Simon Maxwell on Robert Chambers

Simon Maxwell mulls on the future of 'development studies' here. This post is not on that subject. One of the links in the article is a tribute to Robert Chambers written in 1993, worth reading in full, many times over and from time to time. Some excerpts -

...Robert's vision of poverty is not the poverty of simple GDP figures or poverty lines.  He has focused always on the individuals who underly the statistics: on their isolation, their powerlessness, their vulnerability to shocks like illness, their coping strategies. He has emphasised that the poor are found mostly in environments which are complex, diverse and risk prone, the so called CDR environments.  He has reminded us that there is a pronounced seasonal pattern to poverty in the developing world. It follows that when Robert Chambers has sought solutions to poverty, he has focused not simply on increasing income, but rather on the empowerment of the poor, on a reduction in their vulnerability, on helping them to exploit the diversity of their environments.  In brief, Robert has sought, on behalf of the poor, secure and sustainable livelihoods...  

...The second theme in Robert's work that I wish to stress follows from the first.  It is about "listening" and the importance of empowering poor people themselves in seeking solutions to their poverty.  This theme emerged early in Robert's work, in his research on indigenous technical knowledge, and in the question "whose knowledge counts?". It was developed in his work on rapid rural appraisal and is now the dominant theme of his work on participatory rural appraisal.  This represents an astonishing contribution to development studies, which is beginning to revolutionise the way that research is carried out...

...Robert has argued that the role of the state is not to provide simple, technical solutions to poor people, but rather to provide opportunities and offer choices.  This is exemplified in his work on agricultural research, where he argues that what farmers need are not "packages of practices" prescribed by agronomists, but rather "baskets of choices" from which they can choose...

Robert continues to inspire generations of development students and professionals. Here is Ravi Kanbur on Robert

Kristof, grow up!

In a recent article, Kristof starts with 

I first visited Kolkata, better known as Calcutta, in 1982 as a backpacking law student. I stayed at a hostel in the Howrah slums and regretted that my camera could record only images, not the equally memorable stench.

Dear Kristof, 'backpacking student' times can be such a life-changing experience - its obvious you never got over yours. But this was thirty years back - when will you grow up?


I don't think it matters what the rest of the article actually says - even in its annoyingly patronising tone - as long as the opening gambit is such. Forget adding nuance to any of his thoughts - its much easier to breeze through IT, the malls, slums, corruption and communalism. And its not surprising either, continuing in the same vein as the undying memory of the 'memorable stench' and the images of misery. 

I grew up in India, so one could probably argue that my senses are dead to smells and sights - but even so, its hardly what I would commit to memory about any new place I visit. Yes - it could be my first impression, but I seriously hope, its not what I notice or remember even on day two. And yes, it doesn't matter what you remember if you are just a tourist, but its not quite the same otherwise... 

IRBs for development projects?

For a survey conducted as part of an aid-program evaluation, the IRB process will ask a researcher if any survey questions might cause discomfort or recollection of highly unpleasant events for the respondent, and if so what are the procedures for preventing this and whether the potential benefits outweight the potential risks. By contrast, a specific aid project could, by introducing a pile of valuable resources, lead to intra- or inter-village competition that might, for all we know, contribute to people getting killed. Those risks might be outweighed by the potential benefits for most projects, but are there any institutionalized procedures for asking the question in the development sector? Should there be?

asks James Fearon

Its a relevant question - the parallels are quite clear, especially with experimental research, where researchers interact with human subjects just as much as any development project implementer would. That's the reason, we often talk about our jobs as 'implementing research'. If IRBs are required for these studies, then why would actual implementation be any different?

But any honest field researcher would also acknowledge the challenges in ensuring all IRB rules are followed to the letter. And if that's the case, the challenges for programme implementation are bound to be even greater - just think 'informed consent'...

Wear a helmet...ALWAYS!

Road safety is serious business here in Ghana. But just like back home, nobody really cares about wearing a helmet - ever. Me myself - I didn't wear a bike helmet in Accra. But I have decided to change...and while at it, start a Helmet campaign. Ideas welcome!

Moving on from Ghana...

I wrote this post just after I got here

***

Today, I complete three weeks in Ghana - everything has been smooth and pleasant so far. In many ways, settling in has been easy and I am starting to believe that approaching a change of location as emotionless-ly as possible works! Neutralise expectations from people you are likely to meet, temper the doubts in your mind about food, weather, transport...everything. (admittedly though, what I am really paranoid about are snakes - and no, in my mind, it is not stupid at all that I try to keep my feet off the floor as much as possible!).

Kind partner institute, ISSER sorted out housing for me even before I got here - a major portion of settling down. Transport - I bought a bike (bicycle) - after two weeks of careful consideration of the distance I need to commute to work, the deep open gutters all along the road and getting used to the traffic driving on the right - its great fun and I would strongly advise it to everyone. As I told a friend here last week, I am confident I am not going to die young...So thats essential transport to work taken care of. The lifeline of public transport in Accra is the tro-tro (mini-van) and I was completely intimidated by them for a few days to begin with. I havent mastered it yet, but have sampled them enough, started recognising the hand signals that refer to specific stations and can count on them as an option when I travel.

What I have little hope with are the local languages. It pricks my ego that I cant seem to pick even a single word (I had learnt the word for 'Thank You' and then promptly forgotten). It amuses me (reminding me of India) when people from different parts of Ghana themselves do not understand each other's languages and have to resort of English to communicate. If I were able to even partially crack even one of the local languages, I would consider that a great personal achievement.

And work...has been fine. I enjoy the sense of camaraderie that exists here across hierarchies and I know I am working with a group that is serious, committed and competent.

***

About 21 months later, happy to report that I had a great time here. Public transport is fine; the language still a mystery. Both ISSER and IPA were great to be around and I leave hoping I will come back - adding to the list of places I feel familiar with and that I know I could live in. Work has seen ups and downs, as one might expect and there have been moments that were hugely satisfying professionally and some others, that were pretty frustrating. I will write more about it after I leave here, I think - there are lots of little things that made a difference; and none so much as to make these two years any different on average from any previous year - and that's mostly the way I wanted it to be.

Now with three weeks to go and at the verge of taking major leaps in both my personal and professional life, I am trying, as usual, to be calm and non-curious. Its a bit harder this time though.

Delhi, I know; a job with KPMG - not really. Sanjana, I know; marriage - ??  

I am not a MFI, just a moneylender

Both my savings and loan repayment schemes with my neighbourhood fruit-seller hit a snag after two rounds of repayment, a few months back. She had repaid 20 out of my 50 cedis over a couple of months. Then one day, she offered to give me mangoes for free, saying that she would never be able to repay the entire loan in cash. There had been a couple of unexpected deaths in the family and with funeral expenses etc, she was in a tight spot. 


Instinctively, I denied, thinking it might be exploitative of me to be doing so. Perhaps I was wrong - it could have been a painless way for her to pay off her debt - a mango a day. But I rationalised with myself that if I took up her offer, I was forcing her into a daily transaction which she may start grudging soon after. That in turn could affect my personal relationship with her. What if I was her only customer on a given day (not entirely implausible)? Moreover, I really wanted to give her the choice of saving up again and deciding how she would pay me back. Not to mention that in such an arrangement, the burden of keeping records would be on me and that was a cost I was not prepared to take on. I also did not want to be locked into a system where I would feel obliged to pick something from her shop even if I didn't want to. I of course wanted her to pay me back, but was comfortable allowing her a reasonable time period to do so - and of course, I was aware that by doing this, I was running the risk of never being fully repaid.


At that point, I could be either a MFI or a moneylender. If I chose to be a MFI, I probably would not have the flexibility of offering her a moratorium on her loan to help her tide over. I probably would also not have the luxury of placing my personal relationship with her on par with my stake in getting my money back - what with equity investors and term loans on my back! As a money lender instead, I could do as I wished - it was my capital. I could give her a moratorium on her loan - and that is exactly what I did. I told her that it was okay for her to resume paying me back later, when things were better - effectively, I gave her a grace period of no repayment until her cash flows stabilised. My reward then was the look on her face and her smile when she realised I was not going to come claiming my free mango every evening. 


Today - a few months hence - I raised the matter of the remaining 30 cedis. She has been doing good business over the last few weeks and I thought it was an appropriate time to remind her. And she promised she would try to return at least 20 cedis. I leave Ghana in about three weeks - in the end, it may not be enough time for me to collect all my money back. Whatever...


***


Writing this down makes me wonder - how would she have narrated this? I don't want to guess. The story could sound entirely different...or not!

Images: India - Africa collaboration

via The Hindu - a logo I liked

No doubt, this is good business, but the politics will continue to be tricky. From the article - 

...While Africa's rise is no longer in doubt now, its nature and pace are being hotly debated among experts. Recent developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, the Ivory Coast and the Horn of Africa have sent out mixed signals at best. India follows an apolitical approach focused on building cooperation at bilateral, regional and continental levels. But, the political context can hardly be ignored. We should, of course, continue maintaining a low profile on internal developments in Africa and on intra-African conflicts, but we should not shy away from monitoring and appraising them on a sustained basis...

The author cannot help but mention China in this context - and this is one comparison we need to shrug off. The more India tries to prove it is different from China, the lesser room it will have to chart its own course. Ironically, our manpower seems to be a prominent constraint. For more, read this Tharoor interview 

In 2008 or why, even in 2010...

...this would have sounded absolutely crazy. Forget the gluten, it now doesn't matter what else Djokovic wins next month or for the rest of this year! 37-0!

Of Djokovic's 37 wins, 13 are against Top 10 players, including four against Nadal and three against Federer, who in all his years of dominance never started a season in so grand a fashion. If Djokovic reaches the French Open final, he could have 43 consecutive victories—one more than John McEnroe's record 42 to start 1984 (that streak ended in the French Open final, after McEnroe won the first two sets against Ivan Lendl).

Djokovic's 2011 on-court stats border on the absurd: He has won 89% of his service games, 43% of his return games and half of his break points.

via WSJ 

Data. Data. Data.

via EWB Canada

Thoughts on (and from) yet-unread randomistas' books

Why I am looking forward to reading these books:
More Than Good Intentions and Poor Economics were published last month. By a happy coincidence, I have worked in Ghana and India - two countries that feature prominently in many of the accounts in both the books. Also, these books have stories from field experiments conducted by IPA and CMF (an org I have worked with).

On RCTs, 'big ideas' and potential alliances:

From the book websites and the numerous (mostly positive) reviews, the books seem to contain many examples of interventions that have worked and of those that haven't. Put together, they seem to debunk the notion of 'big ideas' that can wipe off poverty and deprivation. Serious implementers know this - when partnering with researchers, they were not always looking to build 'big ideas' about what worked in development.

RCTs can identify interventions that work and those that don't and serve as a starting point to develop theories about the real world development problems that are broader than the findings from separate studies. The natural follow-up would be to combine RCTs and rigorous qualitative work to delve into the processes through which the identified impact was achieved - thereby posing the two realms of research not as competitors, but as fruitful collaborators. And no, I am not just being idealistic - such collaborations are beginning to happen - see the 'graduation pilot' evaluations, for instance.

A tribute to implementers, those that are willing to learn:

Like any publication of RCT results, these books are in part, a tribute to partner organisations that signed up to implement these studies as part of their operations, which I know from experience to be a costly and (often) tedious undertaking. As much as RCTs mean researchers spending time on the ground engaging with real-world programme implementation from the very start, they also usually involve partner organisations that are brave and willing to experiment with their implementation models, while subjecting themselves to an external evaluation.

For some of these implementing partners (that I have worked closely with), I know that they were mostly looking for solutions that could work for them. Sure, everyone benefits from what they learn from other experiments that work, but serious implementers are also aware that there are no blue-prints - that to make it work, they have to take a good idea and tweak it to suit their context and capacities. Its only natural therefore that process evaluations and qualitative studies that accompany RCTs would help implementers learn more about the pathways to the kind of impact their interventions achieve.

'Spill-overs' from long-term studies

Over at the Development Impact blog, Markus writes about the importance of studies that take a long-term view

Some of the more impressive results I have seen have come out of papers which take a long term view. Three examples of this are Esther Duflo’s work on school construction in Indonesia (ungated version here), Hoddinott, et. al’s paper on an early childhood nutrition intervention in Guatemala, and Baird, et. al’s paper on the long term effects of deworming in Kenya. 

Later in the post, he also lays out the obstacles to putting together and funding such studies, especially the challenge of tracking respondents over the life of such a project. Here at IPA Ghana, one of our studies is looking to evaluate the returns to secondary schooling in Ghana.

...2,068 students, 682 have been selected through random assignment to each receive a 4-year scholarship to attend the senior secondary school they were admitted to. Between 2009 and 2018, we will keep track of all 2,068 students and conduct follow-up surveys with them, and the households that they reside in, every three years. The follow-up surveys will include questions on health, labor market outcomes, and fertility and marriage. This will enable us to measure the medium and long-term effects of acquiring secondary education on multiple aspects of life and well-being.

Currently in the midst of this project, its really interesting for us to plan different strategies to keep in touch with respondents in this study. Tracking youth is particularly tricky - especially those respondents in the sample who are out of school - since they often migrate far out in search of work. So far, the team has managed to keep in touch with most of these students - however, not without any challenges. Our project team has shared with us that some of these respondents might have even migrated outside the country looking for work. It appears that the recent disturbances in neighbouring Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Libya might have brought some of our respondents back to Ghana. I feel bad for those who might have lost their livelihoods in the process and wish them the best back home in Ghana - but the point is about the unpredictable nature of  tracking respondents in the long-term.

Another effort at long-term data collection I am familiar with in Ghana is the Ghana Socio-economic Panel Survey. The first wave of this survey was completed last year and there is some really interesting data being put together that we should all be watching out for. This 15-year survey covering households spread all over the country will surely see huge tracking challenges as we go along. In this survey, we put in place many of the possible long-term tracking measures - GPS readings, phone numbers of two non-family contacts etc. Tracking households is supposed to be easier than tracking individuals since they are likely to be less mobile than individuals.

Also, this survey is a collaboration between Yale and ISSER, a research institute in University of Ghana -  a great way to invest in building local research capacities in the long-term. Not only the ISSER research fellows, but a whole generation of present and upcoming grad students will have the opportunity to work on this survey and on analysing the data it will generate. This also highlights the importance of having a strong field team and transferring knowledge over the years within the survey teams in long-term tracking studies.

Another question these long-term tracking studies bring up is that of the relationship between researchers and respondents. There are usually boundaries to how much information researchers want/ought to reveal to their study respondents regarding the objectives of their study. But in long-term studies with repeated interactions, the nature of engagement between the researchers and their study respondents probably need to be different from the usual - an important issue to keep an eye on. Do respondent incentives become more important? Would sharing results periodically help? I would be interested in learning of any experiences on this subject.

Don't forget to keep track of the respective study links for updates in the coming years. 

Microfinance in India: Priority Sector no more?

After soliciting feedback from various stakeholders on the Malegam report recommendations, the RBI has released a policy statement that says -

that bank loans to all MFIs, including NBFCs working as MFIs on or after April 1, 2011, will be eligible for classification as priority sector loans under respective category of indirect finance only if the prescribed percentage of their total assets are in the nature of "qualifying assets" and they adhere to the "pricing of interest" guidelines to be issued in this regard;

• that a “qualifying asset’’ is required to satisfy the criteria of

(i) loan disbursed by an MFI to a borrower with a rural household annual income not exceeding ` 60,000 or urban and semi-urban household income not exceeding ` 1,20,000;
(ii) loan amount not to exceed ` 35,000 in the first cycle and ` 50,000 in subsequent cycles;
(iii) total indebtedness of the borrower not to exceed ` 50,000;
(iv) tenure of loan not to be less than 24 months for loan amount in excess of ` 15,000 without prepayment penalty;
(iv) loan to be extended without collateral;
(v) aggregate amount of loan, given for income generation, not to be less than 75 per cent of the total loans given by the MFIs; and
(vi) loan to be repayable by weekly, fortnightly or monthly instalments at the choice of the borrower;

Some of the above proposals are way off from what the commercial for-profit microfinance industry in India is used to. Choice of repayments with the borrower (that will kill the plain vanilla offerings and increase operating costs)? Total indebtedness of about $1200 (by many accounts, its already way above these limits for many clients)? 75% of the portfolio be income generating loans (that should be fine - some smart labeling is all it takes)? $1200 as a cap on a single loan size (will destroy the upcoming individual loans market)? The NBFC-MFI industry in India is not going to be happy about this.

This though is an interesting move by the RBI. I may be reading this wrong - but the report suggests that only loan portfolios that meet the above requirements can be classified as Priority Sector Loans. Which means that financial institutions can continue lending as they do at present - just that for the banks, those loans won't count as priority sector loans anymore. Will the financial institutions decide that there is enough profits in microfinance even if their loans cannot be designated as priority sector loans?