New Organization

I apologize for the lack of published blogs recently. I have been focusing on the creation of a new organization. It is called AidMarket. It corresponds to the proposal posted in Dec. I could use your support.

Thank you!

Improvement

In my quest for a new practice or method for international aid and intervention, I have come to the conclusion that we need an education-based initiative that supports bottom-up development and improves Feedback from the poor; Monitoring of agents as well as project process and progression; Visibility of the situation, of people's condition, of particular projects and their outcomes; Accountability for the particular outcomes and necessities; Donor Incentives by establishing an a prestigious award, allowing them to choose which form of aid, and observe the outcome of their contribution -- making the donor an active agent; Transparency because donations must correspond with particular work order or responsibility, the books for international funds must be public information; Independent Evaluation with the authority to hold individual agents and agencies accountable for their contribution and responsibilities; and Educational Material available to the unfortunate children.

I would like to propose an initiative that does all that...

The Proposal

An education-based initiative, or the preferred 'point of entry,' would be the physical presence of a school. Not so much a school as most would think of it, but an Education Center serving the entire local community. As opposed to the universal curriculum that is being developed today, I believe that a curriculum and educational resources extended out into the community through the internationally supported Education Center should be tailor-made to address local needs and interest. These Education Centers will enable us to focus on what matters: endowing a new generation of learners with knowledge, strength, and values. All of which, in the long-run, will translate into the wider population with positive effect.


For international interventions and aid to be more successful, it is extremely important to empower the local intellectuals and support development from within the given community. Over time, the Education Center will have empowered locals and formed vital contacts within the decision-making community. This sort of community integration will result in more fluid and influential management and implementation of future programmes and services. These Centers will enable the international aid community to build on local understanding and values to shape particular development projects, giving it a greater local 'buy-in.'


Education Centers provide a clear advantages in the field of research and sharing of strategies for meeting set objectives. As education is an ongoing process, so should we treat the monitoring, researching, and analyzing of the local community and development projects. The research and feedback mechanisms will benefit the most if it is incorporated as an integral part of the curriculum. If so, then the information obtained from particular communities will be more relevant and reflective of local values. The data will be more significant if locals work to obtain the information from other locals.


Provided this method, the UN can more cost-effectively and efficiently assess functional capacities as well as any particular systemic and institutional levels. Unlike the central planning today, the Education Center employs local ingenuity and participation to support bottom-up development within a given community. Moreover, these Education Centers can house and provide the technology adequate for voting.


The following six pages outline how Thor’s Proposal will address the most critical of problems evident in current practices of international intervention and foreign aid. It outlines how to improve: Accountability, Donor Incentives, Transparancy, Visibility, Monitorting, Independent Evaluation, Educational Material, and Feedback.

Education Centers

Accountability

Consider the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These lofty goals lack individual accountability for particular outcomes and necessities. They lack independent agencies with the authority to hold individual agents responsible for the efforts and outcomes of particular interventions. Collective responsibility for goals doesn't work for the same reason that collective ownership of farmland in China didn't work. Xiaogang 1978 - individual farming - 1982 Communist reform - 1984 there were no communes left; "tragedy of the commons." Collective Responsibility for many goals draws from the weight of pride in doing a good job and weakens the incentive, as well as competence, to accomplish particular objectives or projects.


It is good to have a noble goal in mind when engaging in the solution of any problem. However, if the problem is not your own, then the goal, based on your values and experience, is irrelevant and the solution unlikely to resonate. We must place our goals in the background and understand what the problem is before attempting to provide a solution. We must admit that doing everything is a fantasy. Instead, we should be making poor people's lives better in the few concrete ways that aid agencies can actually accomplish. Aid agencies must specialize more in solving particular problems, rather than having each agency responsible for everything.


Education Centers should treat foreign aid and philanthropy like a marketplace. Individual and institutional donors could contribute anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars to the project(s) they find most worthy. Donors should have access to work orders and project proposals. This transparent bookkeeping permits donors to choose the means of their contribution as well as to monitor the development and to observe the benefits of their effort. Individual and institutional donors must assume responsibility for particular necessities and operational expenses of Education Centers. To be clear, not all donor’s assume responsibility. However, for sustainable development, someone must be accountable for the integral parts of the project. The donors who wish to limit their involvement to the contribution of funds can either contribute to a collective fund or select to fund something on the work order that is void of future responsibility.


Individual donors find a country, community, or cause to support. They read the work order to understand how much each project/development will cost. They contribute funds and/or assume a certain responsibility (to pay the teacher's salary, sponsor a single scholarship, the cost of facility maintenance, etc.) Also, donors should have the opportunity to permanently fund certain operational costs and maintenance. In order to have a sustainable model for international aid and development, individual donors, companies, or agencies must be made responsible for the integral parts of Education Centers. To improve the outcomes of our effort, we must rely on willing contributors and hold them accountable for their actions.

The ‘integral parts of Education Centers’ include, for example:

• Teachers
• Other Employees
• Supplies and Maintenance

• Facility
• Educational Material (everything except digital education material)
• Educational Tools (hardware and software)

• Food (Education for food incentive has proven to be a very cost-effective project)
• Electricity/Power (Power Companies)??
• Water (Jay-Z)??
• Connectivity (AMD 50x15)??
• Medical Supplies / Health Care Information and Instructional Material
• Datacenter (Sun Microsystems)??
• Translator (to translate the educational material made available to all Education Centers)
• Lead Partners / The Board (Four year commitment)

• Manage grant funds on behalf of the school
• Accounting and funding allocation
• Work with schools in budget development
• Participate in school planning and implementation
• Share in the accountability of school outcomes
• To seek and allocate scholarships
• Matching grants to locals who put their own money at stake to start a new business

Donor Incentives

International agencies analyze local capacity but aim to achieve global utopian goals. This strange organization persists because the poor are not the real customer -- the rich-country politicians and voters are. Just think about how aid agencies advertise their effort: emphasizing input - the pool of money donated - not the output - the outcome of particular interventions and projects. Politicians and aid bureaucrats react passively to dramatic headlines, utopian ideals, and ambitious global-objectives as opposed to reacting according to how the scarce aid budget could benefit the most people. We must reward agents for reaching goals, not for setting them.

Making donors responsible for project outcomes and contributions marks one incentive. Establishing a marketplace for international aid, as described above, will enable donors to choose the means of their contribution as well as monitor the progress and outcomes, it raises the level of their involvement and result in another incentive. The third incentive could be brought about if the UN was to establish a prestigious award for those donors involved in the education-based initiative whose effort and achievement stand out. This award, in combination with individual accountability and the visibility of progress, will increase the weight of pride in one‘s work as well as the incentive for one to reach positive outcomes.

Transparency

It is important that the UN and other international agencies funded with public money operate transparently, both in its finances and its hiring and promotion practices. The illegitimate use of public money cannot be tolerated. In fact, it is my belief that foreign aid and intervention is too important and delicate to be handled by politicians. That is why I am suggesting that donations and initiatives remain apolitical. The finances of Education Centers must be transparent. Expenditures must be described within the work order. Donations must correspond to particular work orders, expenditures, or responsibilities.

Visibility

The transparent bookkeeping will provide one perspective. Another should be provided by the means of pictures and live video. The pictures can be of selected sceneries, but the purpose of the live video is to increase awareness of local conditions and protect property rights. Many have argued that people behave better when they assume that they are being observed. A video camera could be a part of the datacenter. Non-local storage and analysis of the feed would be a deterrent because it would allow us to accrue evidence against the unjust. The visibility of individual efforts will give donors the opportunity to enjoy the rewarding experience of helping others. It exposes donor contribution and outcome, driving them to achieve positive results. It displays the condition as well as the lifestyle the recipients lead.

Monitoring

Once the books on particular projects are transparent and visible, the monitoring of agents and development progress may leapfrog years of improvement. The progress being monitored would not be on a scale with global objectives, but particular and localized. Monitoring of performance and outcomes is crucial if we want to hold individual donors and agencies accountable.


The information needed for this purpose is a form of resource. The information available to those who monitor agents and projects could, and should, be used for academic purposes. The data offers many potential research hypotheses and could be used as subject matter for classroom instruction. Academic researchers must play more of a fruitful role and serve as the unofficial independent evaluators. Academics could do public service by applying their techniques to evaluate the projects, programs, and approaches take by aid agencies.


When faced with this necessary involvement of quality academics in the education-based initiative, I came to realize that there is a missing link between institutions of higher education and the education that international aid systems try to bring to needy communities. The education-based initiative must establish a mutually beneficial relationship between the best education and the effort to spread it. The mechanisms for monitoring, research, and feedback should be integral parts of the curriculum because any information collected will be more relevant if locals work to obtain that information from other locals. In return, the subject matter for educational material incorporates local values and circumstances resulting in greater interest and significance.

Independent Evaluation

The evaluators for the World Bank, IMF, and UNDP would serve this role well as long as they‘re not somewhat accountable for the projects being evaluated. I probably would have given myself A's for all my assignments in school, but that wouldn't have helped me improve. Unfortunately this form of self-evaluation is well apparent in today's international aid. If it is not self-evaluation, it is that of a co-worker whom they don't want to discredit.


We need independent scientific evaluation of particular interventions from which agencies can learn. It's also important to the education-based initiative that academic research and evaluation will be made visible and credited. There will always be more students and professors looking to improve and impress, so the resource will never deplete. Other agencies should be encouraged to analyze, share, and criticize the data available to all. As long as individual efforts are visible and the books transparent, evaluation of outcomes and performance will be dramatically improved.

Educational Material

In recent years, the quantity of education has gone up, but the quality remains low. This incoherency has made the available resources less efficient at the cost of leaving aside necessary components of the whole. This is where poor feedback, invisibility, and collective responsibility is to blame. People mean well, but the job is poorly done.


For example, World Bank researchers Deon Filmer and Lant Pritchett estimate that the return on spending on instructional materials in education is up to fourteen times higher than the return on spending on physical facilities, yet donors continue to favor more observable buildings over less observable educational material.


I would argue that improving the availability and quality of educational material is the single most important effort needed today! Many of the undeveloped communities will have access to the technology that has an incredible power to educate, but the same technology can also have the sole purpose to entertain. It is important that we focus our effort on developing quality educational material and make it available to those who may not have quality educators. Children often are, and should be, able to learn independently. Without quality educational material and proper instruction most of Negroponte's computers will be used to play bloody games and watch porn on the internet.


Again, the academic community must bridge higher levels of education with the development efforts around the world to improve the results of education-based initiatives. Students who go to teachers’ training have to learn how to develop educational material as well as how to instruct students learning from that material. While learning how to teach, these students and their professors generate a rich source of material. If we employ the real-world data accumulated by this education-based initiative in the analysis and education of teachers, then the by-product of these studies, generated year after year, becomes an applicable resource for international aid and development.


These resources should serve as the basis for creation of educational material tailor-maid to address local needs and interest. It will also function as a positive incentive for those students and professors who wish to see their work published and applied. Note that it is important to have translators responsible for certain languages and Education Centers.

Feedback

UNDP's Capacity Assessment states that it is "a tool, not a solution. It requires a prior understanding of the political context within which capacity is deployed and a clear rationale for why certain capacities are desired in the future." Quite obviously the assessment depends on local understanding of the politics, institutions, and societal capacity as well as constant feedback from these particular communities. In fact, it seems to be the very grounds on which everything else depends, a sort of precondition, and yet the lack of feedback is one of the most critical flaws in today's international aid and interventions


The poor are but orphans that have no money or political voice to communicate their needs or to motivate others to meet those needs. Better feedback from the poor means better informed development initiatives and interventions, which, obviously, translates to higher success rate. Feedback guides democratic governments toward supplying services that the market cannot supply, and toward providing institutions for the markets to work. In fact, the technology employed in these proposed Education Centers will improve the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. By incorporating democratic processes in the education and by creating several topics that both students and the community may vote on, each Center may be thought of as a democracy-seed that will grow from within the community.


Education Centers should, of course, make it easy for locals to propose particular projects and developments. They should be able to express themselves and be heard. However, the feedback that we analyze should not all be voluntary submission. The most valuable information could be collected by means of interactive educational material made available to all Education Centers. Simple games, questionaires, or the simple freedom to create and express one's opinion has the potential to yield a tremendous amount of quality information from the bottom. Simple choices made by a child that experiences interacting education can yield information about local values, interests, traditions, rule, etc; this is a precondition for any future development.


I would like to end this proposal with the words of John Dewey: “Every care would be taken to surround the young with the physical and social conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to release of personal potentialities. The habits thus formed would have entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the development of the future state of society. Then and then only would all social agencies that are available operate as resources in behalf of a bettered community life.”

Thank you for taking the time to listen to what I had to say.

Education is integral to Development

Development requires learning, learning requires education.

Education is empowering.

Education drives development by extending resources to embrace the needs of the larger community.

An infrastructure that advocates information and promotes learning is aligned with both democracy and development.

We must give up on utopian planning in favor of piecemeal education-based intervention.

Bottom-up Construction for Development

We talk about developed and undeveloped countries which makes the difference between countries and cultures seem somewhat binary. For the sake of this example, imagine that the development of countries is analogous to the development of a house that is being constructed. It's a big house that is never quite fully developed, there's always room for more construction, for more development.

I am not trying to universalize cultures or the means of development. I am simply attempting to enlighten you with another perspective. You see, there's an obvious difference between a five story house and a house that has yet to build on top of its base. But their similarity is most important. The construction of both houses must start at the bottom and build on top of the established base.

Imagine that the surface of the base is determined by, and reflects, local traditions, norms, values and rules. The base is relative to the particular culture. When constructing, one must understand the particular culture in order to support the structure. Much too often, the efforts of the World Bank, IMF, UN, and other international agencies has been to copy a unite of another house and establish it on a base which they don't understand.

This can spell, has spelled and spilled into, disasters. The top-down placing of their copied unite crushed little structures at the bottom. They didn't see that the base was slanted down that angle or that their hierarchy was not in harmony with the size of the structure. The whole structure crumbles and limits other potential construction. They didn't understand that providing insufficient treatment merely builds resistance and takes away from other cost-effective, and just as necessary, projects only to perpetuate the tragedy. They didn't understand that democracy and free market require bottom-up development.

Ignorance or was it because they sought personal gain at the poor's expense?

United Nations Development Programme and Their Capacity Assessment

UNDP produces a Capacity Assessment (CA) from which they work out the development plan. This, in it self, is a vast improvement from the previous top-down planning under the assumption that successful reforms were universally applicable. The CA "focuses on the current and desired levels of capacity in a given system or institution, the gap between them, and most important, the resulting capacity development strategies and actions – how the improvements will occur and how much such will cost to undertake."

First, the CA must Assess & Analyze, it is "a tool, not a solution. It requires a prior understanding of the political context within which capacity is deployed and a clear rationale for why certain capacities are desired in the future." Quite obviously the CA depends on local understanding of the politics, institutions, and societal capacity as well as the feedback from these particular communities. In fact, it seems to be the very grounds on which everything else depends and yet the lack of feedback is one of the most critical flaws in today's interventions.

Second, the CA must Formulate Policy & Strategy, it is "a tool for understanding the current state of capacities and defining capacity gaps, capacity assessments provide valuable input into policy and strategy formulation work at the level of MDG-based development strategies and poverty reduction strategies. It also provides a basis for defining the UN's role to support capacity development, within these national processes."

The CA, and the UNDP at large, is inevitably connected to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These lofty goals lack individual accountability. They lack independent agencies with the authority to hold agents responsible for the efforts and outcomes of particular interventions. Collective responsibility for goals doesn't work for the same reason that collective ownership of farmland in China didn't work. Xiaogang 1978 - individual farming - 1982 Communist reform - 1984 there were no communes left. "tragedy of the commons." Collective Responsibility for many goals draws from the weight of pride in doing a good job. It weakens the incentive to complete/achieve particular objectives/projects.

The principal analyzes local capacity but aims to achieve global utopian goals. This strange organization persists because the poor are not the real customer -- rich-country politicians and voters are. Just think about how aid agencies advertise their effort… They emphasize input - the pool of money donated - not the outcome - the result of particular interventions. Politicians and aid bureaucrats react passively to dramatic headlines, utopian ideals, and ambitious global-objectives rather than according to where the scarce aid budget will benefit the most people. We must reward agents for reaching goals, not setting them.

Third, UNDP's ability to Manage & Implement Programmes & Services, depends heavily on their CA as well as their understanding of local norms. However, the poor quality of this information and the lack of feedback resides at the center of ineffective interventions. The systemic way of gathering critical knowledge and information is flawed. When the formulation of development strategy is contemplated, the aim is set for utopian and universal goals. They depend on collective responsibility and can therefore be discredited as flawed as well.

The CA states that "capacity resides on different levels -- systemic, institutional and individual." Assessments "at the individual level are carried out through performance management systems and are the responsibility of the countries concerned… [It] focuses on the systemic and institutional levels." The troubled and underdeveloped countries are held responsible for the capacity at an 'individual level.' The consumers, voters, teachers, mothers and other workers who man local institutions and live in accordance with a particular social system are dismissed.

Ironically, the CA also states that "it is important to note that 'these layers of capacity are interdependent. If one or the other is pursued on its own, development becomes skewed and inefficient.'" No wonder many of the programmes and service interventions are either unsuccessful or straight up harmful to the local community. We must value the human resources/capacity/capital much greater than this.

William Easterly, a former employee at the World Bank and now a professor at NYU admits in his book The White Man's Burden: "what we shock therapists didn't realize was that all reforms are partial; it is impossible to do everything at once, and no policy-maker has enough information even to know what 'everything' is… the "unintended consequences" problem is greater with a large-scale reform than with a smaller one… The overambitious reforms of shock therapy and structural adjustment were the flight of Icarus for the World Band and the IMF. Aiming for the sun, they instead descended into a sea of failure." He convincingly argues that despite "their recorded failure, the World Bank and IMF are still doing these loans; they have just changed their name to 'poverty reduction loans.' This is the fixation-on-a-big-goal characteristic of Planners, despite repeated failures to reach the goal."

Fourth, the capacity to Monitor and Evaluate. The monitoring of development, outcomes, and urgent necessities is just as critical, but, unfortunately just as invisible as the feedback from poor people at the bottom. Interventions do not work if the principal cannot observe performance by the agent. With no ability by the principal to monitor the agent, the agent has no incentive to work hard for the interests held by the principal.

It is possible to connect monitoring, feedback, and the lack of accountability as one big problem. Rich-countries mandate vague goals and are not held accountable for efforts or outcomes, therefore, the incentive for good performance cannot be strong. The evaluation that has taken place is often self-evaluation or the evaluation of co-workers. We must emphasize independent evaluation.

It's a mess. It's politically apolitical. Intervening with governments to impose good behavior, yet insisting that the government choose to behave. There's an unresolvable contradiction between conditions and sovereignty. There's also 'tied aid' which forces recipients to trade with the donor country. We must practice what we preach - free market. Aid is too important to be handled by politicians. We must adopt new methods and help the poor with piecemeal projects that benefit the human capacity. We must employ education as 'the point of entry.'

The Ineffective Reaction to the World's AIDS/HIV Epidemic

AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus

Although the foreign aid community can advertise a few successful health initiatives that have done much good, their failure to sufficiently react to the AIDS crisis continues today. We are faced with an epidemic. This crisis is so important to the world's population, to humanity, that it must not be left up to politicians.

Before discussing why the West didn't act more vigorously early on in the AIDS crisis, I want to quote a few of the news articles that I've read lately. This gives us a perspective on today's situation and issues.

The Guardian reported that there "are now 39.5 million living with HIV infection, according to the annual UNAIDS report, released ahead of World Aids Day on December 1, and 4.3 million of those were infected in 2006. That is 400,000 more than were infected in 2004."

Their front page story said that "in recent years the message on condoms has been diluted in favour of greater emphasis on sexual abstinence until marriage - in line with the thinking of the Bush administration, which is spending millions of dollars on HIV prevention and treatment. Critics say many women are not in a position to abstain from sex and that many are infected by their husbands."

"Peter Piot, UNAIDS's executive director, was concerned by the trends. "This is worrying - as we know increased HIV prevention programmes in these countries have shown progress in the past, Uganda being a prime example ... Countries are not moving at the same speed as their epidemics.""

Pasted from <http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1953921,00.html>

The Boston Globe reported that "In the United States and Western Europe, researchers said lackluster HIV prevention programs were to blame for no reduction in infection rates. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, new HIV infections may rise by 50 percent this year, compared to 2004."

Scotsman.com provided another perspective on Nov. 29th: "AIDS is killing as many people every month as died in the 2004 Asian tsunami, a leading scientist said today - 25 years after the first case of the disease was reported."

www.alertnet.org reported that same day that the "number of reported HIV/AIDS cases in China has grown by nearly 30 percent so far this year, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday, warning that the virus seemed to be spreading from high-risk groups to the general public."

These numbers are alarming. The UNAIDS's executive director, Peter Piot, admits failure to restrain the spread of the epidemic.

So what is the problem? Do people not know how bad the crisis has become? Is it because the actions taken by aid agencies are ineffective? Or because it takes millions of deaths to make it a headline issue? Why isn't this issue worth responding to?

The truth about this crisis and the international reaction to it physically hurts.

The Problem

(William Easterly "White Man's Burden")

"A patient who is already HIV-positive is a highly visible target for help-- a lot more visible than someone who is going to get infected in the future but doesn't yet know it. The rich-country politician and aid agencies get more PR credit for saving the lives of sick patients, even is the interest of the poor would call for saving them from getting sick in the first place. This again confirms the prediction that aid agencies skew their efforts toward visible outcomes, even when those outcomes have a lower payoff than less visible interventions."

A 2004 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, while generally positive about treatment in developing countries, sounded some concerns:

"Finally, how will the tens of thousands of health care professionals required for global implementation of HIV care strategies be trained, motivated, supervised, resourced, and adequately reimbursed to ensure the level of care required for this complex disease? To scale up antiretroviral therapy for HIV without ensuring infrastructure, including trained practitioners, a sage and reliable drug delivery system, and simple but effective models of continuity of care, would be a disaster, leading to ineffective treatment and rapid development of resistance."

"Spending money on a mostly futile attempt to save all the lives of this generation of AIDS victims will take money away from saving the lives of the next generation, perpetuating the tragedy."

"The West largely ignored AIDS when it was building up to a huge humanitarian crisis, only to focus now on an expensive attempt at treatment that neglects the prevention so critical to stop the disaster from getting even worse."

(William Easterly "White Man's Burden")

A Fit of Religious Zealotry

"In a fit of religious zealotry, Congress also required organizations receiving funds to publicly oppose prostitution. This eliminates effective organizations that take a pragmatic and compassionate approach to understanding the factors that drive women into prostitution. Programs that condemn prostitutes are unlikely to find a receptive audience when they try to persuade those prostitutes to avoid risky behavior...

To make things even worse, the religious right in America is crippling the funding of prevention programs to advocate their own imperatives: abstain from sex or have sex only with your legally married spouse...

Studies in the United States find no evidence that abstinence programs have any effect on sexual behavior of young people, except to discourage them from using condoms...

The religious right threatens NGOs that aggressively market condoms with a cutoff of official aid funds, on the grounds that those NGOs are promoting sexual promiscuity. Pushed by the religious right, Congress mandated that at least one third of the already paltry PEPFAR prevention budget go for abstinence-only programs...

The Vatican is also pushing its followers to oppose condom distribution in Africa because of religious doctrine that forbids the use of birth control."

Excerpts from William Easterly's "White Man's Burden"

Why Treatment?

From William Easterly's "White Man's Burden":

"The total amount of foreign aid for the world's approximately three billion poor people is only about $20 dollars per person per year. Is the money for AIDS treatment going to be 'new money' or will it come from these already scarce funds?

President Bush's 2005 budget proposal increased funding for the American AIDS program (especially treatment), but cut money for child health and other global health priorities by nearly a $100 million dollars (later reversed after protest)...

Bush's cut in other health spending was particularly unfortunate when two and a half times as many Africans die from other preventable diseases as die from AIDS...

Granting life though prevention of AIDS itself costs far less than AIDS treatment.

• The medicines that cure TB cost about ten dollars per case of the illness.

• A package of interventions designed to prevent maternal and infant deaths costs less than three dollars per person per year.

• Worldwide, 3 million children die a year because they are not fully vaccinated, even though vaccines cost only pennies per dose.

• One in four people worldwide suffers from intestinal worms, though treatment cost less than a dollar per year.

• A full course of treatment for a child suffering even from drug-resistant malaria costs only about one dollar.

• In fact, Vietnam, a relatively poor country, reduced deaths from malaria by 97% from 1991-7 with a campaign that included bed nets and antimalarial drugs.

• A bed net program in Tanzania also reduced mortality significantly.

• The availability of such cheap remedies makes it all the more tragic that malaria is still so widespread-we are back to the second tragedy of the world's poor.

The $4.5 billion the WHO plans to spend on antiretroviral treatment for one more year of life for 3 million could grant between seven and sixty years of additional life for five times that many people -- 15 million.

Michael Kremer noted in an article in The Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2002: "for every person treated for a year with antiretroviral therapy, 25 to 110 Disability Adjusted Life Years could be saved through targeted AIDS prevention efforts or vaccination against easily preventable diseases."

A group of health experts wrote in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in July 2003 about how 5.5 million child deaths could have been prevented in 2003, lamenting that "child survival has lost its focus." They blamed in part the "levels of attention and effort directed at preventing the small proportion of child deaths due to AIDS with a new, complex, and expensive intervention."

The WHO expects the added years of life to AIDS patients from antiretroviral treatment to be only 3 - 5 years-not exactly a miracle cure...

We see here again the bias toward observable actions by aid agencies...

Rich-country politicians want to convince rich-country voters that 'something is being done' (SIBD) about the tragic problem of AIDS in Africa. It is easier to achieve SIBD catharsis if politicians and aid officials treat people who are already sick, than it is to persuade people with multiple sexual partners to use condoms to prevent many more people from getting the disease...

Alas, the poor's interests are sacrificed to political convenience...

When the U.S. Congress passed Bush's $15 billion AIDS program (known as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR) in May 2003, it placed a restriction that no more than 20% of the funds be spent on prevention, whole 55% was allocated for treatment."

??I must ask, who is selling the treatment and how are they connected to the Bush administration??

More excerpts from William Easterly's "White Man's Burden":

"Thailand has successfully implemented prevention campaigns targeting condom use among prostitutes, increasing condom usage from 15% to 90% and reducing new HIV infections dramatically.

Senegal and Uganda have apparently also had success with vigorous prevention campaigns promoted by courageous political leaders (although the Ugandan government is now backing off from condom promotion under pressure from religious leaders)...

If money spent on treatment went instead to effective prevention, between 3 and 75 new HIV infections could be averted for every extra year of life given to an AIDS patient. Spending AIDS money on treatment rather than on prevention makes the AIDS crisis worse, not better...

For the same money spent giving one more year of life to an AIDS patient, you could give 75 to 1,500 years of additional life (say 15 extra years for each of 5 to 100 people) to the rest of the population through AIDS prevention...

But it does show how politicians and aid bureaucrats react passively to dramatic headlines and utopian ideals rather than according to where the small aid budget will benefit the most people...

The most charitable view is that this statement is commission's strategy to get the money it wants. Otherwise, this refusal to make choices is inexcusable. Public policy is the science of doing the best you can with limited resources-it is dereliction of duty for professional economists to shrink from confronting trade-offs...

The WHO's 2002 World Health Report contains the following common sense: "Not everything can be done tin all settings, so some way of setting priorities needs to be found. The next chapter identifies costs and the impact on population health of a variety of interventions, as the basis on which to develop strategies to reduce risk." ...

Many deaths can be prevented more cheaply than treating AIDS, thus reaching many more suffering people on a limited aid budget."

"The only way to stop the threat to Africans and other is prevention, no matter how unappealing the politics or how uncomfortable the discussion about sex. The task is to save the next generation before it is again too late."

For those who propose treatment instead of prevention argue that it's their human right, but that argument is idealistic and can be dismissed on the account of other necessary rights. Others argue that if treatment is not offered, then people are not willing to come forward and be tested.

"Some bits of evidence support this intuition, but the notion has not really been subject to enough empirical scrutiny. Moreover, it is also plausible, and there is also a little evidence, to support the idea that treatment makes prevention more difficult.

Prevention campaigns did work in Senegal, Thailand, and Uganda without being based on treatment...

Finally, there remains the risk that treatment with imperfect adherence will result in emergence of resistant strains of HIV, so that treatment itself will sow the seeds of its own downfall...

"weak links in the chain" that leads from the donor's dollar to the person's treatment. The second tragedy of the world's poor means that many effective interventions are not reaching the poor because of some of the follies of Planners…

The treatment of AIDS with drugs is vastly more complicated and depends on many more "links in the chain.""

"Spending money on a mostly futile attempt to save all the lives of this generation of AIDS victims will take money away from saving the lives of the next generation, perpetuating the tragedy."

A Generation of Undereducated, Undernourished, Underparented Orphans

Here's the truth people. The terrible truth of the unethical "fight against AIDS."

The West largely ignored the humanitarian crisis as it was building up, only to focus on treatment - an expensive, inefficient, and politically biased attempt that neglects the prevention so critical to stop the epidemic from spiraling out of control.

Public health principles and democratic logic is based on utilitarian reasoning, we should save lives that are cheap to save before saving lives that are more expensive. With the limited funds available, we must maximize the benefit and positive outcome. We must save as many as possible. Simple cost-benefit analysis.

"The advocates for treatment stress the universal human right for HIV - positive patients to have access to life-saving health care, no matter the cost. This is a great ideal, but a utopian one...

There are also other ideals-first of all, prevention of the further spread of AIDS. And what about the universal human right for health care for other killer diseases, freedom from starvation, and access to clean water? (White Man's Burden)"

The truth is that granting life through prevention of AIDS itself costs far less than AIDS treatment. Granting life by preventing and treating other deadly diseases are also much more cost-effective.

What we also need to expose is the terrible influence of the ignorant values held by the religious right in America. Their abstinence programs, opposition to the use of condoms, and prejudice against prostitution are preventing sufficient reaction to the world's AIDS crisis.

How self-involved and arrogant can people be? There are over 300 religions in the world that claim they preach the only true god and that others are wrong... Religion is merely the means to control peoples thought and habit! They should stop contradicting scientific analysis and making the AIDS crisis worse!

The Initial Reaction

"The World Bank did its first AIDS strategy report in 1988. The report said the crisis was urgent. It presciently detected "an environment highly conducive to the spread of HIV" in many African countries. It noted that the epidemic was far from reaching its full potential and that "the AIDS epidemic in Africa is an emergency situation and appropriate action must be undertaken now." The World Bank gave $1 million to WHO to fight AIDS/HIV 1988/9.

Then saying in 1992 that the 1988 "Strategy Paper has been reasonably well implemented." ...

The World Bank's 1993 World Development Report, whose theme was health, notes that "At present, most national AIDS programs are inadequate, despite international attention and the significant effort by WHO to help design and implement plans for controlling AIDS." Translation: it's the WHO's fault...

Part of the problem was probably that aid agencies didn't know what to do to address the crisis, but the above examples show little evidence that they were searching for answers. Only after a truly massive number of people were infected with HIV did AIDS gain the sufficient level of visibility for action...

Ironically for aid agencies that often are trying to do everything, 'everything' sometimes leaves out some high priorities...

The World Bank did produce a Monitoring and Evaluation Operations Manual, prepared jointly by UNAIDS and the World Bank. The manual sensibly warns that "the more complex an M&E system, the more likely it is to fail." It then spends 52 pages laying out its extremely complex M&E system."

Excerpts from William Easterly's "White Man's Burden"

The Kitty Genovese Effect -- Collective Responsibility

William Easterly drew an analogy between the long period of inaction on the AIDS crisis and a true story of a 28 year old bar manager in Queens, killed 1964…

"Moseley first stabbed Kitty, neighbors came back and stabbed her some more, till she died. Police later identified 38 neighbors who saw or heard part of the attack. The eyewitnesses' failure to call police became a symbol of the callousness of urban America...

Each of the 38 people might have been willing to bear the cost to save Kitty's life, but preferred that someone else make the call. With so many witnesses to the scene, each person calculated a high probability that someone else would make the call and save Kitty. Therefore, each person did nothing...

The Genovese effect can also operate within aid bureaucracies. Each department might wish that results happen, but would prefer that some other department achieve them, with glory for all. Departments then get into the game of shifting responsibility for difficult tasks onto other departments, which drives the leaders of even the most results-oriented agency insane...

A story like this could help account for the long period of inaction on the AIDS crisis, until the crisis was so severe that finally aid agencies acted."

Poor's Interest Sacrificed to Political Convenience

Before taking a good look at the organization, accomplishments, and efficiency of international aid agencies I thought that the UN, World Bank, IMF, and other agencies were doing a great job -- I was wrong.

There is almost no feedback from the bottom. There is minimal monitoring of project progress and outcomes. There is limited individual accountability - collective responsibility shifts blame and weakens the incentive to perform well. There is lack of visibility and quality educational material.

At the center of these problems is the fact that the money spent (input) is more important rather than the cost-effective initiatives that really benefit the poor (output). Politicians and aid bureaucrats react passively to dramatic headlines, utopian ideals, and ambitious global-objectives rather than according to where the scarce aid budget will benefit the most people. The poor people suffer because of politics!

Is it that this is the only way to receive donor's money, or simply because of our ignorance and political demagoguery? Should the advent of aid money really be in the hands of politicians? Doesn't democratic public policy, as derived from utilitarianism, prescribe that we must do the best we can with limited resources? The best to most - because we're all equal, right?

The hypocracy in foreign aid seems endless...

These arguments and examples are excerpts from: "The White Man's Burden" by William Easterly (2006)

The Legend of The Big Push

"The poorest countries are in a poverty trap (they are poor only because they started poor) from which they cannot emerge without an aid-financed Big Push, involving investments and actions to address all constraints to development, after which they will have a takeoff into self-sustained growth, and aid will no longer be needed.

Argument: [If POVERTY TRAP --> BIG PUSH] v [If BAD GOVERNMENT --> NOT BIG PUSH]

Over 1950 - 2001, countries with below-average aid had the same growth rate as countries with above-average foreign aid. Poor countries without aid had no trouble having positive growth.

The solution to this conundrum is that the identities of the poorest countries at the start of each period shown keeps changing. It doesn't help the poverty trap legend that 11 our of the 28 poorest countries in 1985 were not in the poorest 1/5th back in 1950… If the identity of who is in the poverty trap keeps changing, then it must not be much of a trap.

The UN Millennium Project argues that it is the poverty trap rather than bad government that explains the poor growth of those countries and their failure to make progress toward the MDGs.

"BAD GOVERNMENT" is not as good for fund raising for aid, as "POVERTY TRAP"

When we control both for initial poverty and for bad government, it is bad government that explains the slower growth.

POVERTY TRAP: (1985-2001 = 1.1% slower)

BAD GOVERNMENT: (1985-2001 = 1.3% slower)

We cannot statistically discern any effect of initial poverty on subsequent growth once we control for bad government. This is still true if we limit the definition of bad government to corruption alone.

The recent stagnation of the poorest countries appears to have more to do with awful government than with a poverty trap, contrary to the UN/J.SACHS hypothesis.

The poor countries were stuck with authoritarian government (or another form of authoritarian rule: colonial occupation). This could imply a bad government trap, but not the savings-and-technology poverty trap favored by the UN/SACHS story.

So we had the world's 25 most undemocratic government rulers (out of 199 countries the World Bank rated on democracy) get a sum of $9 billion in foreign aid 2002. Similarly the 25 most corrupt countries got $9.4 billion. The top 15 recipients of foreign aid in 2002, who each got more than $1 billion each, have a median ranking as the worst fourth of all governments everywhere in 2002.

It would be good to get aid from the rich of rich countries to the poor of poor countries, but what we see happening is that aid shifts money from being spent by the best governments in the worlds to being spend by the worst.

What are the chances that these billions are going to reach the poor people??

"Weak, but Improving" World Bank report on Africa (81,84,89,94,00,04)

The contradiction between 'weak institutions' and 'remarkable progress' calls to mind Japanese government propaganda during the WWII, which to the very end of the war celebrated every battle as a triumph.

What we shock therapists didn't realize was that all reforms are partial; it is impossible to do everything at once, and no policy-maker has enough information even to know what 'everything' is… the "unintended consequences" problem is greater with a large-scale reform than with a smaller one.

The overambitious reforms of shock therapy and structural adjustment were the flight of Icarus for the World Band and the IMF. Aiming for the sun, they instead descended into a sea of failure

As the great Alfred E. Newman once said, "Crime doesn't pay… as well as politics."

-- excerpts from: "The White Man's Burden" by William Easterly (2006) --

What is the Problem With Democracy?

This post closes my discussion on the democratic transformation in Iceland. I will now undertake the messed-up subject of foreign aid and international development.

The question ignites various answers, most of which relate to, and reflect, last century's split of democracy into participative and representative rule. This separation highlights a distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a form of government. The debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the 1920's explicates this democratic split. Whereas, Lippmann's books, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), raised doubts about the possibility of developing a true democracy in a modern, complex society. Dewey's work, The Public and Its Problems (1927), defended democracy and suggested that "when the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own...(p184)" In its embedded ambiguity, 'democracy' encompasses a broad horizon of definitions. The various and ever-changing societies develop unique forms of 'democracy,' all forms depend on the conditions and ability of each particular society. Therefore, the result of the argument between participative and representative rule cannot be universally applied, but must be reasoned with the particular societal conditions and ability in mind. My personal endeavor is to bring awareness to Iceland's possibility to develop a form of deliberative participatory democracy unprecedented in history.
-- Read the posts on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 --


I come from Iceland. I want to support and argue for the implementation of information technology that will enable a democratic transformation as means to increase citizen decision-making power, make the government more transparent, and provide the individual with all her information needs. The development of this system clears the path for further innovation aimed to benefit the community at large and start a societal revolution. Here I will criticize our current ways and hope to help progress toward something better.

Iceland in the News

The historian Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson has accused the Danish newspaper Ekstra-Bladet of racial discrimination against the Icelandic Nation. The paper said, among others, that "On that windblown paperisland out in the Atlantic some 300.000 Icelanders clearly had the idea that they coild take over most of the World." As it reads (my translation from the icelandic) on the newsweb: Nyhedsavisen. Vilhjálmur said that these statements were gross generalizations against a whole nation. "As an Icelandic citizen, I am innocent of these accusations. Nor have I had the idea that I could take over the world."

from <http://mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/frett.html?nid=1231601>

Environmental activists and concerned citizens from across Britain, Iceland and Trinidad and Tobago converged on Sloane Square in London on Friday the 27th of October to protest against the aluminum invasion into these islands.

Miriam Rose, from the campaign 'saving Iceland' said, 'today was very important as we established a real link between the fights in Trinidad and Iceland. People were truly moved by this solidarity and the shocking truths about Alcoa's actions.' After the ceremony a procession followed the symbolic coffin to the embassies of the affected nations, where petitions were presented.

A live phone link connected the crowd in London to a simultaneous protest in Trinidad, where locals have set up a permanent protest camp at the University of West Indies in objection to the building of two huge gas powered smelters, one by Alcoa, one by Alutrint. Details from this Trinidadian protest camp can be obtained through contacting rightsactiongroup@gmail.com

The London demonstration came on the heels of large scale demonstrations that took place in Iceland exactly one month earlier. A historical amount of Icelanders, about 5% of the entire population, marched in four different cities against the damming of Kárahnjúkar to provide Hydro Power for an Alcoa Aluminum Smelter. Following a call from retiring television reporter and nature enthusiast Ómar Ragnarsson to march on the day before the dam is scheduled to be flooded, up to 15,000 people in total walked the streets in the Reykjavik, Akureyri, Egilsstaðir and Ísafjörður.

from <http://news.bn.gs/article.php?story=20061030110057354>

Some of Iceland's Qualities

From the Belfast Telegraph:

Iceland: The secret of happiness

Iceland has everything - hot springs, cool bars and a nation of healthy, beautiful people. Oh yes, and it's the safest place on earth, too. Is this the modern world's answer to paradise? John Carlin reports

23 October 2006

* Iceland is the only member nation of Nato that has no armed forces, these having been abolished in the 14th century.

* Only a tiny fraction of the country's 679 police officers - an elite crisis unit called the Vikings - carry guns.

* With an annual murder rate below five, the sum total of the country's prison population is 118.

* Iceland has the highest density of mobile phones per capita in the world (there are more mobiles than people) and three quarters of the population is on the internet.

*Infant mortality is the fifth lowest in the world and life expectancy higher than in all but 10 of the planet's 226 nations.

* Reykjavik is the most northern capital in the world and Iceland is further north than most of Alaska but, while the winters are dark, they are several degrees milder than New York's.

* Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning parliament, the Althing, founded in 930.

* The hot water in every home is provided free, courtesy of nature, via underground volcanic passages; no nation has had more recorded volcanic eruptions than Iceland, which has 33 volcanoes.

* Iceland (the size of England) is the seventh least densely populated country in the world (the first is Mongolia) and is 25th in the list of countries with the fewest people in them (here the Vatican comes tops).

* 0.07 per cent of Iceland's land is arable; 12 per cent is covered by glaciers.

* Iceland legalised gay marriages in 1996.

* Private education and private health care do not exist - the state facilities are so good that there is no demand.

* Icelanders are investing so massively abroad that their banks are growing faster than any other country's, by far.

* Icelanders buy more books per capita than any other nation on earth.

* Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest writer never to receive a Nobel prize, was a huge fan of the Icelandic sagas, of which he wrote: "In the 12th century the Icelanders discover the novel, the art of Cervantes and Flaubert, and that discovery is as secret and as sterile for the rest of the world as their discovery of America."

"A lot of people I spoke to in Iceland agreed that a large reason for the country's success was the absence of the cultural, religious, political and tribal baggage that other nations accumulate over time. Baggage that, as the minister of education observed to me, weighs other countries down, and gets in the way of intelligent, practical, natural solutions to the elementary problems of life."

Iceland Hunting Whales -- Damn Right!

Wow, so little Iceland is receiving international attention once again. Before, it was the unsustainable growth and overheating of the economy. Now, for hunting whales - again. Let's throw this into perspective.

Iceland declared Tuesday it was issuing licenses to hunt about 40 fin and minke whales in the year ending August 2007.

Japan on Wednesday welcomed Iceland's decision to resume commercial whaling, saying Iceland's catch will "in no way endanger the whale population." The Japanese government plans to kill 1,070 minke whales in 2006, as well as a total of 170 Bryde's, sei, sperm and fin whales.

If you, dear reader, think that Iceland has made the wrong decision, you must consider this:

• The International Whaling Commission, provides information on whale populations -- you will see that Iceland's action will in no way endanger whales.
• Controlled whaling is environmentally sustainable and a right of whaling communities -- a 'collective human right' to uphold cultural tradition and support those communities that were built around commercial whaling. (further down you can read about collective rights)
• That prior to the hunting ban 20 years ago, humans - not Iceland in particular - had endangered many whale species. That in the past 20 years, the population of big whales grows more slowely than that of small whales.
  
• That today, these small whales dominate the sea, eat too much and stand as a threat to our most valuable resource - fish.
  
• That while roughly one sixth of the world's population, or one billion people, suffer from malnutrition, whales eat more than five times the amount of fish humans do per year.
• That controlled whaling is necessary for us to sustain our environment and tradition.
• That if Iceland does hunt whales, we will increase our food production and support the lifestock of other animals in the sea.
• That if Iceland does not hunt whales, our most valuable resource will gradually diminish and the problem caused by small whale species will grow exponentially.

Come on!

Iceland's Ministry of Fisheries issued a press release regarding the new permits. The International Whaling Commission has published its response.

Collective Right

Even though they reflect the general understanding of individuals, the collective right is the right of a group, not an individual. The claim needs to serve the interests of the group, and not allow for individual gain.

What the liberal mind often fails to observe, is that, for the same reason that we are individuals, we are also all different; and there are communities within our society that do not share the normative understanding of the majority -- the liberal individual often fails to recognize other communities of different 'shared understanding.'

There are mainly two types of collective rights that are being claimed:

1. the indigenous group seeks to protect its distinct existence and identity by limiting its vulnerability to the decisions of the larger society;
   
2. the indigenous group may seek the use of state power to restrict the liberty of its own members in the name of group solidarity.

Will Kymlicka argued, the latter is a matter of 'internal restrictions,' and the former of 'external protections.' Internal restrictions are 'good' in a limited sense; they are to attain some minimal restrictions, such as jury duty, vote duty, community service, etc. As for the 'bad' restrictions, of them; the most apparent are religious obligations and traditional gender roles. The line of oppression must not be crossed -- a line defined by the distinction between one’s ‘duty to the community’ and imposed the ‘restriction on one’s liberties.’ The most general form of oppression, unfortunately, is a governing unification of church and state.

In the case of external protection, however, we are dealing with inter-group relations. In the case of minorities, the collective will seek to limit their vulnerability to the actions of the larger community. These rights prove to be important for the minorities, for otherwise their voice would only echo in the crowd and their opinion would not reach across. 'Good' claims are of this sort. And out of these, the most apparent, is the right of indigenous people for preserved land and a guaranteed representation in the various fields of politics. As stated by Kymlicka, “these sorts of external protections are often consistent with liberal democracy, and may indeed be necessary for democratic justice (PHR, 449).”

Because of the vast scope of The Human Rights to autonomy, or self-determination, it must be treated as a basic Human Right -- both individual and collective rights are subject to its interpretation. Henry Shue, in his book "Basic Rights," draws the conclusion that “the social guarantees against standard threats that are part of moral rights generally are the same as the fulfillment of basic rights (p.34).” Shue argued that basic rights are 'simultaneous necessities' (p.26). Within the scope of this basic right is the right to belong to a group and seek the life one wishes to lead. Consequently, since the liberal state is committed to providing vast options for its members to choose from, it will have to allow for the preservation of the groups of people that wish to seek a non-normative understanding.

In the United Nations Human Rights Covenant, self-determination is understood as claiming "all people may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources…in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence."

The question of cultural survival has become a growing concern for encapsulated minorities in ethnically plural situations. For example: Tom G. Svensson examines the case of the Sami, and their claim to the right of self-determination as a matter of cultural survival. The Sami sought to be recognized as an ethnic minority within the Norwegian state in order to be subject to international human rights law. This particular case pertained to the legality of a state-managed hydropower development that affected a vital section of the Sami habitation. Although the Sami were not too concerned with this particular case, they were ’no longer prepared to accept that each case be viewed separately, resulting in losses they could not control.’

Hunting and other ecological adaptation are a crucial part of the Sami community, meaning that “they have to have access to a much larger area of land to carry on their tradition made of production, whereas people who use the land more intensely usually require far less territory for their cultural maintenance (HRCCP, 369).” Moreover, Svensson argues that cultural survival is not only a matter of culture, per say. It can also be regarded as a human right issue based on political rights and land rights, the two predominant elements contained in what is referred to as “Aboriginal rights.“

There is a conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the self-determination of distinct cultures. It is important that the government support the minority cultures with the means necessary for them to stand and progress as a distinct culture.