Generators donated to schools in Rwanda. And fuel?

From  Rwandan daily, The New Times (by way of AllAfrica.com):

Kigali — MTN Rwanda, Wednesday, donated 50 second-hand generators worth US$500,000 (Approx Rwf 280m) to the ministries of Education (MINEDUC) and Health (MINISANTE).... Speaking at the ceremony, State Minister for Education Theoneste Mutsindashyaka, acknowledged the development and urged MTN to keep up the spirit.

"Many schools lack electric power and with the newly introduced ICT education on the curriculum, the generators will definitely have an impact," Mutsindashyaka said.

Twenty head teachers from some of the remotest schools attended the ceremony and their schools will be among the beneficiaries.

OK, a used generator worth $10K is going to have high output, 80KW, for example... and high consumption of diesel. Even if the value of these machines is overstated, they are coming from one of the largest private-sector consumers of power in Rwanda. They are way bigger than schools need.

(For purposes of comparison, telecenters in Indonesia frequently run generators in the 10-13 KW range.) 

Electricity in Rwanda is a problem that cripples computer and Internet use in schools. When I last visited, head teachers reported that they were shutting down or radically limiting use of their school computers labs--not because they didn't have generators (most of the schools that i visited had 5.0 KWh versions), but because they couldn't afford the fuel to run them. 

This was in 2005. Perhaps the situation has changed. But for me to believe that the MTN donation to "definitely have impact," I'll need to hear  that MINEDUC will definitely pay the costs of fuel.

In vitro meat

Scientists use stem cells to grow tissue, so of course people have started talking about growing stem-cell-based meat as food. On the one hand, it's expensive at present ($1,000s per kilo). On the other hand, it radically reduces carbon emissions, it can happen anywhere, and it can be "adjusted" to be low fat, to provide Omega-3 fatty acids, or whatever.

And you can "design" the meat. The photo shows the 3rd-place design in the Oslo young-designers competition for 2009. 





If the costs can be brought down far enough, they can provide protein to people who otherwise would have none: 

Once when I was visiting Rwanda, I checked with my young friend John, then 6, and his friends in the village of Ruhengeri. At some point, they went with me to a local shop, where I offered to buy them Fanta sodas. But these kids were not so well off. John said, "Please, can we have some meat." What could I say? I bought them goat-on-a-stick. 

Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch... Dambisa Moyo!

Professor Dambisa Moyo has been flogging her book, Dead Aid, over the past few weeks on National Public Radio. I'm sorry, but when someone from a privileged background (OK, in Zambia) works for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank and then announces that aid doesn't work and that no one in Africa wants it, well, it just makes me ill.

Wm. Easterly and Ms Moyo to the contrary, I believe that there's a reasonable amount of evidence that aid works when it's well applied, well monitored, and well conceived. At the least, it's an arguable proposition that has been well-supported by empirical studies, even if those studies have themselves been contravened.*

More specifically, Ms Moyo says in her radio interviews that investment by the private sector will support infrastructure development and service provision, just as it does in OECD countries. Really? The autobahns of Germany were funded by the private sector? And healthcare in the UK and in France are private-sector goods that just happen to be provided to all citizens because it's a profitable undertaking?

Sure, as Ms Moyo points out, entrepreneurship, asking people what are their problems and what are their dreams is vital, supporting entrepreneurialism is vital.  But to dismiss aid in favor of entrepreneurialism when the Chinese government is essentially telling African governments and businesses, "We'll invest, and we won't ask questions," at best betrays a strong bias, and is at worst criminal. 

School completion, health care, peacekeeping, good governance--these are all areas in which aid has been proven at least provisionally to be efficient and effective. Infrastructure development, as I see it, is challenging because there are huge sums being wagered in countries that have few checks on nepotism, kick-backs and privateering. To argue, as Ms Moyo does, that aid should be rejected in favor of private-sector development is to argue, really, that the rich should get richer both at home and abroad, while the poor should pound salt.


* From the NY Times review of White Man's Burden: Easterly acknowledges that not all foreign aid has failed. In public health and school attendance, where results are relatively easy to measure, focused efforts have made a huge difference. The easier it is to see whether aid is working, he argues, the more likely it is to succeed.

We are all economists now

I'm no expert, but this is stupid:

Mounting public debt and excessive liquidity in the economy could tip the US into an inflationary spiral, a senior economic adviser to Angela Merkel, German chancellor, has warned.

A more-precise version creates a slight margin of probability:

"I see an inflationary risk in the US in the medium term because of the development of money supply there," Prof Schmidt told the FT in an interview. "There is a danger that [governments] could start considering inflation as a way to reduce the burden of public debt."

If you generously extend "medium term" to include the next 3 to 5 years, Prof Schmidt's statement becomes arguable.

But the most recently reliable US economists (e.g., Krugman, Galbraith, Roubini)  worry that the government's actions aren't sufficient to pull the national economy out of a deflationary spiral, an event wildly more fearsome and more difficult to manage than inflation. Germany's economy will very likely contract far less than most in Europe or globally in 2009, however there is substantial concern that several Eurozone countries and the EUas a whole are going to be slow to emerge (if emergence in fact happens) from this de(e)pre(ce)ssion.

Mobile banking launches in five African countries

Tom Burgis reports in today's Financial Times:

Africa's biggest mobile phone operator yesterday launched what it hopes will become the world's largest mobile banking service,

MTN's new scheme, which follows the success of a similar Kenyan venture by Vodafone of the UK and local operator Safaricom, accelerates the provision of basic financial services to people long considered "unbankable". It uses the popularity of mobile phones to offset the absence of bank branches.

Subscribers in an initial five countries - Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Ivory Coast - will be able to deposit, transfer and withdraw funds on handsets.

The Johannesburg-based group is using software from Fundamo, the world's largest specialist mobile financial services company, in a deal worth $10m.

In a sign of the potential obstacles mobile companies face as they seek to wrest some banking services from financial institutions, MTN has also entered partnerships with local banks in each territory in order to meet central banks' requirements.

It will generate revenue by charging transaction fees.

MTN is also running pilots in other countries.