Well said!

"Iraq today is sovereign and independent," 

"With the execution of the troop pullout, our relations with the United States have entered a new stage between two equal, sovereign countries"

This is according to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on a day when the American forces will apparently withdraw from Iraq, leaving behind only 50,000 "formidable and heavily-armed force". 
And Joe Biden chimes in: "We'll be just fine, they'll be just fine," 
Ah, the politics of face-saving and obfuscation...well done!

"Policy of No Contact"

He's an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he's the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him. In 2007, with ranching and logging closing in quickly on all sides, government officials declared a 31-square-mile area around him off-limits to trespassing and development.

Read more on Slate (via Chris Blattman)

Fraud alert: Jobs on offer

from Videocon Electronics India Ltd.  sender time Sent at 21:36 (GMT+05:30). Current time there: 05:12. ✆ reply-to vedioconhouse121@hotmail.com to date 30 August 2010 21:36 subject Dear Applicant,

hide details 21:36 (2 hours ago)

Dear Applicant,

Ref: VIDEOCON Direct Recruitments offer.

It is our good pleasure to inform you that your Resume has been selected for our new plant. The Company selected 32 candidates list for IT, Administration and Production Departments, as well as Company offered you to join as an Executive/Manager post in respective department. You are selected according to your resume in which Project you have worked on according to that you have been selected in Company. The Company is dealing in Electronics manufacturing business in India The Company is recruiting the candidates for new plants in Delhi, Bangalore and Pune.Your interview will held at Company Corporate office on v 20th September 2010 at 11.30 You will be pleased to know that Company has advise you in the selection panel that your Application can be progress to final stage. You will come to Company corporate office in Delhi.

Your offer letter with Air Ticket will be send to you by courier before date of interview. The Company can be offer you as salary with benefits for this post 30, 000/- to 2, 00, 000/- P.M. + (HRA + D.A + Conveyance and other Company benefits. The designation and Job Location will be fix by Company HRD. At time of final process. You have to come with photo-copies of all required documents.

REQUIRED DOCUMENTS BY THE COMPANY HRD.

1) Photo-copies of Qualification Documents.
2) Photo-copies of Experience Certificates (If any)
3) Photo-copies of Address Proof
4) Two Passport Size Photograph

You have to deposit the (Cash) as an initial amount in favor of Company HRD. Department. for Rs. 7,300/- through any [SBI BANK ]Branch from your Home City to Company Senior HRD

ACCOUNT NAME: AKUM JAMIR
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 20068172473
BANK NAME:  STATE BANK OF INDIA
BANK BRANCH:  NEW DELHI BRANCH

This is refundable interview security. Your offer letter with Air tickets will be send to your Home Address by courier after receiving the confirmation of interview security deposited in State Bank India . Company will pay all the expenditure to you at the time of face-to-face meeting with you in Company. The Job profile, salary offer, and date -time of interview will be mention in your offer letter. Your offer letter will dispatch very shortly after receiving your confirmation of cash deposited in SBI BANK. We wish you the best of luck for the subsequent and remaining stage.

The last date of security deposited in bank - 3rd/09/2010 You have to give the information after deposited the security money in bank to Company HRD v direct recruitment email ID: - vedioconhouse121@hotmail.com Your Letter with supporting documents will be dispatch same time by courier to your postal address after recd. Your security deposited confirmation in bank. The interview process and arrangement expenditure will be pay by Company. Lodging, traveling and local conveyance actual will be paid by Company as per bills. The candidate has to deposit the initial refundable security as mentioned by HRD.

If the candidate wants to come with his parents or friends, the Company will arrange all facilities only for female candidate.

Thanks
MRS SUMAN KHAN - (Executive - HRD)
Videocon Electronics India Ltd.
H.O. - 174, Vediocon House,
G.K. Part  1, Greater Kailash,

Contact EMAIL  : vedioconhouse121@hotmail.com

Back to the basics in Kolkata

At the Presidency College in Kolkata

Left leaning students attacked Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia with eggs and tomatoes to protest the Centre’s “failure” to check price rise, but the edible missiles missed him.

According to an eyewitness account, some students, owing allegiance to CPI(M)’s student wing SFI, waved black flags and shouted “Montek go back” before hurling eggs and tomatoes at Mr. Ahluwalia as he was entering the Presidency College here to inaugurate a national seminar on economics.

"Obama is a devout Christian!"

The White House insists President Barack Obama is a "committed" Christian whose faith is an "important part of his daily life," despite growing opinion that he's a Muslim.

"He prays every day and he seeks a small circle of Christian pastors to give him spiritual advice and counseling,"the White House said in a statement to CBN News Thursday.

"The president's Christian faith is a part of who he is, but not a part of what the public or the media is focused on everyday," officials continued.  "The president's strong Christian faith is what guides him through challenges, but he doesn't wear it on his sleeve."

This is the White House's desperate response to an opinion poll on Obama's faith. Why would they even care? Where is the "change"? Never ceases to amaze/amuse me...

A (not so) new antidote to food insecurity

WHEREAS the agricultural situation in the State is constantly watched by the State Government, and relief measures as warranted by the situation are provided as soon as signs of scarcity conditions are apparent, so that there is no scope for famine conditions to develop

This is from Maharashtra in 1963, which passed "An Act to delete the term "famine" from all laws in the State of Maharashtra" 


I came across this amazing piece of progressive legislation via P. Sainath, who is clearly not amused - 

Maybe the government, the National Advisory Council and other assorted enthusiasts of the Food Security Bill can learn from Maharashtra about moving towards ending hunger altogether.

In 1963, the government of Maharashtra ended famine forever in the State. It did this without adding a morsel to anyone's diet. It did so simply by passing an Act in the Legislature that deleted the word ‘famine' from all laws of the State....

The next para says the term ‘famine' “has now become obsolete, and requires therefore to be deleted” (emphasis added) from “other laws on the subject in their application to the State.” It decrees that “for the words ‘famine or acute scarcity' the word ‘scarcity' shall be substituted,” in all laws of the State. Lucky Maharashtra — it can't ever have acute scarcity either. 

...By slaying famine and acute scarcity on paper, a government kills its own responsibility towards citizens, mainly poor and hungry ones, in times of crisis. Its burden becomes less. It can concentrate (especially in Maharashtra) on boosting the Indian Premier League and its billionaires.

Way back in 1963, Maharashtra really got it! Before anyone else...Certainly way before Amartya Sen came out with his famine-democracy link 


Unfortunately, less than a decade later, Maharashtra was struck by wide-spread scarcity, what the rest of the world would simply call a famine.  

Can we ever be completely gender neutral?

Over at The Road to the Horizon, Peter expresses his solidarity with women in the aid sector constantly under pressure to balance their work lives with their personal ones. 

The other evening, I went with E. over all the women we knew. And we tried to flag those we thought had found a good balance between kids, house, husband and career. And are successful in all. We found one. One woman out of the dozens of women we know, we found one. That is a sad observation. And even more sad, when we realized that lady does not work in the humanitarian "business".

I am no gender expert. But it does seem quite obvious that many of us who work towards a fair gender balance in communities we work with often tend to neglect the same at our own work-places. So this post has some thoughts/questions about organisations, their female workers, and in particular, field workers. I have often paused to think about typical notions that run through some organisations. Sure, there are cultural differences between different parts of the world and I would be in no position to comment on contexts I have not been a part of. (And I am, as usual, stuck on small NGOs)


The following are the most common notions that I (and I am sure most of you) have heard many many times over - 

• 'This' type of job is not suitable for women; they will not be able to travel to/stay overnight at remote rural areas using public transport or a motor-bike (and we cannot afford cars for all field work)
• 'She' cannot travel as much anymore now that she is married/has children
• 'That' community is very aggressive and a woman cannot work with them
• 'She' will get married soon and then will have to move with her spouse. Is it smart to hire her now only to lose her soon after?
• We should hire 'her'. She will be good at mobilising communities, especially women for training/health/education/some such soft intervention

So that leaves us with desk-based academics, research or M&E and the whole lot of admin work (finances, procurement, office assistants etc). 

As a result, very few women rise up the ranks of an organisation from the very lowest level, when compared to men who get the opportunity, in the first place, to start work with the organisation. True, some of the notions above stem from social structures in the respective areas. Women may be particularly vulnerable/unsafe in some settings and no organisation would want to put their staff at risk. In such instances, is an organisation being unfair? What about stereotypes - if a woman is assertive, smart and can take care of herself, is she 'being a man'? On the other hand, if a man is mellow, patient and compassionate, is he 'not being a man'? I wonder! Through its policies, is the organisation reinforcing these stereotypes? Or is it merely doing the best it can for its staff? 

The other set of concerns stem from prevalent social norms in the respective cultures. In India, I have seen female staff quitting their jobs soon after they get married - sometimes because the family disapproves, or because she has to move to a different city along with her spouse. Why must an organisation invest in a female staff if their tenure is uncertain? Organisation already have limited resources and are affected by high staff turnover. But is turnover actually higher among women than among men? But in the first place, does the organisation see itself as an individual entity or does it consider itself part of a eco-system of organisations/institutions in society? Depending on the answer to this question, one might see variations in some of these decisions... 

In contrast, the chances that a man and woman have comparable career trajectories when they join the middle management (usually out of school with a professional degree) seem much higher. That's where the professional aid worker comes in. I tend to feel less badly for people at that level. Men or women, they more often than not, get to choose how they want to live their lives and in the long run, have better chances of being on even ground in their chosen areas of work, if they want to... 

The emergence of Ghana

Via Africa Unchained, I came across this fascinating story tracing the evolution of Ghana over the last five decades: "Where Ghana went Right". Quite an obvious pun in the title - John Schram clearly approves more of JJ Rawlings's adoption of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) than Ghana's founding father Nkrumah's socialism.

He derides the naiveté of Nkrumah's supporters as follows

None of them seemed overly concerned by the increasing security presence, arrests (Ghana had some 1,200 political prisoners in 1965), or disingenuous propaganda issuing forth from the leader’s ubiquitous Convention People’s Party media. To the contrary, Nkrumah’s message sounded to them quite credible: if Ghana and its African neighbours were to be truly independent, they had to outwit the neo-colonialists, control the market, produce centralized five-year economic plans, and borrow however much it took to manufacture anything and everything then being imported from the former colonial powers. If this meant collectivized farming and tight bureaucratic control of prices, wages, imports, foreign travel, and currency — or a few years in James Fort Prison for members of the country’s traditional elite — so be it. The end, the Nkrumahists believed, really did justify the means.

On the other hand, according to Schram, Rawlings, his political abrasiveness notwithstanding, allowed himself to be guided by sound economic counsel of his finance minister, Kewsi Botchwey

...when the World Bank and the IMF arrived, preaching structural adjustment, Rawlings was ill disposed toward them. He saw them as an imposition from abroad — one that would weaken his control over patronage and make the economy the fiefdom of Western politicians and businessmen. Only when the economy continued to deteriorate toward complete collapse in 1983 was he persuaded to move, reluctantly, from his populist radicalism to something closer to liberal realism.

Politically, the most amazing piece for me is the democratic transition from Rawlings to his successors. Schram himself is highly impressed

After twelve years of rule, in 1992, Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress had submitted to national elections. These votes, and the ones held four years later, were judged by the donor community to represent the will of the Ghanaian people — a feat duplicated by few other African leaders. Each time, Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress party won, admittedly. But a larger victory was being won by my Legon mate Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and his electoral commission, which ran the votes with an impartiality, a transparency, and a professionalism unknown in much of the rest of Africa. The elections represented a victory for free speech and the media: the Rawlings era had spawned a flourishing opposition press and several private FM radio stations. These provided a constant flow of comment on popular call-in talk shows, ensuring that every step of the election process became instant public knowledge.

Afterwards of course, in 2000 and 2008, Ghana witnessed peaceful transfers of power; and in spite of all its weaknesses, remains an example worthy of emulation. 

Preparing for crises

Crises are likely to be new normal for developing and transition economies. In designing programs to protect the poor against crises, governments face two uncertainties — uncertainty of crisis type and uncertainty of crisis timing.

In the face of these uncertainties, I have proposed three lines of action for governments and for the international community: (i) Conduct a Social Protection Assessment Program which “stress tests” the collection of social protection interventions against a range of possible crises to reveal gaps and vulnerabilities, (ii) Over the medium term, finance improvements in design to addressing these gaps and vulnerabilities, and (iii) offer a pre-qualified line of assistance for social protection which goes into action automatically when crisis triggers are breached.

This is how Ravi Kanbur concludes his short paper on "Protecting the poor against the next crisis". 


Each of the highlighted points are illustrated and clearly add up to the point Kanbur is making here - crises are always going to be around the corner. Recent experiences have shown that crises (financial, climatic, pandemics etc) can wipe out livelihoods and set back development processes. Irrespective of what might ideally be required in such situations, developing countries will continue to grapple with weak social protection systems due to technical and political compulsions and this is a challenge for all actors in the development sector. 


Kanbur's 'stress test' or the Social Protection Assessment Program (SPAP) could be a great research topic

A wide variety of systemic crises threatens the short run and long run wellbeing of the poor in developing and transition economies. The SPAP, an effort led by the government and supported by the international community, aims to increase the effectiveness of social protection in the face of systemic crises. The work program seeks to identify gaps in coverage and in speed of response of social protection programs, and other relevant national and international programs, viewed as a system; to ascertain development and technical assistance needs; and to help prioritize policy responses.

 

Internal Affairs

h/t Facebook friends of  facebook.com/atewari

More on the myth of authoritarian growth

Following up on the China-induced myth of authoritarian growth...

Jason, at Congo Siasa points to Adam Przeworski' empirical research that dispels the notion that authoritarian regimes promote economic growth (h/t Chris Blattman)

Chris Blattman weighs in, supporting the idea that economic growth under authoritarian regimes is indeed a myth. He goes on to suggest a possible explanation for why China might have been bucking the trend for so long

If I had to speculate, I’d guess the stronger, more flexible authoritarian regimes are ones that are rooted in parties rather than personalities, and in places that start with a large professional class available to become technocrats–spreading power and decision-making among more bodies.

Jugaad - the good and the bad

Jugaad: "The slang Hindi verb “jugaad,” as translated for managers, means to make something much like a jugaad. It is to be innovative despite scarcity — a winning formula for hard economic times" - an Indian speciality 


The good 

the $800 elec­tro cardiogram, the $24 water filter, the $2,500 car, the $100 electricity inverter, the $12 solar lamp;

The taxis, Premier Padmini sedans built from a Fiat design in the middle of the last century, haven’t been upgraded in decades. Their maker has faded from the scene. But in jugaad’s India, this means that any one can be a Padmini mechanic, supplier or decorator; 

Unlike in the West, where you must contact Vodafone and only Vodafone for connection issues or Nokia and only Nokia for hand set woes, on India’s streets, as across the developing world, every third store is a one-stop cell-phone shop. They poke into your device with screw drivers and pens, recharging your credit, answering queries on behalf of a company they do not work for. 

and the bad

Fraudsters, who generally strike in pairs, enter ATM by swiping valid debit card at the gate, press down a key on keyboard and stick it with adhesive so that it does not return to its original position. This switches on the machine. They then walk out and wait for a victim to step into the trap. 

When a customer enters the ATM and swipes the card, he does not realize that the machine is already on. A message flashes for him to key his PIN, which he does. But since the machine has been switched on in an improper way, the screen goes blank automatically as a security feature to stop fraudulent withdrawals. 

The customer thinks it is a system fault and gives it a second try. He has no clue that the two 'customers' getting impatient outside are actually criminals waiting to steal his money. They start abusing him for taking too much time and force him to leave in a huff. Exit customer, enter fraudster. They simply use a screwdriver to 'release' the key. The ATM restarts automatically. What it has in store is PIN of the last customer who swiped his card. The gang enters the amount and walks out with cash.

Foreign Policy

via Forbes India

Another China myth?

This one is more dangerous...and one which is obviously seductive to an increasing number of countries across the world. The Myth of Authoritarian Growth, is by Dani Rodrik, who argues 

When we look at systematic historical evidence, instead of individual cases, we find that authoritarianism buys little in terms of economic growth. For every authoritarian country that has managed to grow rapidly, there are several that have floundered. For every Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo.

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, ultimately produce economies that are as fragile as their political systems. Their economic potency, when it exists, rests on the strength of individual leaders, or on favorable but temporary circumstances. They cannot aspire to continued economic innovation or to global economic leadership

Here is another Rodrik paper where he argues that democracy works better in the long-run - in particular, yielding predictable long-run growth rates; stable economic performance; resilience to shocks and better labour market conditions - all of which contributes to possibly a less-exciting life, but one with greater likelihood for a gradual increase in prosperity. 

But citizens in badly governed democracies must cry foul. It is difficult not to look at China, Rwanda or Singapore and believe that a better standard of living under an authoritarian regime is preferable to being poor in a democracy.  

So here's Rodrik on China - 

At first sight, China seems to be an exception. Since the late 1970’s, following the end of Mao’s disastrous experiments, China has done extremely well, experiencing unparalleled rates of economic growth. Even though it has democratized some of its local decision-making, the Chinese Communist Party maintains a tight grip on national politics and the human-rights picture is marred by frequent abuses.

But China also remains a comparatively poor country. Its future economic progress depends in no small part on whether it manages to open its political system to competition, in much the same way that it has opened up its economy. Without this transformation, the lack of institutionalized mechanisms for voicing and organizing dissent will eventually produce conflicts that will overwhelm the capacity of the regime to suppress. Political stability and economic growth will both suffer. 

In a previous article, Rodrik had discussed the potential hurdles in China's path towards global superpower-dom, focusing chiefly on what he thinks is the inherent fragility of the Chinese authoritarian system.  

China’s stability hinges critically on its government’s ability to deliver steady economic gains to the vast majority of the population. China is the only country in the world where anything less than 8% growth year after year is believed to be dangerous because it would unleash social unrest. Most of the rest of the world only dreams about growth at that rate, which speaks volumes about the underlying fragility of the Chinese system.

The authoritarian nature of the political regime is at the core of this fragility. It allows only repression when the government faces protests and opposition outside the established channels.

The trouble is that it will become increasingly difficult for China to maintain the kind of growth that it has experienced in recent years. China’s growth currently relies on an undervalued currency and a huge trade surplus. This is unsustainable, and sooner or later it will precipitate a major confrontation with the US (and Europe). There are no easy ways out of this dilemma. China will likely have to settle for lower growth.

Urban myths about China?

That China exports prisoners to its construction sites overseas to work as cheap labour is quite a popular notion. I have heard this many times and have also relayed it on to many others. Deborah Brautigam though, thinks it is just an urban myth.

My best guess is that stories like this are largely urban myths. People view the way that Chinese construction workers live, in extremely basic conditions like those on the left, in compounds on the construction site. These construction sites are usually surrounded by security fences, but this is to keep the construction site secure, and in particular, to prevent the stealing of construction materials, rather than to keep the workers locked inside.

She signs off with a challenge -

I encourage anyone with actual evidence on this issue to comment. But please provide specific evidence, rather than sightings of Chinese workers who looked like prisoners, or other unsubstantiated claims. 

Any evidence, anyone?

Is microfinance like alcohol?

Part of the comments by Nachiket Mor in response to a post rooting for social performance rating as a way to measure the social impact of the business of microfinance.

It is true that in the world of commerce there are often businesses (such as cigarettes and alcohol) that one may wonder if they are indeed adding value or destroying it even though they seem to pass my test of being viable businesses and are far from becoming non-performing assets.

The same question is being asked of microlenders who lend at very high interest rates. In my view that is where competition and activisim come in — they ensure that super-normal profits are competed away and that businesses (apparently social or not) are forced to stay within accepted norms. Thankfully the level of activism against smoking is growing by the day.

For alcohol the evidence seems to be that it is excessive drinking that is the problem and not small amounts so really the challenge is not at the production end but perhaps partly also at the consumer end. 

So microloans are like alcohol and are okay if taken in moderation; but can ruin if consumed in excess?

That aside, the implicit debate about focusing on the 'social' is a question of impact. This, below, is problematic as far as I am concerned -

For example, the most social value that microlenders can add, in my view, would be to grow as fast as they can to serve as many customers as possible and do so at the lowest possible interest rates and still remain profitable and viable

Surprisingly, the arguments suggest the usual practitioner defence: if it is popular/profitable, it must be good. Surprising, because these comments come from the group that funded one of the first RCTs on micro-credit and continues to fund studies till date...

Perhaps the frustration is about the clamour for 'social' ratings with apparently fuzzy methodologies. As Mor puts it

The worry that I have (and share with Bindu) with Social Reporting is that it at its best it can seriously distract the attention of the business from its core task of adding value by doing what it does best and at its worst it can be used to hide inefficiency and to even conceal direct violations of the law.

Agreed, we shouldn't be forced into social rating merely to satisfy donors. An MFI also doesn't need to be defensive about their core strengths, which might be in attaining the widest coverage in delivering credit at the lowest price. Every donor/financier has the right to choose what they want to focus on - outreach and profits, or social impact. But none of this implies that these businesses are inherently contributing to good change - and while social ratings may not answer all our questions just yet, it seems to be a step in the right direction.

If you can't pay, push

In India, waiting in line is not for the soft-elbowed

thus begins the NYT piece on the practice and meaning of queues, focusing on India, but applicable everywhere. Walking into a train station in Mumbai, I know I have to push my way in, whether I like it or not. Either I use my strength, or I get left out. Buying a movie ticket in a single screen cinema in India and getting into a tro-tro in Accra require the same skills.

The NYT piece is a story of how queues evolved, equating queuing with not just civility, but civilisation...

The story of the scrum, the queue and the market begins, in most versions, in a Hobbesian state of nature in which the scrum controlled all. People got what they got based on their ability to push and pull, maim and slaughter.

It required new ideas — of fairness, equality and the like — to replace scrums with lines

Thankfully, the author doesn't stop just yet. He goes on to discuss how the next step is to evolve out of queues using a different muscle this time - financial. An excellent conversational analysis in the lines -

But the market also changes a culture. A line conceives of people as citizens, presumed equal, each with an identical 24 hours a day to spread among the lines around them. A market conceives of people as consumers, presumed unequal, with those who can pay in front of the others. It allocates efficiently, but it eliminates a feature of line culture: the idea that, in line at least, we are no better than anybody else.

In a way, the market’s spread is a return to another kind of scrum, one in which financial, and not physical, might means right.

In many ways though, queues have not ended. The setting for the struggle has, along with the rules of the game...

Inception

Later than most, but I did end up watching it.

While the movie presents a real thought-provoking concept, raising serious doubts about what our minds can and cannot do, it seems far too logical, too convenient to be convincing at times. I agree with the NYT review that

Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

The ending was mysterious. Did Cobb really wake up? or not? He is not shown to have actually woken up in the van that drowns, yet he wakes up in the airplane. So was that a loop where Cobb kept going down levels in his dreams to eventually surface in the present along with the others?

Stalker captured

Devotees visiting the "rich and famous" Tirumala were being stalked by a panther for the last two weeks, which has now been captured by the forest officials in the region.

The big cat had created terror on the footpath during the past two weeks injuring two girls, besides giving sleepless nights to the authorities.

Guess divine intervention has its limits, after all...

Feel the pain...

The issue has again come to the limelight with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee expressing displeasure as he himself got one such call on Monday when he was at a meeting with Opposition leaders.

An absolute nuisance - unsolicited calls from telemarketing companies! Good that Pranab-babu felt it too. Wonder what the caller was trying to sell to him - credit cards?

I don't see myself ever responding to a random call asking me to sign up for something. I guess there is market research that a lot of others do... :(

Happy for Kenya

As presumptuous as this might sound, I am actually glad the referendum over Kenya's new constitution passed off without any drama. Having spent eight days in the country over the last two weeks, it was easy to sense a very real tension amongst people regarding the outcome of the vote. Add to that, hanging out with a good friend, who was quite heavily invested in the process and the politics in Kenya.

So its good news that the vote was peaceful. Its even better to to hear something like this -

"[The] majority had their way, we had our say," said Ruto (who had previously headed the NO campaign), admitting defeat. "Now that Kenyans have endorsed that we pass, we are now proposing immediate consultations. We want to be part of taking Kenya to the future."

While issues such as dubious land deals and religious sentiments have seen fierce public debates, one of the most exciting pieces for me is the demarcation of counties, with elected governments and assemblies, supported by a fiscal outlay of at least 15% of the national government revenue. Here is a full draft of the constitution.

There is also quite a comprehensive bill of rights for citizens; reservation of women in the Parliament; and a cap on the number size of the executive (drawn from outside the legislature, like in the US). Exciting times ahead for Kenya...

The origins of RCTs?

...a Scottish surgeon, James Lind, divided a dozen sailors into six groups, each given a different "cure" for his scurvy. After six days, the two sailors who had been given two oranges and a lemon had recovered, and the random clinical trial was born.

from a Washington Post article, via the IPA Blog.

On peace-keeping

"[I] don't think a peacekeeping force where there's no peace to keep is a good strategy,"

Nigeria gets it; they get that their men and women would be the ones to suffer if the world doesn't get this right.

 via FP Passport: Nigeria, on sending peace-keeping troops to Somalia

Poverty kills...

...this time in the form of asbestos

...an estimated 55,000 workers, unmindful of the lethal effects of asbestos-laden material in the ships...

...hundreds of workers at dusty factories producing asbestos sheets used in construction

India is now the world’s second largest asbestos market, behind only China, consuming nearly 3,50,000 tonnes in 2008. The industry generates more than $850 million a year in revenue, and directly employs 3,00,000 people. Indirectly, it supports as many as three million more

“Despite asbestos being a health hazard, its market has grown because it serves the poor,” says Gopal Krishna of the Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI). “And it is growing at a tremendous pace. So, nobody has the time for complaints.”

There is good research backing up the movement to regulate/ban the use of asbestos, but with little success against the powerful lobbies that have continued to rule the roost. See this for the full story.