This clock shows the time since the World Bank promised an investigation on Thursday, September 22 into the charges that they financed a project in Uganda in which poor people had their homes, cattle, and crops destroyed as the project forced them off their own land. Click the image once to reveal clock.
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Both China and India’s engagement in Africa operates in the wider context of globalisation, although it seems that when non-western countries spread their economic reach across the world no-one wants to use this word.
China has sought to present itself as exceptional from the rest of the world in its dealings with Africa. Officials and scholars stress the absence of a donor-recipient relationship but instead only win-win mutual-benefit solutions. They wield a south-south-developing-country-harmonious-totally-not-colonial discourse. In the West, China has also been painted as exceptional - but not in a good way, for example through supporting rogue regimes, giving away aid without conditions, ignoring good governance and refusing to interfere even in the face of alleged genocide.
India will prove both of these narratives of exceptionalism wrong. It will build relations with a wide range of partners in Africa and refuse to comment on their political nature at the risk of wrecking relations. It will give out what it calls aid but what in reality will be export credits and subsidies to its own firms’ expansion into the continent. It’ll talk about cooperation and development, but be looking for resources and new markets. It will support democracy in word but still - officially - prioritise the doctrine of non-interference and other Bandung Principles. With its non-permanent seat at the UNSC, it has already stood alongside China and the other rising democracies (Brazil and South Africa) in condemning NATO’s actions in Libya.
In short, India in Africa might end up looking much like China in Africa: spawned by globalisation, economically motivated, business-like, unpatronising and with little intention of trying to generate social change, be it through dictating development paths or demanding democratisation. It will also share with China a flowery and colourful discourse that attempts to prove that its intentions are different, and that India is, well, exceptional.
In the end, perhaps it might be “the West” that’s the exceptional one …
… Hmmm… well, rhetorically at least.
Skeptics are the essential life-blood of the answer-finding system, and the terrible movie review system.
What should we do to end world poverty? Not only do we not know, says Bill Easterly, but that’s also the entirely wrong question to ask. Professor Easterly discusses answer-finding systems, professional skepticism and M. Night Shymalan’s alternate career as an aid worker in a panel discussion at the Columbia Tikvah-Hertog Summer Institute.
Listen to the Podcast (25.7 MB)
#logistics almoz ready 2 @admitfailure
Hey Aid Watch readers, remember the AW post on Inception Statistics in the Lancet Medical Journal last April?
Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi also wrote a letter to the Lancet criticizing the methodology in a 193-country study on stillbirths, in which researchers could obtain actual data on stillbirths from only 33 countries and twice modeled the stillbirth estimates for the other countries. “We question the wisdom of creating policy based on figures with such a tenuous basis in reality,” they wrote.
The correspondence includes a response from the authors of the original study, who argue that “improving data quality and quantity is a high priority but in the meantime modelling is indispensable.”
Links:
>National, regional, and worldwide estimates of stillbirth rates in 2009 with trends since 1995: a systematic analysis (The Lancet, April 14, 2011)
>Inception Statistics (Aid Watch blog, April 18, 2011)
>Correspondence published in the Lancet, with the authors’ reply (September 3, 2011)
Alanna Shaikh (@alanna_shaikh) and our own Laura Freschi weigh the costs and benefits of the Gates Foundation’s sheer spending power in a new article for Alliance Magazine:
The public health landscape today looks unquestionably different from how it did in the late 1990s when the Gates Foundation strode on to the field. To its credit, the foundation has brought about a resurgence of interest in global health issues at a time when the cause was running low on energy and funds. Before Gates, global health funding covered little more than HIV and emerging infectious diseases – a bare shadow of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health for All vision of the 1970s. But Gates’ support for global health also raises questions: is it pushing us too much towards simple technological responses to multifaceted problems? With its influence so far-reaching, who will be willing and able to offer objective feedback?
Click through for a PDF of the full article.
Results were inconclusive, however, on the awkward, early-stages-of-dating, just-what-is-the-other-person-thinking gap.
When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Ethiopia late in May for the second Afro-India summit his delegation was not just composed of state officials. Also joining him was a diverse group of some of India’s most powerful businessmen, eager to tap new markets with high growth potential.
A wide array of Indian companies, like telecoms giant Bharti Group and industry conglomerate Tata, have increasingly been focusing on African countries in recent years. These businesses are familiar with having to meet the needs of millions of poor customers under difficult conditions.
Time and again, Indian officials have denied that there is a rivalry with China, saying that Africa can benefit from both countries’ presence. Yet Beijing’s clear head start has led New Delhi to package itself as a partner who’s putting the emphasis on building mutually beneficial ties.
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India makes moves in Africa (h/t Duncan Green). China and India’s pro-business approach is seen by some Africans as less patronizing — though not necessarily less opportunistic — than a lot of Western aid. Could the collective memories of recent, and ongoing, development struggles in these countries shape the way their governments reach out to Africa? Do the Chinese, Indian and Africans share more common economic backgrounds, leading to more aligned incentives and new approaches to aid and development?
Send us your thoughts and we’ll publish the good responses here.
As a group, immigrants demonstrate some of the most vibrant entrepreneurial insight in the United States: Immigrant entrepreneurs, particularly those with highly specialized skills, are in high demand worldwide. Rob Atkinson, who heads a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on innovation and competitiveness, says the U.S. needs to do more to lure them here. “These are scarce talents, and they are valuable talents,” he says. “And they end up leading to the creation of a lot of growth companies that end up hiring thousands and thousands of workers.” Or even tens of thousands of workers. In research done while at Duke University, Wadhwa found that between 1995 and 2005, roughly half of all of the startups in Silicon Valley were launched by immigrants. Many innovation and economic development experts are now advocating passage of legislation called the Startup Visa Act. And Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurship, is among them. Development around the world happens when local entrepreneurs find innovative ways to mend gas in the economy for profit. Check out the whole story on NPR.
