My Beauty Best Teacher

Francisco Noguera at Next Billion writes:

Collier and Ghani/Lockhart emphasize the importance of engaging citizens in tackling the issue of governance in the developing world. Collier calls it "building a mass of informed citizens" without which "politicians will continue to get away with gestures," calling for the help of his techie TED audience to build ways for that to occur.
Ghani and Lockhart, on the other hand, go deep into describing what, in their opinion, should be the key functions developed by the state and a framework to spread this model across the world, acknowledging from the very beginning that "... the common people of failing states have no real stake in the success or failure of their countries" although, thanks to technological advance, "they can now truly become principals in state-building by making an agenda for accountability and transparency concrete".

At TED "...Paul Collier (author of the Bottom Billion) lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor..."

Paul Collier writes:

...many African leaders must have been hoping for more of the absolving balm of western guilt. They did not get it. Instead, Obama delivered three unwelcome messages.The most explosive was that Africa's core problem is its own misgovernance: Africa's persistent poverty has been largely self-inflicted. Obama is the first western leader to have the political space to deliver this tough but necessary message. He does not need a photo-op with smiling Africans to signal to voters back home that he is a compassionate sort of guy. Nor does he risk being denounced. His protection is in part that it is not possible to imagine Obama in a pith helmet; but beyond that, nobody can seriously question Obama's sincere concern to help his father's continent...[continue reading]

Chris Blattman writes and asks for suggestions:

That's the (informal) course title for my spring undergraduate lecture. Turns out that's too long and rambling a name for a transcript, and so the Yale powers that be had me shorten it to the duller, "African Poverty and Western Aid"...What can the West do? The course has students read the new canon of development: Sachs, Collier, Easterly, Rodrik, etc. Putting it together, I was struck with the preponderance of rich white male academics. Don't get me wrong. I aspire to be a rich white male academic myself (I am 3 for 4--and only held back from that goal by the preponderance of student debt). But it would be nice to have other perspectives.

So the course is now set up to read other points of view--mostly, admittedly, rich black male perspectives--and think critically about the new canon. Ayittey, Ake, Ekeh, Sawyer. Mamdani, Ndulu, Wainaina. Mwenda, Mkandawire and Soludo. And some optional Franz Fanon, just to appease Chris Udry...[continue reading]

Paul Collier writes:

The loot-seeking elites that control parts of Africa illicitly send capital out of the region to the tune of $20 to $28bn per year. Illicit money flows are hard to quantify, but this is the new estimate by Raymond Baker of the NGO Global Financial Integrity, the most careful and ingenious study to date. Capital flight of this magnitude is roughly equivalent to the entire aid inflow to the region, so closing it would generate a similar resource transfer to doubling aid. One side-effect of the financial crisis is that aid commitments will be at the front of the queue for spending cuts. For example, in the vice-presidential debate it was the only Democratic spending pledge that Joe Biden suggested might be rethought...[continue reading]

Sierra Leone's tourism promise and more-Tony Blair
Barclays Bank up to more fishy stuff?
A bid to strengthen Think Tanks.
Is corruption in Nigeria's DNA?
A tour of Nairobi.
Writing off sovereign debt and hampering growth-Thompson Ayodele in the Telegraph
Can we rein in the destabilizing effects of Natural Resources? Perhaps with the Natural Resource Charter contends Paul Collier.
Taju Tijani asks, where are the Black British Millonaires?
How Corporate America Really Views Africa.
The Guardian compares their Katine village project with MVP's. They should take a look at the Working Villages and learn from the successes of Songhai Centre.

Whoever says cheerleading isn't a sport needs to see how much icy hot, how many bruises, and how much sacrifice it is to do this sport.

Last night I printed my boarding pass and zipped up my suitcase and then ran over to the school to get my daughter at 8:30 pm. I picked her up and she fell apart. She's been nursing a back injury for several weeks without telling anyone and tonight the stunt fell on her. With her cheerleading camp supposed to be next week, I have to be the one to take her to the doctor and make the call about whether she can attend as it may mean that she's off the squad (something that would kill her.)


I don't have the answer but I do know who has to be the one to get the answer: me. This is one of the most important things in my daughter's life and she has a spine that she will have with her for the rest of her life.

My Sessions will Go on!
Julie Lindsay is running DigiTeacher along with some help from Barbara Barreda and a visit from Anne Collier. Adam Frey is running the wiki session. I am working on some Diigo experts to present the diigo session.

(If you're going to ISTE and are using Diigo to post to your blog, make lists, do bookmarking groups with your students and possibly save tweets, please let me know by responding to this message in the comments.)

Not Cancelled: Just Modified
So, my sessions will go on without me. It just doesn't look good to write 'cancelled' when you've made a commitment and fortunately, I've got some great friends who will do a jam-up job for these sessions. (Ten years a go, a cancel would have meant a real cancel - we all just have more "friends" now, don't we?)

I'm heartbroken but this isn't about me. I could pretend to be the martyr but I'm not - I quit a great job to be a stay at home mom for these precious babies and didn't regret it a moment. I want them to know that they are more important than any blog, book, or anything.

Fear
I guess as with this sort of thing and being a blogger, the biggest sacrifice is my own fear. Will I become irrelevant? Will people still want me to speak at their conferences this next year? (most of my bookings come from ISTE.) Will? Will? Will?

The fact is we WILL have a Flat Classroom book (www.flatclassroombook.com) coming out in January 2012 from Pearson Publishing and I WILL be back at ISTE 2012 signing books and doing sessions about global collaboration. As for the other things, I think the good Lord will just have to handle that for me. If he wants me to speak, He'll put it in the minds of those who've seen me speak before.

I'm not fading out or signing off or checking out on anyone. My commitments for ISTE11 are fulfilled and I didn't renig- so hopefully those who know me know that I keep my word to the best of my ability.

Gotta Do Right
But this is one of those things in life that just happens. You know I can talk to you all the time about having your priorities straight, but if I don't have mine straight then, I'm a hypocrite. I might as well stop talking.

I'm not perfect by any means, but this is my chance to live my priorities to you, my friends.

It is costing me, big time - at least I feel it is. This is MY Pd. I'm going to have to read a lot next week to learn from all of you who are there.

I have a sign by my bed quoting proverbs

"A good name is to be had above great riches." 

The worst feeling is that somehow someone will think less of me as a person for not going. The fact is that if you spend your life trying to please everyone you are living a life on quicksand.

For me, I choose to live a life firmly grounded on a foundation of God and family first. Again, I'm not perfect, but it does give peace when such winds blow.

Life is short. We don't get do-overs. Yes, there are tears on my pillow, the collar of my robe, and this piece of paper with the confirmation number for cancelling this flight with Expedia. The ink is all smeared and I even have the first few characters of my cancellation "S-24" tattooed on my left cheek where I laid down my head and yet, right now, my relationship with my daughter isn't.

It is funny, my daughter's name begins with an S and these first three letters remind me that I'm her mom 24 hours a day - ISTE lasts for but 72 or so. I doubt in five years anyone will remember if I was there or not -- except her.

She knows that she is more important to me than anything else. That, my friends, is priceless.

Carry on, learn a lot, laugh a lot. Have a great time! Meanwhile, I'm begging ISTE to let my conference ticket convert over to some sort of virtual attendance! I want to at least see Stephen Covey on Tuesday. I'll get to see John Medina of Brain Rules fame at the Microsoft Innovative Educators Forum in Seattle at the end of July.

I also look forward to a killer keynote I'm delivering in Evansville, Indiana in two weeks. Oh, and I'll actually get to see Chris Lehmann's closing keynote because my flight was leaving during his keynote on Wednesday. (IF ISTE let's me attend virtually.)

But I sure do hope someone will live stream me to watch the Family Feud on Monday - I was really looking forward to that!

Paul Collier writes:

The debate on what the G8 should do has been entirely dominated by aid. More aid for parts of Africa would probably be helpful, but it would not be decisive in reversing divergence. It is, in fact, a sideshow relative to the other policy instruments that G8 governments control. It is the failure to use these instruments that is the tragic missed opportunity. Because aid has dominated the airwaves people are simply unaware of our true potential for action. Africa faces three distinctive economic problems, each amenable to a distinct policy.

They are:
-The trade hurdle
-The growth obstacle
-The insecurity wall

From the assassination of Guinea-Bissau's president:

Guinea-Bissau President Joao Bernardo Vieira was assassinated in the first hours of this morning, allegedly in an attack by renegade soldiers as he fled his home. The crime happened a few hours after his long term rival, the country's army chief General Batista Tagme, was killed by a bomb blast, late on Sunday. Although the reasons are still unknnon, the crimes have sparked alarm at instability in the young West African republic...Global Voices

To this past December's coup d etat in Guinea-Conakry:

Guinea's prime minister and some 30 other ministers have submitted to the leaders of a military coup.The government officials met Capt Moussa Dadis Camara, who has declared himself Guinea's new president, at a military base in the capital, Conakry.
The rebels staged the coup on Tuesday, just hours after the death of veteran strongman President Lansana Conte...BBC

...plus in February when MEND guerrillas attacked Equatorial Guinea adding a new twist to African based non-state actors:

Men in speedboats attacked the capital, Malabo, which sits on an island off the West African coastline in the Gulf of Guinea. They struck before dawn on Tuesday and were heavily armed, the government said in a statement, but the army, using boats and a helicopter, quickly repelled the attack.-NYTimes

The common thread is that these actions all occurred in countries on the verge of becoming failing and or failed states. With largely non-existent institutions and an attendant parasitic ruling class.What are the options? Don't expect much from the largely ineffectual African Union. Should we look to a Paul Collier inspired solution of more unilateral military intervention by neighbors or something else?

Paul Collier in Foreign Policy writes:

Sure, some of Asia's "benign" autocrats have turned their ambitions to building strong national economies. But not in Africa and many of the other countries that I call the bottom billion -- quite a number of which crowd the upper reaches of the Failed States Index. There, the most common form of autocracy is anything but benign. These leaders not only neglect to build the economy, they actively avoid doing so.

He contends that:

Bad guys matter, and when they rule, they make weak states weaker. And the countless anecdotes are backed up by numbers: In a celebrated study, economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken looked at whether the death of a country's leader altered economic growth. It did, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Recently, an Oxford colleague, Anke Hoeffler, and I sifted through their results again, distinguishing this time between democrats and autocrats. We found that in democracies, changing the leader does not change growth -- all leaders are disciplined to perform tolerably. But in autocracies, the growth rates are as unpredictably varied as the leaders' personalities. Here lies the difference between good leaders and great ones: Good leaders put right the policy catastrophes of bad leaders; great leaders, like the men who shaped the U.S. Constitution, build the democratic checks and balances that make good leaders redundant.

More here

Paul Collier at TED@State:

Paul Collier in FP asks?:

Those of us who studied political systems presumed they must be right: Elections would empower citizens against the arrogance of government. And with the fall of the Iron Curtain, elections indeed swept the world. Yet democracy doesn’t seem to have delivered on its promise. Surprisingly often, the same old rulers are still there, ruling in much the same old way. Something has gone wrong, but what?...[continue reading]

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• Wars, Guns, and Votes (marginalrevolution.com)

Paul Collier author of 'The Bottom Billion'writes in OpenDemocracy:

Since the 1960s countries with around a billion people have been diverging from the rest of the world at an accelerating rate, a trend which will generate unmanageable social pressures. Most of these countries are in Africa, and so it is appropriate that the region should again have been on the Group of Eight (G8) agenda at the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany on 6-8 June 2007. Unfortunately, the debate on what the G8 should do has been entirely dominated by aid. More aid for parts of Africa would probably be helpful, but it would not be decisive in reversing divergence. It is, in fact, a sideshow relative to the other policy instruments that G8 governments control. It is the failure to use these instruments that is the tragic missed opportunity. Because aid has dominated the airwaves people are simply unaware of our true potential for action. Africa faces three distinctive economic problems, each amenable to a distinct policy.

Paul Collier writes in ANSA:

...as the radically different trajectories of Botswana and Sierra Leone illustrate, growth based on resource exports is critically dependent upon the quality of public choices. A long chain of decisions has to be got right, not just once but repeatedly for a generation. The upstream part of the decision chain involves reconciling strong incentives for prospecting with capturing as much as possible of the resource rents for society. This requires overcoming acute problems of agency, of time-inconsistency, and of asymmetric information. As the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate, it also requires the effective restraint of environmental damage.
The downstream part of the decision chain is about harnessing revenues for sustainable growth. Resource revenues need to be treated distinctively: they come from the depletion of a natural asset and should be substantially offset by the accumulation of other assets. The only European model of prudent use of resource revenues is Norway, but the Norwegian model is inapplicable for Africa. Norway has more invested capital per member of the labour force than anywhere else on earth, whereas Africa has less. Hence, whereas it is appropriate for Norway to accumulate foreign financial assets, Africa needs to invest domestically

More here

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution discusses Paul Collier's book,Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places:

The key point of the book is how and why democracy doesn't work so well for the bottom billion. The early discussion of the incentives facing quasi-democratic governments is dysfunctional societies is brilliant. It's the best discussion I've seen of why "produce better government" is not the prevailing incentive in such societies. You can learn why ethnic diversity lowers the value of public sector activity but raises private sector productivity, why skills for construction are often a binding constraint in very poor societies, why the social returns to peacekeeping are so high, why Kalashnikovs are cheaper in Africa, why there are fewer civil wars in larger countries, and how the Ivory Coast went from development model to disaster...[continue reading]

Africaworks reviews When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa by Robert H. Bates :

His new book aims to describe why African societies — and the governments that serve them — did so poorly even after recognizing the importance of markets. His book, while brief, is studded with great insights and, to my eyes, intended as a counterweight to reductionist arguments by others,notably the Oxford professor Paul Collier and Columbia’s Jeff Sachs, that the African state is essentially powerless in the face of wars over “greed and grievance” or geographic forces that isolate and undermine political actors. In a bid to undercut the ciricularity of these arguments, Bates tries to put politics — as a human activity — back in the center of the African condition.