to graduate students.

About CIDA:

CIDA’s President, Margaret Biggs, is UBC’s Champion in the Deputy Minister University Champion Program

Rebecca Mellet is the Director of CIDA’s Pacific Regional Office.

CIDA is a granting agency that accomplishes development primarily by giving money to its implementing partners.

CIDA is guided by the Paris Declaration, which include principles of:

• Ownership – Development is recipient-driven, and the recipient agrees to the activity
• Alignment – Development aligns with the recipient country’s priorities
• Partnership – Avoid duplication of effort
• Results – Two-way accountability between Canada and the recipient country

CIDA has 20 focus countries.

CIDA has 3 priority themes:

• Securing the future of children and youth
• Increasing food security
• Stimulating sustainable economic growth

Gender, environment and good governance are understood to permeate these three themes.

CIDA conducts Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) of all of its programs.

Working for CIDA:
There are no pure or applied researchers at CIDA, although CIDA does give research grants. The IDRC, by contrast, is a research-focused crown corporation. IDRC has awards for student researchers.

CIDA recruits new Development Officers approximately every two years. The next recruitment will be fall 2011. Most positions are filled through the Public Service. More information can be found on CIDA’s Work Opportunities

Speaking French is an asset if you want to work at CIDA. CIDA is based in Gatineau, Quebec. In the past, up to 70% of CIDA’s staff have been francophone. Other languages are also valuable.

Beneficial skills to have if you want to work at CIDA include: program management; business skills e.g. experience with contracts, clients, budgets, etc; policy; communications; partnerships. Consider making the work you are doing demand-driven by the people you work for; make yourself indispensable to your target employer.

CIDA has a consultant database.

CIDA and Food Security
Ryan Clark is CIDA’s food security (FS) team leader.

CIDA considers four dimensions of food security:

• Availability
• Access
• Stability
• Use

70% of world’s poor are rural and involved in farming; in 2007, 4% of global development assistance focused on agriculture, and 4% of in-country public spending in developing countries.

Following the global food crisis in 2007-8, Canada committed $1.2 billion to FS at the G8 meeting in 2008.

CIDA focuses on smallholder farmers. Smallholders are understood to be part of the private sector. To meet the poverty and FS challenge, smallholder farming must be productive, integrated into markets, environmentally sustainable, and resilient to shocks and climate change. CIDA aims to work within local systems and knowledge.

CIDA emphasizes the importance of women to FS.

CIDA is aiming to strengthen national and regional agricultural systems.

CIDA’s FS program is currently focused mainly on Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, Sudan and Mozambique.

Official development assistance is seen to be only a small part of what is needed; the agricultural development needs private investment.

Some important questions for CIDA’s FS team:

• How can policy decisions be translated into development programming on the ground?
• How can smallholders be reached? How are governments reaching their smallholders?
• How can CIDA ensure a multi-sectoral approach to nutrition?
• How can CIDA extend and scale up what they know works?
• How do you facilitate more responsible private sector investment?
• How can the mistakes made by developed countries in agricultural development be avoided in developing countries?

Willam Easterly, at Aid Watch, makes a very straightforward case for the need to build redundant substitutable elements into development project design. Like the way we build airplanes. See below for details.

Via Aid Watch post: Substitutability: there is no substitute for learning this wonky concept if you want your project to succeed

The debate we had on the HDI brought up the seemingly drop-dead boring jargon “substitutability.” Surprise! This actually turns out to be a USEFUL concept.

Consider two extremes in an everyday example.  For producing the output: “weird music that Bill listens to,” my iPod and my iPhone are perfect substitutes, so one is redundant for this purpose (forget about other purposes for now). For producing this same output, headphones and the iPod are NOT substitutes, they are BOTH required in the proportions: 1 set of headphones for every 1 iPod. So headphones and iPods have zero substitutability.

The exact opposite concept to substitutability is complementarity. Headphones and iPods are perfect complements (you can’t use one unit of either without one unit of the other). At the other extreme, iPods and iPhones have zero complementarity (you CAN use one without the other). This is just a description of technology as it is at the moment, that we might have to take as given (but maybe not, see below).

So why does this matter for, say, aid projects? Aid projects often run into trouble because one of the essential inputs (one of the “complements”) for the desired project output goes missing. So for example, the supply of clean water breaks down because one small part fails on the water pump at the well. None of the other components of the water supply are worth anything as long as the one part of the pump stays broken.

This is a common problem. Indeed, many disasters are caused by the failure of one (sometimes very small) complementary input, like the malfunctioning O-ring that caused the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion.[1]

Yet the idea of complementary inputs over-predicts the likelihood of disaster – there are so many different parts that could fail, any one of which would be fatal, you would expect MOST Shuttles to fail. Or you would expect a lot more airline disasters than actually happen, since airplanes are subject to the same problem.

So why are more airplanes not falling out of the sky? Airplane designers do not passively accept perfect complements, they add many backup (redundant) systems in case one part fails. In other words, they deal with a complementary (essential) input by creating a perfect substitute for it in case it fails. I follow the same principle when I carry around both my iPod and my iPhone, to avoid the catastrophe in which the battery runs out on one and I can’t listen to my eccentric music.

The lesson for aid projects is to also build in redundancy for the essential complementary inputs. Make sure you have a good backup system of repairmen and spare parts in case the water pump breaks down. This seemingly obvious advice is often not followed–for example in Malawi, between 30 and 40 percent of all waterpoints don’t work.

Oh, and a final word on the HDI debate. Under their old method, UNDP assumed that inputs into the index (like income and life expectancy) were perfect substitutes, so the amount you have of one doesn’t affect the usefulness of the other. This means that even if, say, Zimbabwe has almost no income, it still gets some credit if life expectancy rises.

The new HDI method instead treats these inputs as complements, meaning that a missing input (or an income level very close to zero) would produce the catastrophe of zero overall human development, just as an iPhone with no headphones nets us no music at all.

In our critiques of the HDI, Martin Ravallion, Laura Freschi, and I thought this was way too extreme. People are resourceful enough to “produce” human development even if their income is extremely low, when they will find back-up substitutes for “low material income.”

An important part of development in general is developing systems that provide back-up redundancies for any essential input into production. Development is also the growth of resourcefulness to work around bottlenecks of any one particular scarce input.

And so, class, today’s lesson is: Aid project managers should imitate this resourcefulness. Whenever you get stuck by complements, look for substitutes.

FOOTNOTES
1. In fact, Michael Kremer used this as an analogy for development failures in his classic paper “The O-ring Theory of Economic Development”↑

By Laura Freschi @ Aid Watch

In a new World Bank blog post (h/t @poverty_action), economist David McKenzie explains why he thinks facilitating international migration should be at the top of everyone’s list of effective development interventions. Compared to microfinance, conditional cash transfer programs and cash grants to microentrepreneurs, a seasonal migration program in New Zealand produced WAY larger gains in annual income for program beneficiaries.

The good news doesn’t stop there. The usual fears for or about migrants—that they would be vulnerable to poor treatment, or that they would take advantage of the program to over stay their visas—don’t seem have materialized: In addition to estimating per-capita income gains of 30-40%, we find that participating in the RSE leads to greater subjective well-being, more durable asset purchases, housing improvements, and in Tonga, a large increase in secondary schooling. Moreover, as a recent evaluation by New Zealand’s labor department found, these gains came with minimal displacement of native workers, and overstay rates of less than 1%. Previously on [Aid Watch], Michael Clemens wrote that the development program known as leaving Haiti has pulled far more Haitians out of poverty than anything else that has ever been tried.

via The secret to fighting poverty is New Zealand.

William Easterly at AidWatch writes:

Truman’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1949 is usually taken as the beginning of foreign aid, after it included these stirring words:

Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas…More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery….For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people….  And…we should foster capital investment in areas needing development.…this program can greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations and can raise substantially their standards of living.

Foreign Aid was at first referred to as the Point Four program because it was the 4^th point in the speech. I recently stumbled across an old article by a participant in the 1949 events, Louis J. Halle.[1]

The events were roughly these. Halle worked for the State Department and one evening in 1948 had a conversation with the Deputy Director of American Republic Affairs (DDARA) about a program of technical assistance that only covered Latin America. The two agreed something similar could possibly be useful other places.

In November 1948, the President’s speech-writing assistant asked the State Department for some proposals to include in the Inaugural Address. A meeting happened and they came up with three proposals. The Director of Public Affairs called for additional ideas. The DDARA remembered the evening conversation and said something like “how about a program of technical assistance for undeveloped countries, like that in Latin America?” The fourth proposal was noted and the meeting adjourned.

The proposals went through the regular clearance procedures in the State Department. The fourth proposal was killed in the clearance process. Halle thought it was probably because officials thought it would be irresponsible to announce such a program when nobody had a clue about what it would mean in practice. So only the first three points were sent over to the White House for the Inaugural Address.

Then the speechwriting assistant called the State Department’s Director of Public Affairs back a few days later complaining that the three proposals were boring. The President wanted something original. As Halle describes it:

At this juncture, without proper time for reflection, the Director of Public Affairs found himself standing on the shore of his own Rubicon. He took a deep breath, and crossed over. There had been a fourth point, he said, but it had been thrown out. What was it? The Director told what it was. “That’s great,” said the voice from the White House, and “Point Four” went back in again.

Halle says nobody gave the matter another thought until the delivery of the address. To continue his narrative:

“Point Four” was a public-relations gimmick, thrown in by a professional speech-writer to give the speech more life. When the newspapers dramatized it in their principal headlines on the morning of January 21, the White House and the State Department were taken completely by surprise. No one – not the President, not the Secretary of State, not the presidential assistant or the Director of Public Affairs –knew any more about “Point Four” than what they could read for themselves in the meager and rather rhetorical language of the speech….It was only now, after the Inaugural Address had been delivered and the “bold new program” acclaimed all over the world, that machinery was set up in the government to look into the possibilities of such a program and make plans.

President Truman was asked six days later about background on the origin of Point Four. He replied with a good story that had no relation to the reality:

The origin of Point Four has been in my mind, and in the minds of the Government, for the past two or three years, ever since the Marshall Plan was inaugurated. It originated with the Greece and Turkey propositions. Been studying it ever since. I spend most of my time going over to that globe back there, trying to figure out ways to make peace in the world.

We want always to think our leaders take intentional, decisive actions , especially on something so important as foreign aid. It’s hard to say in this case to what extent it was an “accident,” or whether the fundamentals made aid an accident waiting to happen. But it’s good for the soul to realize that policies can happen by accident more than we are usually willing to accept.

EU deal threatens HIV drug supplies – Al Jazeera English

The charity Medicins sans Frontieres (MSF) says that hidden clauses in the free trade agreeement (FTA) currently being negotiated between Europe and India will prevent the manufacture and distribution of crucial generic medicines produced in [India]… The issue hinges on a so-called “data exclusivity” provision in the free trade agreement, which campaigners say would effectively copyright information gathered in the clinical trials that prove the effectiveness and safety of medicines.

The Indian generic pharmaceutical industry is predicting a global health crisis if restrictions are introduced as a result of the trade agreements.

Check out these neat ideas from the design world — from clay pot refrigeration to rolling water drums — aimed at improving livelihoods in the developing world!

The Big Idea

In her recent talk at UBC and in her book “Dead Aid“,  Dambisa Moyo boldy states that:

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse. [emphasis added]

To me, such a statement is too general to be helpful. Moreover, is it true in every case? How can we know? In Esther Duflo‘s compelling TED talk she illustrates a new and badly needed path for exploring these questions. Have a look. Is this what development research should look like today?

Dr. Sergei Soares, of Brazil's IPEA

In the first installment of an IDRN-exclusive interview series, Dr. Sergei Soares of Brazil’s Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) answers questions on the colonial roots of Brazilian inequality, describes current policy experiments, and gives controversial insight on future trends in urbanization and the state of the country’s infamous slums, or favelas.

Part I

soares-take-I

Part II

Soares – Part II

Part III

Soares – Part III

Part IV

Soares – Part IV

Part V

Soares – Part V

The mountains of poverty-stricken Oaxaca, Mexico. Sacred landscape, underdeveloped assets, or carbon bank for the poor?

As using economic terminology to reason about nature picks up steam, observers are beginning to ask if we’re mistaking the medium for the message (see ‘Treehugger’ article below).

There is undoubtedly something inherently distasteful about reducing the natural world to ‘underperforming assets’ and ‘capital stocks.’

Yet, some argue thinking in this way, and creating business arrangments and other instiutions that reflect this approach, is nothing less than a road out of poverty for many of the world’s marginalized populations. Countries like South Africa, for example, have been actively pursuing this model, which, crudely put, entails paying the poor to be ‘good’ stewards of the environment–namely, to not destroy and convert nature into short-term liquidity, or, alternatively, disregard its importance and use it as waste dump.

Payment for ‘ecosystem services’ schemes (PES, as they’re known in the trade) are becoming the stuff of conservationists and pro-poor development workers alike.

But, on a grander scale, one could argue this reeks of the same North-South power dynamic imposed on the ‘Third World’ back in the days of the Cold War: the same-old same-old power imbalance that prompted the creation the dependency school, and the whole dependentista debate over import-substitution industrialization.

So does playing Wall Street with nature entail a path to greater freedom of choice for the poor, now conceived as full-time ‘stewarts’ of the earth? Or do PES schemes and the like just entwine the destiny of the poor with the vagaries of the North’s new Gaia-worshipping conscience, in fact forestalling their ability to get ahead by doing just what the North did with its environment–converting it into liquid assets?

The jury is still out, of course. But, as with so many development models, I tend to think the devil is in the details here–if the history of development has taught us anything thus far, it’s to avoid a one-size fits all fix. In the face of so much uncertainty, it’s temptingly easy to get ideological about the use of one particular tool. But facts on the ground should remind us that what works, say in South Africa, may be completely inappropriate in places with different historical, economic, ecological and cultural contexts.

Development needs not be the uniform, shared road to ‘maturity’ (i.e. capacity for mass consumerism) that the word itself tends to imply. Rather, maybe we should be thinking about it as creating space for a global patchwork of solutions to poverty.  PES and pricing nature may be one tool in the toolbox that allows us to experiment with this model. Mistaking the medium of economic metaphor for the message of humanity’s ulitmate reliance on nature, however, is a perpetual risk worth being vigilant about. As the recent financial crisis has shown, applying market logic to areas best managed by other means can do as much harm as good.

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Read on for Matthew McDermot’s take, via Will Putting a Price on Nature Ultimately Just Undermine Its Value To Us? : TreeHugger.

I’ve long be a proponent of making people aware of the myriad practical services that intact, or at least functioning, ecosystems provide. From protecting against flooding, to maintaining climate, to countless medicines, etc etc, it’s all stuff that’s more expensive to do when humans do it, and we take it for granted. Which is where projects like TEEB come in, calculating the price for all these things–and it’s absolutely huge, by the way.

But while still maintaining that such analysis is useful, I increasingly wonder if assigning dollar figures to currently unpriced nature, just undermines efforts to get people to see that there is more to nature, there is more to the world than the economic or financial value we place on it?

I’ve been going back and forth about writing something about this ever since my colleague Stephen Messenger tried to explain why we must not consider nature priceless, but never quite got around to it–partly because I realize it’s swimming upstream a bit and I wondered if I wasn’t just overreacting or worrying to much about an abstract eco-philosophical concept.

After all, if pricing nature leads people to protect more of it and help drive a shift in society towards more ecosocioculturally sustainable development, who am I to argue about motivation? Right?

Then I read a recent piece by George Monbiot on the recent Conference on Biological Diversity that concluded in Japan, with what he argues is a worthless deal, a con. In it he really articulates the sort of doubts I’ve been better than I’ve been able to in the past few days:

As soon as something is measurable it becomes negotiable. Subject the natural world to cost-benefit analysis and accountants and statisticians will decide which parts of it we can do without. All that now needs to be done to demonstrate that an ecosystem can be junked is to show that the money to be made from trashing it exceeds the money to be made from preserving it. That, in the weird world of environmental economics, isn’t hard: ask the right statistician and he’ll give you any number you want.This approach reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy. In reality it’s the other way round. The economy, like all other human affairs, hangs from the world’s living systems. You can see this diminution in the language TEEB reports use: they talk of “natural capital stock”, of “underperforming natural assets” and “ecosystem services”. Nature is turned into a business plan, and we are reduced to its customers. The market now owns the world.

The TEEB analysis is correct in an analytical way, but at the same time feeds into a non-holistic mindset where everything is a commodity and substitutable.

I’m not saying that the authors of TEEB believe that, there’s every indication that they believe exactly the opposite, but nevertheless by framing the discussion in financial terms potentially just reinforces the philosophical and psychological frameworks that have led to so much destruction of people, animals and environment in the first place.

In attempting to compartmentalize and analyze and price the pieces of existence, we risk moving even farther away from seeing and experiencing it as a whole. We risk even moving farther from the sort of reverential attitude of stewardship that is required for sustainably managing the lands under our trust–which let’s not forget, with population growth and ever expanding resource usage means more and more of it.

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…and from the comments…

seamusdubh 1 hour ago

Two words.
CARBON. CREDITS.

Fourth law of the realist, ‘“Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; Steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for a trickster and catch him at first attempt, but beware of an honest man.”

…

guest 9 hours ago

Rich countries are like a deadbeat dad who offers unconditional love to his children yet firmly refuses to pay child support. The amount of such support payments does not put a price on dad’s love but simply equals the required amount to provide for the needs of his children. I guess nature would be the children in this scenario. We should pay the developing countries if we want them to preserve our loved one.

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[Image credit: Jordan Levine, 2010]