Why are aid workers getting attacked?

 From the NY Times:  news of a 10-fold increase in attacks on aid workers between 1998 and 2009:

Soaring violence in Somalia and Afghanistan helped make 2008 the most dangerous year on record for aid workers, with 122 killed while carrying out their work, a report showed on Monday. Altogether, 260 humanitarian workers were attacked in 155 serious episodes in 2008 — compared with 27 instances in 1998, according to figures compiled by the Overseas Development Institute in London and the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. Most of the violence occurred in three countries — Somalia, where 45 aid workers were killed, up from 7 in 2007; Afghanistan, with 33 deaths; and Sudan, with 19. Local humanitarian workers were most often the victims, accounting for 104 of the deaths. The study also found a significant increase in kidnappings over the past three years. “It’s a very dangerous profession indeed, and I don’t think that’s understood as much as maybe it should be,” said Abby Stoddard, a fellow at the Center for International Cooperation who co-wrote the report.

Someone--whether it's donors and NGOs, the aid workers themselves, the recipients of aid, or all three groups--feels that development aid is important enough in these contexts that it should be delivered despite violence that increasingly threatens both aid workers and aid recipients. 

Of Automobiles and economic growth: India & China throwdown

China has just announced its intention to become the leader in manufacture of hybrid and electric vehicles. Next door, India's Tata Manufacturing Nano, the $2,500 sub-sub-sub-mini-nofrills car, is set to launch this week. The two programs reflect two wildly different approaches to economic growth and economic justice. Not to mention the environment...

Tata, which is the largest manufacturer in India, is aiming squarely at India's domestic market, and at what we might call the upper triangle of the bottom of the pyramid. No air bags, no air, no antilock brakes, the Nano i

s...

"

... a vehicle meant to herald a revolution by making it possible for the world's poor to purchase their first car."

 

But the Nano's going to be marketed within India for years before going global (if indeed global it ever goes). Tata has calculated that the Nano will be well positioned to attract the broadly rising fortunes of the Indian population. (The idea no doubt sounded better in 2007.) But at least in its marketing rhetoric, Tata is observing that poor people need wheels too, and that public transportation in India is inefficient, unreliable and harsh. Cars, essentially, are positioned as part and parcel of the ongoing (altho extremely incremental) approach to economic equality in India. 

The Chinese government (not a particular Chinese manufacturer) is in contrast focusing on a "leapfrog strategy" in relation to global automobile sales. China manufacturers are well behind Japanese, U.S., South Korean and European competitors--I believe Buick is the best selling automobile brand in China--but the playing field in relation to hybrids/electrics is still pretty level. Plus, China (and Tianjin, P.M. Wen Jiabao's home town) is a leader in battery manufacturing. 

The Chinese strategy seems aimed at gaining a big chunk, even the biggest chunk, of this emerging market niche worldwide. One model discussed by the NY Times will jump from US $14,600 to ~US $30,000 before subsidies, as a result of the switch from internal combustion to an electric powerplant and storage. (Per capita GDP is around US $6,000.)

As important, given China's power-generation infrastructure--75% of which runs on coal--the net reduction in greenhouse-gas output will be small (19% according to a McKinsey study). Of course there are other benefits, not least of which is reduced reliance on oil imports in proportion to domestic sales of electrics. (However these benefits accrue whether the electrics are produced within China or not.)

So, what are key points of comparison?

• The Chinese government seeks to take advantage of the semi-global reliance on the automobile while doing little to address it's own bottom-of-the-pyramid market.
• Tata (and by extension the Indian government) seeks to satisfy domestic demand with a product that might eventually see widespread export to an emerging global middle class. 
• The Chinese approach has moderate domestic upside in relation to reduced greenhouse emissions, with few costs in relation to increased traffic congestion and related problems.
• The Tata/Indian approach has the potential to be an environmental disaster. 

Interestingly, manufacturing for both approaches will likely hit 250 - 500,000 vehicles by 2011. Roughly the same. But gross returns from the Chinese approach will be wildly greater. 

Exit the Nano, pursued by the Nano-killers

Interesting to see the emergence of parallels in perceptions of the low-cost car market and the low-cost computer market. From Wired's article about the sub-$3,000 Tata: 

Now that Tata Motors has shown the way, competitors are scrambling to offer their own budget vehicles. Hyundai has announced a $3,700 car. Renault-Nissan has teamed with Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj to put 400,000 of its own ultra-low-cost cars on the road by 2011. General Motors is rumored to be working on a Nano-killer with China's Wuling Automotive. 

Time was (and still is) when the OLPC initiative was seen as launching a wave of innovation around netbooks, which led to the Classmate, the ASUS eeepc (which was initially based on the Classmate reference design) and an explosion of competitors. As far as I can tell, however, the manufacturers who have jumped successfully into this market aren't pursuing strategies at all like OLPCs; they aren't even focusing with any real diligence on education sales. 

I'm generally skeptical of models in which first movers are seen as suddenly alerting competitors or copycats to potential markets that had been neglected because, well, no one been able to realize a combination of design and price that would appeal to it. My skepticism increases when it's a market that opens less as a result of conceptual innovation (e.g. Twitter, YouTube) than of re-engineering and re-combining pre-existing tools. Yes, I do realize that the XO is a  swell feat of collaborative design specifically targeting (at least at first) children in developing countries. But the marketplace is demonstrating that manufacturers don't need one-off interfaces, learner-centric apps, or mesh networking to have sales. And HP (via e-inclusion) and other companies were tracking developing-country and emerging-market trends well before the OLPC initiative; Intel had already launched their 

In the case of Tata and the Nano, efforts by competitors are at least partly defensive: Manufacturers don't want to risk losing all of a global market that might reach 10 million per year by 2019 (my back-of-the-envelope estimate). However, Nano-killers will only generate nano-profits, and productive capacity won't be sensibly diverted from higher-margin models. Remember, Buick is the largest-selling brand in China. (Although the situation is slightly different in the cheap-device market, the trend toward higher-cost/higher-markup products demonstrates the sway that profit margins hold over marketing and production.)  My sense is that other manufacturers will direct some of their considerable resources into low-cost designs and, eventually, manufacturing, but that this was a space that they'd been tracking for quite some time and they simply aren't about to let Tata get too far along without having at least to face up to competition, in its South Asian backyard and, perhaps, elsewhere.

(Not) the last word on the anti-Bono

The NY Times, National Public Radio, the Financial Times,the BBC... I can't get away from Dambisa Moyo! At least we're starting to see refutations of her statement that aid to Africa has been an ""unmitigated disaster." Sadly, perhaps, no one with the status (or at least, the publicity) of Ms Moyo herself is picking up this argument.

Bono's .org for aid to Africa, ONE, has posted the following:

• Since 2002, more than 2 million Africans who might have otherwise died are on life-saving anti-AIDS medication;  
• between 2005 and 2007, in Rwanda and Ethiopia malaria cases and deaths were more than cut in half thanks to a dramatic increase in bed nets and access to anti-malaria medication.  
• since 1999, 34 million more African children are going to school for the first time;

All of these successes are directly attributable to a combination of increasingly effective aid, improved African governance, targeted debt relief and the hard work of people in Africa. [ONE doesn't support the direct attributions with a link, however.--Ed.]

Bono himself hasn't gotten involved. Instead, noted-but-overstated economist Bill Easterly has issued several counter-refutations of the ONE article, without really offering his opinion of Ms Moyo's book. (He likely finds it convenient but insubstantial.) Fortunately, David Roodman of Center for Global Development has at least taken the time to declare the book "sporadically footnoted," "selective in its use of facts," "sloppy," "illogical," "simplistic"   and "stunningly naive"--providing at least a mote of evidence for some of these adjectives and adjectival phrases.

The blogs and comments at the Guardian, the BBC and other UK-based sites are filling up with invective ("imperialist!"). In the US, Ms Moyo's media coverage provokes little popular response. Why is this?"

Another Ms Moyo weighs in on aid

Some years ago I was working with a small NGO in the Matabeleland South province in Zimbabwe. We were supporting the Zenzele Women's Goatkeeping & Development Group outside of the town of Gwanda by, among other things, conducting a two-week practicum on water harvesting. The goal was to help the women (who sang every day as we trekked out to their hectare garden plot) increase their crop yields, enabling them to sell more vegetables to their neighbors and others in the vicinity.

We measured slopes, we dug channels, we piled berms. We were guided by a German guy who had developed techniques for making community-built dams for the Swaminathan Foundation in Pondicherry. (He sounded exactly like my grandmother, from Alsace, by the way.) The challenge in Mat South is that rains come only one month out of the year--December I believe, IF they come--and typically wash away the topsoil without soaking deeply into the earth. An additional challenge is posed by the fact that the Ndebele people who occupy these lands were historically speaking, semi-nomadic pastoralists rather than farmers. Farming was not among their traditions at the time that their movements were constrained by Rhodesians arriving at the turn of the 20th century to take over land and launch Zimbabwean agriculture.

OK, we dug, we piled, we talked, we sang for a couple of weeks. These enterprising women discussed their various lines of business: gardening of course, and the had a milk cow, and they sewed school uniforms. And of course they kept goats, or rather, their kids kept the goats but the women sold them off for local consumption.

At the end of the workshop, we had a review session. After all that work, the women of the Zenzele group were somewhat enthusiastic, politely so, but they hadn't been blown away by the assembled experts and effort.

I asked Ms Moyo, who was sort of their leader, ""What is it that you really want to find out? What would be the most help for your group?' She said, ""Well, we have all these businesses, and we are making money..."" (Murmurs of jubilant assent.) ""... but we don't know how much money we are making, we have no records."" Ah. :""And so,"" she went on, ""We don't know whether to buy another milk cow--we can always sell milk, no matter what--or buy more sewing machines and fabric for the uniforms or rent another farmer's plot. If you could help us figure that out, we would be all right."" (Murmurs of concurrence.) So we had taken 2 weeks of their time, focused on water harvesting to improve cropping, and these women weren't sure--and had never been asked--whether cropping was a potential profit center or not.

It's almost enough to make me agree with Dambisa.