Negative Externalities in Nigeria

I clenched my fists tightly around my backpack as our van driver feinted around both sides of the bus ahead of us. We were straddling two lanes, looking for which side of the bus would allow us to continue our breakneck pace down the road. As we moved back and forth, horns blared behind us from the various cars we were cutting off. What is going on here, I thought to myself. Can’t they see that if they all slowed down a mile or two and stayed in their lanes, everyone would go faster? Actually, this was a common thought that occurred to me almost constantly in Nigeria.

Everywhere I looked, I saw the subjugation of societal gain to individual gain. I supposed this made sense in a country where policemen were nowhere to be seen and (generally speaking) there was no cost to the negative externalities one created. To make this concrete, let me share two examples:

1. “Can I see your papers?”, the cop asked as he waved us to the side of the road. Our driver had all of her documents in order but still the cop pondered them. He tested the waters, claiming that the license wasn’t valid, that we were missing documentation for the car, but our driver was resolute, everything was in order, everything was there in his hands. Finally, he relented and let us on our way. You wouldn’t see a cop stopping you just to ask for a bribe in the US but in parts of Nigeria, it’s commonplace. Cops don’t make much so they look for small amounts of money they can make here and there. Since no one in law enforcement makes that much, officials don’t crack down on their junior people and look to make money in a similar fashion. Would the populace of Nigeria be happier overall paying a little more in taxes and avoiding this whole mess? Probably yes, but the state apparatus is too weak to make it happen. So you get individual cops, slowing down and extorting the citizens they are supposed to protect. This introduces a huge inefficiency into the whole system.
2. Let’s go back to traffic and driving. Here, if there is a slight delay in the traffic ahead of you, let’s say a car backing out of a driveway into your lane, Your first course of action will be to swerve around the stopped cars ahead of you to try and cut past whatever the obstruction is. Once you get to the front of the line though, you are met by oncoming traffic that was waiting for the reversing car. Since you’re now behind that car, it can’t fully pull out into the lane and is stuck. No problem, it can just pull forward again and let cars past. Except it can’t because now motorcycle drivers have tried working their way past the car by moving around on the other side. So now everyone is blocked in a hopeless tangle as motorcycles attempt to eke by on either side. If each vehicle had just waited, the situation would have resolved itself in a minute. But by each trying to avoid that minute, we’re all stuck in a ten-minute snarl. In most places , you’d get a hefty ticket for attempting this but in Nigeria, the cops are back on Victoria Island (the rich part of town) asking people for their papers. Again, seeking advantage at the individual level is slowing down society as a whole.

Before I move on, I want to make clear that, in the absence of an effective state, most Americans would act the same. BUT, since examples exist of effective states, why doesn’t Nigeria focus on problems of this nature to help out the people?

Actually, they are! Two days ago, Nigerian customs authorities shut down the two air freight clearing warehouses at Lagos’s international airport as they were unable to explain how goods had been leaving their warehouses without paying full customs and without proper documentation (I have a guess how). Anyways, the government wants to put a stop to individual agents receiving bribes at the expense of tax revenue for the state and has made a strong move to stop it. Presumably, when the warehouses reopen, things will be done mostly by the book and the government will be taking in the tax revenue it is due.

Seems pretty easy so why don’t they look for other opportunities to address externalities like this? Well, in reality, I don’t think it has been easy. Many individuals are made worse off by this arrangement. The customs agents lose a valuable source of revenue, their supervisors lose their share of the payments, the company I’m working for has its goods locked up AND will have to pay more in tariffs, and the large merchants who important millions of dollars of goods will certainly face delays and stock outs. As you can understand, people are up in arms about this and calling in their political favors. Which I suppose brings me to my point. When governments seek to assert themselves in the interest of society (well, first they will look to improve their own interests, e.g. get tax revenues), there will be powerful actors that will oppose the move away from the status quo. These are the people that benefit from whatever local maxima the current situation is at. While in this instance, we’re hamstrung by our goods being locked up, on the whole, I can’t complain about this situation. Hopefully it will help the average Nigerian and maybe it will even lead to cops that do something about traffic violations here.

Indonesia Part V - A Little Visual Element

I didn't take too many photos on the trip but some of my more talented peers did!

The crew

Boaters ferrying around whities

Jumping proboscis monkeys

Baby orangutan

Rice paddy!

Indonesia Part IV - Economic Development (Past, Present, and Future)

Towards the latter end of the trip, we started to focus in on the themes of economic development and poverty alleviation.  This is of course a fascinating topic to me and one that we had ample time to explore in Indonesia.

I'm going to frame this discussion around three examples that we learned of in Jakarta, eastern Bali, and Jakarta respectively.  To me, they clearly and starkly represent the past, present, and future of development paradigms.

First, let's begin with IBEKA.  IBEKA treks into the remote reaches of Papua, itself one of the least accessible places on earth and installs micro-hydropower plants on the many rivers that course through the jungles.  According to IBEKA itself, it began as a reaction to government inefficiency and inability (which I totally sympathize with).  Many of its founding members were actually jailed by the government back in the day (potentially as suspected Communists but I really don't know).  According to our guest speaker, IBEKA is completely and totally opposed to  anyone making a profit and benefitting others at the same time.  If you don't believe me, perhaps I can dig up the powerpoint slide he presented showing the precise point at which the good social entrepreneur icon turned from green to red and became evil.  Don't get me wrong, IBEKA was doing tremendous work to lay the foundations of an electrified society in very needy areas, but I found his mentality to be completely calcified and closed to the idea that perhaps there were sustainable approaches that he might consider.  It seemed to me like the more paternalistic efforts that developed world NGOs have been trying for decades.

Okay, let's move on to the East Bali Poverty Project.  While Bali is generally an affluent region  (although nowhere near as pretty as what I imagined) due to its tourism industry, the eastern part of the island is poor, isolated, and perched on fragile soils on the slopes of the two volcanoes that formed Bali.  David Booth found this region in the 90's when he was looking for the absolute poorest place on Indonesia.  Apparently this was it so he set up shop here to start what I would describe as a series of Millennium Villages.  He raised money and then pumped in capital to build roads, off-grid electric systems, and recruit teachers.  He did a lot of cool things besides (like planting Vertiver grass to stabilize the slopes so that gardens could be grown) those large projects and today the villages are transformed.  Certainly still not well off but vastly improved from where they started.  I was impressed I must say but many of my peers were not.  Perhaps that is because the entire visit felt like a pageant, complete with children singing "Thank you all so much" plaintively as our vans / trucks rolled up.  That part was pretty silly.  I hope that the kids didn't have to wait long for us to show up.  But, not shocking I suppose that a ton of cash and concerted technical expertise can improve a system of villages but still, I thought the progress was awesome.  This system to me epitomized the type of development work that we see most often through Jeff Sachs and others.  Pump in cash and break the poverty cycle.

Okay, now to Ruma.  Ruma is a for-profit social enterprise in Indonesia that trains rural entrepreneurs to sell prepaid phone cards and electricity via mobile networks (much of Indonesia is covered by 3g and other data networks).  The company is staffed by former members of BCG, Kiva, the UNDP, Yahoo, E&Y, and many other well known entities.  I really like the model.  They train the owners of small shops how to get set up with a mobile tablet, a printer, and with the prepaid phone cards (a system that Ruma built the back end systems for).  From there, the owner hustles to sell the products to the local area residents.  They make more money, people have more connectivity, and Ruma makes more money to expand its operations.  Win, win, win.  From this base, Ruma has also expanded to offer research services to some of the larger CPG firms that are eager to design products that are valuable to the base of the pyramid market.  This to me is the epitome of the new guard of development workers.  Ideas that benefit the poor but also generate earnings for the institution, enabling it to continue operating and incentivizing it to perform well.  However, I must admit the potential for a biased perspective.  Is it shocking that I found the young entrepreneur, fresh out of consulting and an MBA, to have the best perspective?  

Indonesia Part III - Decision Makers and Decision Takers

My previous post dealt with the question that was raised for us in the first phase of our trip on the Indonesia side of Borneo, known as Kalimantan, but glossed over the particulars of the trip.  I’ll try to cover that in a later post but for now let’s turn our attentions to the second phase of the trip, our visit to Jakarta, AKA the big durian.

In Jakarta, we met with leaders from three of the largest family-owned conglomerates in Indonesia.  Just a quick aside, the biggest players in Indonesia are the massive corporations that certain families have been cultivating for decades or generations.  We met with Sinar Mas (the Widjaja family), Anindya Bakrie who runs the Bakrie family’s media empire, and BCA (the bank run by the Hartono family).  We also gave some love to the government as well, meeting one of the right hands of the President of Indonesia, the Minister of Tourism, and one of the various Transportation organizations.

From the moment we stepped into the headquarters of Sinar Mas, it was clear that we had left the dusty environs of the environmentalists of Kalimantan.  While in Samboja Lestari (on Kalimantan) we had met in old office buildings and outdoor patios, at Sinar Mas we met in a massive boardroom with a full-wall monitor that mapped their operations across Indonesia.  Here, all of the figures we met with were well-dressed, well-spoken (perfect English), and highly accomplished.  Sinar Mas is one of the largest, if not the largest, producers of palm oil in Indonesia and you could tell that they were cognizant of the perception of their industry.  Their communications team gave us a pitch on how Sinar Mas did no wrong and was really the best possible company you could ever envision.  On balance I think that Sinar Mas wasn’t really a bad company.  They had some rules in place for themselves that weren’t bad.  But really, I was struck by the idea that they didn’t really have a choice but to play in the palm oil game as aggressively as they could.  They knew that any lands they didn’t use for palm oil, someone else would.  And, most likely, that other actor would be more reckless / exploitive than Sinar Mas.  Yes, people can point fingers at them and yell about them buying up land degraded by secondary actors for palm oil but what else could they do?  If they refuse to buy that sensitive land, I can assure that none one of their competitors would share the same compunction.  I was left with the impression that the government needed to step up and enforce some legislation with teeth.

After Sinar Mas, we were able to get time with Anindya Bakrie, one of the richest men in all of Indonesia.  I personally didn’t speak with him at all since he breezed in late to our lunch, trailed by his entourage complete with movie camera, but he’s certainly an interesting character that bears mentioning.  I think the jury is still out on Anin but most think of his dad as a rather corrupt dude.  He created the Bakrie empire and then bankrupted it a few times over (according to Anin) before handing the unprofitable media divisions to Anin.  By all accounts, Anin has done pretty well with it.

To round out our corporate meetings, we met with BCA, one of the largest banks in Indonesia.  They had a very interesting model and approach to banking that I’d be interested to hear others weigh in on.  Primarily, they focused on making profits via transactions (i.e. as a payments processor) vs. via credit and interest payments.  I don’t know how much of this was just marketing spin but our speaker seemed quite genuine.  And, since he went to Stanford, I must assume he was being honest.  Then again, he did claim that Antarctica was the largest continent…  Hmm.  While his discussion of the bank’s operations was interesting, I most enjoyed his thoughts on the government.  He readily acknowledged the problems of corruption in the government but pointed to a new generation of leaders that showed promise of both talent and integrity, a potent combination.  He also spoke about how his bank was fighting for certain practices that would eliminate the potential for graft and corruption, like shifting to electronic payments that would be more easily traceable.

In addition to Sinar Mas, Bakrie, and BCA, we also met with some members of the government that we had been hearing so much about.  The Minister of Tourism was interesting but her power was so limited that I’m going to just focus on the right hand of the President, Pak Kuntoro (Pak just means Mr.).  This guy was a very interesting fellow and the type of guy I would expect to see in a position of this type.  He was easy-going and fly-by-the-seat-of-pants type of guy, or at least that is the impression that he gave.  He started out our meeting by asking us for any questions we had.  He followed that up by ignoring the presentation his aide had put together for him.  Clearly a smart guy (another Stanford grad) and he had achieved noteworthy success rebuilding the Aceh region that was devastated by the 2004 tsunami (and doing so without allegations of corruption).  However, what was most notable about him was the silver lining of his aides.  They hovered just over his shoulder looking ready and competent.  We met up with some of them after and found them to be highly intelligent and passionate about Indonesia.  I think they make up the second iteration of those leaders that Armand Hartono of BCA spoke.

On the topic of the government’s role in balancing development and the environment, the meeting came up a bit short.  Basically, the process of decentralization that was undertaken after the Asian Financial Crisis has taken all of the central government’s tools (at least according to Kuntoro).  This makes it very difficult for them to control palm oil, oil, or coal production.  Not a good situation and not one that the central government seemed keen to attempt to wrestle back under its control.

Indonesia Part II - Balancing Economic Development with Environmental Sustainability

Just like every party, every good trip deserves a theme.  For Indonesia, the theme we set out to explore was balancing economic development with environmental sustainability.  This is an especially appropriate question to consider when visiting Indonesia.  Again, let me do a little to set the stage on Indonesia.

While being the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia only has the world’s 17^th largest economy.  In my opinion, that’s not that bad.  Certainly no Japan but still safely within the G20.  GDP per capita is about $3,500 which is on par with what you would find in much of Central America or countries like Ukraine.  So… good but not great.  However, Indonesia has been blessed with being situated almost literally on a gold mine.  First, it straddles the equator and is drenched with copious amounts of sun and tons of rain and moisture.  Basically a natural greenhouse.  This is especially good for growing things like palm trees for palm oil (more on that later).  This rich biological gift existed in prior years as well and as a result Indonesia sits on top of large amounts of both oil and coal.  Until recently it was the only member of OPEC but has since become a net oil importer (hey, 240m people need oil).  Further, Indonesia has tremendous biological diversity as one might expect.  It has everything from komodo dragons to orangutans to just about anything else you might expect to find in SE Asia.  This biodiversity extends to the ocean as well.  Indonesia has approximately eight times the biodiversity of coral as the entire Caribbean.  Apologies as that stat might be slightly off the mark but I don't think it's off by much.

However, it’s already fully in the throes of cashing in on these resources.  Indonesia is the world’s fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world.  Yeah, I know, finally punching its weight!  But in this case that’s really not great.  Especially since emissions will grow as Indonesia continues to develop.  Mostly this is due to the clearing of land for palm oil.  Small or large actors will clear virgin forest (that stores literally tons of carbon) and peat bogs with bulldozers and fire to make the way clear for the incredibly lucrative palm oil plantations that cover large swaths of Indonesia.  This releases massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere while also wreaking havoc on Indonesia’s forests and biodiversity.  To boil it down to a Greenpeace campaign, glaciers and monkeys vs. palm oil and cash money.  Worse than this is the coal mining that goes on in the northern reaches of Indonesia.  Unlike coal reserves in the US, that lie far below the ground, Indonesia’s lie just under the surface and lend themselves to strip mines that literally uproot every tree in sight.  Not surprisingly, this is devastating to the local ecosystem.  These operations lead to massive runoffs, contamination of the water supply, and devastation of the region’s topsoil.  There is also significant oil production but it almost pales in comparison to the effects of palm oil and coal operations

Knowing all of this, you have to ask, what should Indonesia do?  It’s easy for us in the developed world to say that this type of reckless development is indefensible but it would ring pretty hollow considering the wanton use of the environment that we’ve shown in the past.  Plus, how do you really tell a poor Indonesian not to cut down some trees to provide for his family?  I know what decision I would make if it were between my children and the trees (or peat bogs) in my backyard.  Next, I’ll discuss this question from the perspective of government and corporate leaders in Jakarta.

Indonesia Part I - Setting the Stage

Stanford GSB, in its wisdom, insists that all students must complete at least one structured, global experience before completing the MBA.  At first I was a bit skeptical of the logic behind this requirement.  It seemed like insisting that all students, regardless of past experience were in need of a trip of this nature was wrongheaded and would lead to a misuse of some students time and resources.  However, as the pre-trip meetings gathered steam, I began to change my mind on the topic and upon reflection, I'm glad for the policy.  I'm certainly still digesting the lessons that I learned over my time in Indonesia (the subsequent blog posts will do something to address this) but I wanted to get started with laying the background before I jumped into my thoughts from the trip.

First, the trip.  Stanford offers 15 or so trip options for the first year students.  The trips must be to a country that you haven't spent serious time in before and are usually about 1.5 weeks in length.  The nice part is that second year students plan the entire trip covering country selection, travel logistics, and meetings.  All we need to do is rank the trips we find most appealing and cross our fingers that we get it.  Typically, you'll be matched with either your first or second preference and grouped with 17 of your soon-to-be-best-friends.  At that point, only a few meetings and some paperwork stand between you and a country you know nothing about.  In my case, Indonesia.

Okay, time to move away from logistics to start talking Indonesia.  The first thing to understand about the country is its scale.  As I learned in literally every meeting, Indonesia is made up of 17,000 individual islands stretching over 3,000 miles (greater than the width of the continental US.  Indonesia is home to 240m people making it the fourth most populous country in the world (just after the US).  Stretching the word scale a bit, Indonesia also houses incredible demographic diversity.  The archipelago supports over 300 ethnic groups speaking 700 languages / dialects.  Can you imagine trying to make generalizations to cover a country like this?  I hope so since I'll be making some later on...

Next, we should turn our attention to Indonesia's recent past.  Well, recent-ish.  In 1600, the Dutch laid their claim to Indonesia via the Dutch East India Company.  They didn't control much beyond the coastal regions until the 1900s but at that point the end was already bearing down on them.  In WWII, Japan invaded Indonesia and expelled the Dutch.  Then, when Japan surrendered, the founding father of Indonesia, Sukarno (not Suharto) declared Indonesia independent.  The Netherlands tried to get Indonesia back after but colonialism was so passé at that point.

Sukarno ruled Indonesia as an authoritarian until an attempted coup d'etat weakened him politically (despite a violent purge of Communists) and General Suharto assumed control in 1968.  Suharto made a number of reforms to Indonesia's economy but ruled with an iron fist and allowed tremendous corruption.  Finally, in 1998, he resigned amidst the instability of the Asian Financial Crisis.  Transparency International estimates that Suharto embezzled $15-25 BILLION over his 30 year reign.  

Sukarno

Suharto

Since the financial crisis, Indonesia has been steadily regaining lost ground.  Since 2007, its GDP has grown at over 6% a year.  Given the Global Financial Crisis, this is an incredible statistic.  Corruption still plagues the country but it is currently rated investment grade so... not too terrible at least.

Okay, that is a basic grounding in Indonesia that in no way does it justice but that should suffice for our purposes.  In my next posts, I'll dig into some of the reflections from my trip.

What Could be Stereotypes

I was doing some light reading on scaling up treatment for pneumonia, malaria, and diarrhea in a selection of countries when I came across what could be gross stereotypes of crests.  But they weren't.  So, I did a little more searching and found some other crests / emblems / shields that I particularly liked.  And here they are:

1.  Djibouti:  Pretty solid.  What defines us? Machetes, a spear, and a shield.  And we're not bad with MS Paint.

2. Zaire: Jaguar! Spears! Scimitar!  I'll be honest, I like this one.  Pretty hardcore.  Okay, technically Zaire isn't around anymore but still, good work.  This is also a step up from MS Paint to PowerPoint.  I could have made this.  I am a fan of the motto though.  Justice, peace, labor.

3. Mozambique:  Hmm, suspicious... same red star as with Djibouti.  But, I dig the gun and bayonet crossed with the hoe.  Very agrarian / communist of Mozambique.  I can't get over the weird water at the bottom though.  It looks like it's surging up on the right.

 
4. Democratic Republic of the Congo:  And last but not least, the current incarnation of Zaire, the DRC.  As if it didn't already have enough problems.  Basically it just took what it had as Zaire from above and took it down three notches.  Probably the rattiest big cat I've ever seen plus super low res spear and saber. Seriously.  Same motto but now it is sitting on top of a mud block.  I'm not impressed, DRC.  I'm throwing my hat in the ring for v2.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

As a baby photographer, I’ve been tasked with taking photos of each of our clinic sites, to document the processes and also possibly produce some promotional material worthy images. Our director, who this week is in Washington meeting with ‘the highest guys at USAID and PEPFAR,’ has repeatedly told me that the pictures are ‘very important politically.’



Today I visited Makambako, a small town on the Tanzam highway between Iringa and Njombe. The town was dry and dusty, but the clinic was actually a quite nice and new. As I walked around taking pictures, I noticed that there were two distinct groups of people: those who wanted their picture taken and those that turned away from the camera. I tried to focus on the kids who liked the camera, but soon I heard grumbling from the crowd around me. I saw two traditionally dressed older women scowling at me, and rubbing their fingers together. Yes? I asked, feigning innocence. Money first! they hissed at me with narrowed eyes. A small boy beside them positively yelled, ‘GIVE ME MY MONEY FIRST!’

I could feel the mood change in the crowd as everyone turned to stare at me, and I felt an involuntary sense of disappointment and disgust. I lowered my camera and stood silent for a moment, debating how I could explain in my elementary Swahili that I was not a professional photographer who would profit from these photos. That actually, I was a taxpayer that was indirectly paying for the free service their sons would receive today, and that these photos were to help ensure the continued supply of that service.

Of course I couldn’t explain this, so I waved and left the crowd. I felt annoyed, but I knew I had little right to be angry. Most of the people in the crowd were poor enough to make a good living off what I spend on coffee in a year, and furthermore, how could I convince a group of subsistence farmers that I had this fancy camera not for work, but simply because I enjoyed it as an inconceivably expensive hobby? Perhaps these Tanzanians have met photographers or heard about photographers that profit from their photos, and in that sense they do have a right to demand some payment. Morally, it doesn’t add up for a photographer to take a photo of a child in destitute poverty and then sell it for hundreds or thousands of dollars as art.

Africa is a culture shock, but from my highly affluent lifestyle back home to the dirt roads of Makambako, I can’t escape the pervasively corrupting influence of money. I feel sad to see the little boy shouting at me for money, but of course this fixation on money is only a byproduct of having so little of it. But do I have any moral ground? Maybe Americans don’t scowl and shout at strangers for money, but we are certainly willing to bomb civilians and impose economic sanctions in order to protect our wealthy way of life. I guess this is also impolite, just on a grander, and more acceptable scale.



But speaking of photography, I want to plug my friend spencer’s photos, which are infinitely more compelling than mine. He is in the Zambia, probably saving children, but I’m not sure. You can click through the photo to get to his flickr stream.

Vignettes from Honduras

I suppose I can't let Linda dominate the blogging too much since my boy B has dropped the ball so badly.  But, since I'm writing this on a plane and can't research my next post, military drafts, you'll get just my musings.  But let's call them vignettes and not musings.  So, over the next ten minutes you'll get to read about, gov't inefficiency, gov't efficiency, community activities, non-profit bumblings, and for profit excellence.

Plates in Process (Government Inefficiency)

I bought my motorcycle in mid December with no license plate and left Honduras in early April still with no plates.  I never got a Honduran motorcycle license either but that’s another issue entirely.  Apparently there is about a one year delay on getting plates of any kind in Honduras.  A friend from work told me that it was due to a lack of materials and some slow bureaucracy.  Last I checked, metal was in decent supply so I’m chalking up about 11.5 of the12 months up to bureaucracy / inefficiency. 

Don’t worry though, I had a permit to drive without plates.  I had to renew this once every three months.  This consisted of standing next to long desk and waving my expired permit and a 50 lempira note a lá late night bar style until a functionary grabbed it.  After about a two minute wait, my permit returned with a smudged blue stamp giving me another three month’s grace.

On the flight back, a chubby American that was living in Honduras told me that if your plates get damaged (in a fender bender let’s say) it is advisable to have a counterfeit plate made.  This pokes another hole in the lack of materials theory.

Overhead (Government Efficiency)

Much of my work required interacting with members of the government’s Promotion of Agriculture office.  This group is part of the larger Secretary of Agriculture (equivalent of our USDA) and is a legit organization of it’s own.  I’m on a first name basis with it’s Director (shoulder brush off).  Anyways.  What an interesting set up.  When you walk in, no reception.   Nothing.  Just stairs.  I told a passerby what I was there for and they led me up to flights of stairs and down a hallway to a door with a rainbow colored word art sign.  This was the office of PRONAGRO.

After my meetings, we would exchange emails so that I can follow up with more questions as I had them.  Everyone uses yahoo, hotmail, or gmail addresses.  No official .SAG or .PRONAGRO or even .gob (that’s spanish for .gov for you gringos). 

That’s how you cut overhead America. 

Soccer in La Esperanza (Community Activities)

I went up to the town of La Esperanza for some interviews and stayed with a co-worker.  On our way back from an evening meeting, we stopped in the central square where there was a soccer match underway.  Every night there are two games in this square between many team’s in various leagues.  The teams were composed of all ages.  Teenagers and 60-year-olds ran around the field with equal abandon if not equal speed. 

There was one especially short player that I noticed.  My colleague told me he was one of the Lencas, an indigenous group that lives in the area.  Apparently he runs into town to play.  10km each way.  Not bad.

Debt Forgiveness (Non-profit Bumblings)

I stumbled across this little gym in an NGO report on Honduras.  I’m sure this was a huge revelation to them.

(ii) the debt forgiveness mandated by the government of Honduras has distorted the lending market and encouraged a culture of nonpayment, which is a challenge to overcome;

Who would have ever guessed?

Data Visualización (For Profit Excellence)

My preferred Honduran periodical, La Prensa, published a little gem of data visualization every day towards the back of the paper.

Impressive and sobering.  It shows the reported crime in San Pedro Sula over the last three days.  The key icons are the sprawled bodies (homicides) and the guns (armed robberies).  The red icons with cars are car robberies and the blue icons with busses are bus robberies.  I worked just under the “s” in Noroeste in the top left and lived on the left side of the map just under BLV Los Proceres.  Relatively safe areas.

Letter from Njombe Town

Last weekend, the campaign team and I made the two-day journey (on Tanzanian time, which is really a one day journey in normal time) from Dar es Salaam to Njombe, in the far southwest of Tanzania. I had loaded up my podcasts and my sleeping hat for the ten highway hours, but I ended up with my eyes glued out the windows for most of the trip. I saw Hillary Clinton (or at least the diplomatic motorcade of), as well as elephants, giraffes, zebras and gazelles, although I think the Hillary is not actually native to this area.

I also saw the most astounding poverty I’ve encountered in my life. On one of my free days in Dar, I visited a ‘cultural museum park,’ which exhibited various mud huts used by different tribes in the country. I toured each of the musty low-grass-ceilinged structures with a flashlight, and tried to imagine what it could possible mean when a sign pointed to two square feet of dirt floor and said ‘The Living Room.” But after all, it was a museum, and I like modern art, so mostly I was able to relegate it to an abstract ideas area of my mind and move on.

But all along the Tanzam highway, I saw villagers living in mud structures and collecting firewood. These mud homes weren’t even as nice as the ones in the museum, but were shabbily thrown together and covered with sloping straw mats. I watched small children chasing each other around the houses and women carrying bundles of rice or wood on their heads. Here was the abstract in reality.

Being in Njombe for the past week, I’ve also noticed the distinct and sometimes surprising markers of poverty in town life. The per capita GDP in Tanzania is $500. To drive myself crazy, I like to think about how my annual medical school tuition is $50,000, or 100 times more than what the average person here makes in a year. For the golden price tag of 50 grand, I am provided with the online password to a cache of lecture videos, about four school sponsored keggers, and the legitimacy to travel here as a summer intern. It’s a funny idea to imagine, on the one hand, a laptop with lecture videos that amount to my medical education, and on the other hand, 100 Tanzanians. Or, if you like, my Macbook, and two Tanzanians. Or my iPhone, and one Tanzanian. These comparisons make life seem so unbearably arbitrary.

So what is life like in a town with a per capita GDP of an iPhone? I think on of the first things I noticed going up and down the one road in town is the lack of any bookstores, or music shops, or art establishments. For $500 dollars a year, you don’t get any of these niceties. What you do get though, is a choice between 15 different churches in which to worship. The churches are invariably the nicest and largest standing structures in town, and their soaring spires make an odd picture beside small stands selling used socks and potatoes. Not surprisingly, everyone is religious.

Poverty also does not lend well to culinary creativity, and ‘Tanzanian cuisine’ consists of rice, beans, steamed maize called ugali, fried chicken, friend potatoes, fried eggs, and fried potatoes with eggs. Ordering at a restaurant means getting a plate of one of the three things they have, which rarely changes day to day. Amazingly, local people don’t seem to notice the monotony of it, and ask me sincerely if I’m ‘enjoying Tanzanian food.’

The government does not provide a garbage collection service. I didn’t realize this until one day when we were unpacking boxes and boxes of surgical instruments, and were left with a pile of plastic bags as waste. We asked some kids on the street to help us clear the mess, and a while later I stepped outside to discover them burning the plastic bags in a big pile in front of the house. I was overwhelmed by the intense smell of carcinogens filling my body, and I turned to a co-worker to ask what the hell they were doing. ‘What else do you want them to do with the garbage?’ she asked, bewildered. And then I realized, every household across town, and in the villages does this. This was the smell that I had noticed for days but couldn’t place. Njombe is developed enough to have Coke bottles and plastic wrappers, but not developed enough to have a central garbage service.

Hans Rosling has a great and simple idea about differentiating between the means of development and the ends of development. Healthcare, economic growth, stable government: these are only the means, and not the ends of development. They aren’t the things that make life worth living. But to have books, music, plays, cake, and lets not forget cookies, doughnuts, strudel, muffins, pancakes, turnover, and dessert sampler plates, etc, these are the things that really make people happy (or if you don’t like my hyper-western/sweets-centric value system, we can just say ‘culture’).

I think something that does amaze me about the local people I meet is that everyone seems pretty happy. Locals regard me with a confused look, but a simple hand wave and a ‘Mambo’ usually gets a big and ready smile. But still, I can’t imagine my childhood with no bookstore, no library, no music hall, no sports teams.

This post amounts to an ineloquent but realtime effort on my part to come to terms with the unfathomable differences between life here and my life waiting for me back home come August. But until I come to some kind of satisfying unified theory on this, here are some pictures of animals and such.



Elephants


Masaai girl herding cattle by the highway


Overturned truck with spilled cargo along the highway

Male circumcision, WTF? (what are the fundamentals?)

After heaps of requests from international fans, I’m finally ready to reveal the project that has brought me to Tanzania for the summer. This way at least, my friends can stop ending chat conversations and emails with ‘K go save some children!’, to which I can only reply ‘lol k thx bye!’ as they sign off, caught between feeling inadequate and not wanting to debunk their image of American medical students immediately eradicating poverty and disease by their mere presence on the continent. But anyways.

I’m in Tanzania this summer with a Johns Hopkins affiliated NGO that works on bringing innovations to practice in developing countries. Specifically, I’m here to help on an 8 week male circumcision campaign in the rural Iringa region of southwest Tanzania.

Before I go on, here’s a primer for the general audience. Over the past several years, three definitive randomized controlled trials (the most badass, legit kind you can do, for you non-medical folks) in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that circumcising adult males reduces their risk of HIV acquisition by 60%. SIXTY PERCENT. In fact, in all three studies, the differences in acquisition rates between the control group and circumcision group were so extreme that the trials were stopped early, since it would be unethical to allow the control groups to go on not receiving the procedure.

(If you’re curious about the science, the risk reduction has something to do with the high number of Langerhans cells on the underside of the foreskin, through which the virus particularly enjoys attacking and entering the body.)

When you factor in that circumcision is relatively low risk and inexpensive, you might conclude that circumcising as many men as possible in high HIV areas is a very effective strategy for preventing HIV transmission, which is what the WHO concluded in 2007. But now that the science is proven, the question becomes one of implementation.


(A branded truck advertising MC services. We'll be driving this around the countryside.)

The challenge is how to get the service to tens of thousands of men as soon as possible, which brings us to right now, when I’m about to embark on a 9 hour car trip from Dar es Salaam to Njombe, in southern Iringa, to kick off the 2011 male circumcision (MC) campaign. Although the Iringa Regional Health service offers circumcision services three days a week year round, they have contracted Jhpiego to help run an 8 week high volume campaign the will offer clinic six days a week to reach a high volume in a short period. This is the second year of the campaign: last year, the goal number of clients was 6,000, and the campaign ended up circumcising 10,000. This year, the goal is 20,000.

To reach out to and care for so many clients in a short time, especially in a rural area, the Jhpiego team uses several creative strategies. To generate demand in the community, the team created several radio ads, and employed a social marketing team to head to the field in advance of the clinic kick off.

Blackouts, scandal and sexy US diplomats: An adventure through the interwebs!

Tuesday was my second day at work. I came in at 8, excited to sit at my desk, work on some spreadsheets (oh my!), go to some meetings, and still be ready for a hike at any moment. However, around 9 am, I noticed my macbook said ‘Not Charging.’ I got up and switched the plug to a new outlet. Still not. Huh.

After a while, I realized we were in a power blackout. (I sit by a big window so we usually don’t use overhead lights.) Supposedly, the office was supposed to have generators so that we could work through the day, but these weren’t working. So people finished their meetings, and eventually trickled home as laptop batteries ran dry. Some of my co-workers asked me if we had power blackouts in the US. At this point, I naively failed to realize these were scheduled, rationed blackouts. I stammered something about storms and tree branches hitting power lines. I got some confused looks.

That night, I went to a local outdoor pub for rice and beans with my coworker C. and his brother G. Both are from a rural town in Tanzania, but G. went to graduate school at a large US university that rhymes with Barvard, and currently hosts Fogarty fellows at his NGO here in Tanzania.

As we sat in almost complete darkness, I asked them what the deal was with the power outages. Ah, G. said, good question. The story he went on to explained was a complicated tale.

Traditionally, Tanzania’s electricity relies on hydroelectric power. In the past ten years, two factors have come together to generate a large gap between supply and demand: El Nino and global weather changes have lowered available supply, while at the same time the growing economy and urbanization has led to a surge in demand. These two things add up to rationing, or rolling blackouts.

These elements of the story are natural. Now enter 1. Ostensible desire to help and 2. Human fallibility. G. explained that four years ago, the government contracted with a US company to buy, install and generate power using large turbines to be placed in Dar. However, after years of protracted dealings, no turbines emerged, the US company shifted their assets around, no power was generated, and eventually the Tanzanian prime minister resigned over the scandal. Though stable, Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world. The rolling blackouts have had an immense effect on depressing productivity and the entire economy.

G. then entered into a lengthy (and informative) discussion of the imbalance of power between a developing country like Tanzania and world powers with a financial interest. Of course, GL, BM and I, as card-carrying yuppies interested in moving abroad to do ‘development work,’ have all read the basic curriculum of Sachs, Easterly and Collins. We know a little bit about a few things. But as I listened to G. talk, I started to wonder just how sheltered our perspective still was.

G. mentioned scandals and seemingly conspiracy level situations as if they should be basic knowledge, but these were not things I’ve encountered in the New York Times or New Yorker. When I got home, I decided to see what the internet could tell me. What follows is my while goose-chase around the web.

I started by googling ‘tanzania energy scandal.’ After reading various articles (mostly from Africa focused online publications, no nyt or wapo, of course), I found the name of the US company: Richmond Development Co, from the mighty state of Texas. I changed my google search for ‘tanzania energy richmond llc”

Here’s short version of what emerges: In 2006, Tanesco, the Tanzanian government energy group, entered into a contract with RDEVCO, for RDEVCO to design, install and run power turbines in Dar es Salaam. Interestingly, Tanesco would not own the turbines, but would instead pay to then ‘use’ power produced by RDEVCO on Tanzanian soil. That is stupid and has kickbacks written all over it, but fine, whatever.

RDEVCO then contracted with another US group, Vulcan, to purchase the actual turbine. Then, RDEVCO contracted with a Tanzanian holding company, and signed over the rights of the Tanesco contract as well as the turbine purchase agreement to Dowans, the new Tanzanian company. Yes, this is all very confusing, and now RDEVCO and Dowans are currently fighting over who actually did own the turbine when it arrived in Dar. But here’s the kicker, somehow in all of this, the International Chamber of Commerce, in Paris, France, has ruled that Tanesco is the one in breach of contract with Dowans, and last fall has ordered Tanesco to pay $120 million for breach of contract. Let’s keep in mind that during this time, regular Tanzanians have been living with constant and devastating blackouts.

One might wonder, who is this mysterious Richmond Development Co.? To the internet! RDEVCO’s dark blue template style website informs me that “Energy Infrastructure Development helps economies and communities struggling to meet their rising demands for electricity. By designing, overseeing, and securing financing for large scale energy projects, RDEVCO meets this need and helps aspiring people find success and build a brighter tomorrow.” How nice. The leadership page also tells me that they have a Mr. Nick Lampson, a US Congressman, on the team. In fact, the second person listed.

Now, it’s understandable that if, for the last four years, 40 million Africans have been cheated out of having affordable electricity delivered to their homes through some shady business contracts, it wouldn’t be news I’d hear about. I mean, who cares. But, doesn’t the involvement of a US Congressman make it at least worthy of an inside page NYT blurb? Apparently not. Mr. Lampson’s Wikipedia page has no mention of anything related to Richmond or Tanzania or blackouts.

So what’s going on with the turbines now? Why did I go home yesterday instead of working to eradicate HIV through Excel spreadsheets from my air-conditioned Dar es Salaam NGO office? Well, this gets weird too. The latest news results for Tanesco show that they are in the process of signing a contract for a new US company to operate the turbines in Dar. This company is called Symbion Power, and it’s CEO, Paul Hinks, came to Dar yesterday to sign the papers.

The first weird thing is that many of the small news sites quote an ‘exclusive interview Mr. Hinks gave to the Guardian last week.’ Now, I’m assuming this means the British Guardian, so I tried to find the original article. However, guardian.co.uk turns up no recent results for either Symbion or Hinks. I even googled around for other possible papers named ‘The Gaurdian,” but not surprisingly the local newspaper in Idaho did not interview Mr. Hinks in Dar, or anywhere else.

What I did find in the British Guardian though, was a curious little stub article from 2002 that implicates Mr. Hinks, at that time a managing director of a UK energy firm, in possibly illegal kickback payments to a Ugandan official in relation to a dam construction contract. As a result, the dam project was stalled, and I’m assuming, some Ugandan people didn’t get the electricity they were promised.

Huh, weird. Now, who is Symbion Power and this elusive Mr. Hinks? The website of this US registered company tells me that “Symbion Power was built on a foundation of partnership and cooperation. Even our name – a derivative of the word Symbiosis – reflects the cooperative relationship we maintain with key suppliers, local partners and subcontractors.”

…Really? Do these companies hire middle school cheer-camp directors in the off-season to write their PR? Perhaps the most urgently needed NGO is one that teaches African leaders how to smell bullshit.

Anyways, I’m much more reassured when I get to the leadership page, because lo and behold, they also have a trusty US public servant on the team: Mr. Joseph Wilson, the former H.W. appointed ambassador to Gabon and Sao Tome and Principe. (I once read in some article that when you become president, you have to find jobs for all the people you kind of want to please but really don’t know what to do with, so you stick them as ambassadors to obscure countries.)

So, we will see if Symbion, Mr. Hinks, and Mr. Wilson will save the day and the blackouts improve this summer. I have a hunch that they won’t.

Oh, Symbion also has a British LORD on the team. This beautiful man:

Now here’s a caveat, I’m not an investigative journalist. I tried to find multiple sources but I didn’t really validate or fact check anything here. This is why blogs, like women, are both beautiful and dangerous. But this is what I found to satiate my own curiousity, and furthermore, this example is an interesting entry into a debate that GL and I have had in the past, about whether in the end, NGOs or for-profit business will save the world.

G., my Tanzanian friend, repeatedly told me that what US companies are not allowed to do in the US, they come and do it here. And now that the scandal has been perpetrated, is there a court in the world that will rule in favor of the people who actually need the power? Apparently not. Of course, this doesn’t acquit the corrupt Tanzanian leaders who got the country into the mess by signing contracts that obviously didn’t benefit their countrymen for the sake of some personal kickbacks. But still, is it then valid to say that even relatively stable developing countries like Tanzania do not have the political infrastructure to benefit from the undeniable perks of well-regulated capitalism? I don’t know.

In other news, I’m getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and might well have malaria. Stay tuned.

Who do you worship!?

GL, the illustrious executive editor and publisher of this virtual publication, once told me that if I wanted to write down my daily occurrences, only my mother would be interested in reading them. However, since today was my first day of work in Tanzania, it might be worth mentioning. In my short life, I’ve been a waitress, an SAT tutor, a shopgirl, a lab rat, a nurse’s assistant, a financial consultant, a food blogger, a public health research assistant, and a medical student, but I’ve never been a field intern for an international medical NGO. Therefore, I had almost no idea what to expect on my first day.

Before coming, I had corresponded briefly with several of the local office staff about my position this summer and what I would be working on. I had done some other work with male circumcision for HIV prevention, so I knew the science behind it, but very little of the actual field implementation. I also just couldn’t guess what the day to day work flow would look like.

I arrived in Dar es Salaam on Saturday night, and spent most of Sunday at the hotel sleeping and getting unpacked. This morning (Monday), I woke up at six, but really had no idea when I was supposed to arrive at the office. I had been told via email that a driver from the hotel would take me to the office. After wasting some time unsure of what to do with myself, I sat down to breakfast in the dining room sometime around 7:30. A little while later, one of the receptionists found me to tell me that my ‘car was ready.’ I thought this meant a driver would be ready to take me when I wanted to go, so I thanked him and continued to eat breakfast. A little while later, I saw the same receptionist wander back to the dining room to smile nervously at me. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll just finish and we can go.’

After I ate, I went back up to my room, packed my bag, and wandered downstairs. When I stepped outside the hotel, I saw to my horror that a Toyota Landcruiser with my NGO’s label stamped on the side was idling in front of the door, and inside sat a very impatient looking man. It dawned on me that someone from the office had come here to pick me up, and had been waiting the whole time while I lackadaisically spread jam on toast.

I ran to open the door and breathlessly apologize for the mix-up. S., the supremely irked driver, informed me that he had been waiting over half an hour, and that there were a limited number of cars to go around! I apologized repeatedly while trying to awkwardly hoist myself into the rather elevated car, and in the process bumped my head against the doorframe. While apologies continued to stream out of my mouth, I thought, ‘Oh shit, did my headband just crack?’

I closed the door and saw the two pieces of forlorn plastic that had fallen from my head onto the floor of the car. S. had already started pulling the car forward. My mind raced as I tried to think of some way to salvage this situation without asking him to stop the car. Did I have any spare clips? No. Did I have some way I could wear my hair down? No. Did I want to show up for my first day looking like a raving lunatic? Um…

Finally, when we had reached the end of the block, I blurted out, ‘I’m SO sorry, but do you mind if I run back upstairs to get a headband? Mine just broke…’ S. braked, and looked at me like I had just asked him for a blueberry lollipop because I had left mine at home. He narrowed his eyes and said, ‘You have another one upstairs?’ I quickly nodded and darted out the Landcruiser before he could say no, yelling that it would only take a minute.

After we were back on the road, S. turned out to be very nice. We drove the dramatic distance of half a mile to a white gated compounded on the side of a major road. Pulling into the parking lot, I saw a lot of Tanzanian men in business casual congregating around the front door of the building. Everyone was busy greeting each other good morning and shaking hands. S. pulled us to the front door, asked me to sign a car usage form, and waited for me to hop out. Wait, I thought, weren’t you supposed to take me in? What now? I nervously stepped out of the car and looked around for someone to save me. And then like a miracle, the country program director, and American, stepped out from behind the vehicle and asked me if I was Linda. Yes! If I ever was.

H., the country director, took me upstairs and rapidly introduced me to several men who’s names I promptly forgot. I noticed that despite the dirt roads outside, 1) this was a normal office, complete with copy machines, communal fridge and water cooler and 2) everyone else was wearing business casual. I, on the other hand (and to be fair, against GL’s explicit advice), was wearing hiking sandals, North Face capris, and a Columbia hiking shirt. I suppose the native Tanzanians here will just forever think that Asian American medical students are all a very poorly dressed lot, or else hopelessly over-zealous outdoorsy types.

It was somehow decided that my first day would be best spent attending a training session for a new community outreach team helping us with the circumcision campaign. This sounded like a reasonable idea to get me oriented, so I enthusiastically agreed. And so, I followed three of my new colleagues a short drive away to a hotel conference room, where I proceeded to sit through an entire day’s training…entirely in Swahili.

Luckily, my three Tanzanian colleagues were extremely nice, and gave me background materials to read in English, and also translated bits for me along the way. It was interesting to see how the audience interacted with the presenters, and hear the questions they had about the campaign. (This is an outside media group contracted to do community outreach ahead of the campaign dates in order to address local concerns and create demand, more on this later.) I also wrote down individual Swahili words that stuck out (tohara means circumcision).

Halfway through the day, I saw a slide that looked like a biblical quote in Swahili. Curious, I leaned over to C., one of the community outreach officers, and asked him what it meant. He explained it was the pact between God and Abraham. I nodded, but really I had no idea what this meant.

‘You are Christian?’ C. whispered to me.

I smiled apologetically and shook my head no.

‘Oh,’ he nodded understandingly, ‘In China you have your own…?’

Again, I shook my head no.

‘You have…nothing?’ he asked. ‘Who do you worship?!’

I dumbly shook my head and flexed my lower lip from a smile to a nervous pout. But he wasn’t done.

‘Who do you pray to? ... No one? …It’s just you?’

I nervously glanced around at the presentation that was still going on around us. I timidly shrugged my shoulders and turned back to my empty notepad. Of course before coming here, I had read about Tanzanian culture, the breakdown of different ethnic and religious groups in the country. Somehow, the percentages of Christians and Muslims and indigenous faith-ers all seemed very abstract in my mind. I never expected to encounter this kind of reaction to my own beliefs, which I found very irrelevant to my coming here.

Luckily, a few minutes later C. nudged me to help him add me on Facebook, and this relieved some of my fears of being a complete social outcast for the next two months.

Despite a rocky start, it would be unfair to end this post without saying that I ended up having a fun day and enjoying my co-workers a lot. I felt the palpable disorientation of being plunged into a culture I know very little about, and a language I don’t understand at all. Still, I’m looking forward to having a great summer, especially when we leave Dar next week for the rural Iringa, where we will actually be conducting the circumcision campaign, and where my awkward hiking shoes will have their day to shine. Stay tuned.