My Beauty Best Teacher

AltNigeria compiles a few lessons from India and China.Prefacing,"...We ought to learn that progress does not take a millennium to accomplish. Economic independence has to be wrestled from the powers that presently be, nothing will be handed to us on a platter..."

From a recent Lancet–LIDC Commission report on the MDGs:

The MDGs are fragmented not only in their implementation but also in their underlying conceptualisations of development and overlapping of means and ends...While this approach captures a range of development perspectives, it generates a poorly aligned mixture of means, ends, and sometimes competing ideas about normative aspiration (eg, economic growth vs sustainability), which has made the MDG project less useful than it could have been, since opportunities to link the goals together coherently have been missed and a rigorous approach to assessment has been overlooked.
The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

The Economic Commission for Africa reports "...The private sector only gets a brief mention in the Millennium Development Goals. Yet it is business – entrepreneurs, employers, investors and workers – who are best positioned to help Africa achieve the Goals...One area where private sector intervention could really make a difference is boosting the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as proposed in Goal 8...ICTs are crucial for developing countries. They help reduce costs, improve productivity and increase access to domestic and international markets, thus contributing to economic growth and competition in the global economy...It’s indisputable that the private sector has played a major role in the evolution of ICTs, particularly in the mushrooming mobile phone networks. Nigeria has the world’s fastest growing mobile market, increasing by about 143 percent in 2003. That’s the kind of growth that will bring the MDGs within reach...So why is Africa finding it hard to achieve the necessary growth rates? Tariff barriers and border restrictions, heavy and indiscriminate taxation, complex, time-consuming regulations and bureaucracy have all played a part.Vigorous entrepreneurship can be seen in the informal sector all over the continent but these constraints, as well as disincentives discouraging investors, prevent small operators from thriving and expanding their businesses to become energetic - small and medium-sized enterprises and the engine of African growth.Africa does not just need growth per-se, but specifically growth in labour-intensive sectors that leads to job creation and wage improvement. This link is vital because the fastest exit from poverty is through employment and higher salaries..."

In Ngex,Wole Soyinka stated:

“Part of the Obama lesson for this continent is that those who believe that leadership depends on religion, race, ethnic and other related issues are obviously living in the past. They are completely antiquated and are not to be counted upon as civilized people.
“What America has done is to gate-crash so many of us into the third millennium. Nigeria had an opportunity to show the way. Zimbabwe had an opportunity too. But we lost it because a few antiquated people never accepted the fact that all men are created equal, and that it is actually possible for a virtual outsider, but who is qualified to be a citizen of a nation, to rise to the top position of the country.”...[continue reading]

From the Africa Report:

Even without much-needed infrastructure developments, Nigeria is on course to become Africa’s largest economy. However, much remains to be done for the country to reach its full potential.  

The road suddenly peters out. The few bin bags littering the end of the worksite suggest that the funds have run out, too. On either side of the road, however, new farms and buildings have sprung up, growing thicker as you cross the new Makarfi bridge into Kaduna. They will, ultimately, make up Millennium City, a decongestion suburb for Kaduna, with planned lots linked to the national grid and water mains. Had former Governor Ahmed Makarfi managed to connect the road to the Abuja road, who knows what other entrepreneurial forces would have been unleashed.
..[continue reading]

Are the UN Millenium crew coming to their senses? The Guardian reports on comments made by Sylvia Mwichuli:

African countries need to find alternative sources to money to finance their national budgets, rather than rely on overseas aid, according to an official from the UN millennium campaign..."African governments must find ways of financing development; we are calling for a paradigm shift in financing of development, not depending on donors,"

The FT reports on the work of Dora Akunyili,Nigeria's Drug Czar:

By the turn of the millennium, Nigerians had become among the world’s most frequent victims of fake drugs. The country’s reputation was so bad that its west African neighbors were refusing to import the medicines that came across its borders. An analysis in 2001 of 2,060 drug samples taken from the large wholesale markets where most medicines are easily bought showed that 62 per cent were not registered with the country’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (Nafdac).

clamping down on hawkers and wholesale drug markets, and pursuing dodgy manufacturers and importers alike. Nor did she flinch from angering powerful people, reprimanding Nestle for importing out-of-date baby milk, closing the bakery of the wife of the former president Ibrahim Babangida for using a carcinogenic bread-enhancing chemical, and even fining one of the current president’s farms for importing chemicals without a permit. But the worst abusers were far more difficult to target. ”The drug people were like gods here,” she says. ”Since 1960, with independence, they became progressively entrenched and terrorised everyone unchallenged. Outside oil, there’s no business as lucrative as drugs.”

Sam Rich critiques Jeffery Sachs millennium villages:

If Sauri(A millenium village) is to become a useful model for development on a bigger scale, and not just another development expert’s white elephant, Sachs and others working on the project must acknowledge that they are still learning about Africa. Sauri is not yet a ­success.
Lasting changes in Sauri will come about not through distribution of commodities, but through education for children and training for adults. To put it another way, give a man a mosquito net, and when it rips, he’ll come and ask for another one. But show him how using a mosquito net benefits his health and how it will save him money on medication in the long run, and he might just go out and buy one for himself.

William Easterly writes on the rebirth of utopianism"...it is in 2005 that utopia seems to have made its big breakthrough into mainstream discourse. In March, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, celebrity economist and intellectual leader of the utopians, published a book called The End of Poverty, in which he called for a big push of increased foreign aid to meet the Millennium Development Goals and end the miseries of the poor...British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likewise called in January for a major increase in aid, a “Marshall Plan” for Africa. Brown was so confident he knew how to save the world’s poor that he even called for borrowing against future aid commitments to finance massive increases in aid today...We have already seen the failure of comprehensive utopian packages in the last two decades: the failure of “shock therapy” to convert the former Soviet Union from communism to capitalism and the failure of IMF/World Bank “structural adjustment” to transform nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into free-market paragons. All of these regions have suffered from poor economic growth since utopian efforts began...With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good, much less attain Utopia? They get the political and economic incentives all wrong. The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help...ree markets and democracy are far from an overnight solution to poverty—they require among many other things the bottom-up evolution of the rules of the game, including contract enforcement and fair political competition. Nor can democratic capitalism be imposed by outsiders (as the World Bank, IMF, and U.S. Army should now have learned). The evolution of markets and democracy took many decades in rich countries, and it did not happen through “big pushes” by outsiders...The problems of the poor nations have deep institutional roots at home, where markets don’t work well and politicians and civil servants aren’t accountable to their citizens. That makes utopian plans even more starry-eyed, as the “big push” must ultimately rely on dysfunctional local institutions..."
Via Bullets and Honey

The Economist writes:

Ethiopia likes to do things differently. In September it started celebrating the new millennium, more than seven years after everybody else. The country has been out of step in this respect since 1582: while the rest of the Christian world changed to the revised Gregorian calendar, Ethiopia stuck to the Julian. It also still keeps its own time, measured in 12-hour cycles rather than 24-hour ones.

The reasons for this economic crawl are not hard to find. Beyond the government-directed state, funded substantially by foreign aid, there is—almost uniquely in Africa—virtually no private-sector business at all. The IMF estimates that in 2005-06 the share of private investment in the country was just 11%, nearly unchanged since Mr Zenawi took over in the early 1990s. That is partly a reflection of the fact that, despite some privatisation since the centralised Marxist days of the Derg, large areas of the economy remain government monopolies, closed off to private business.

This is where Ethiopia misses out badly. Take telecoms. While the rest of Africa has been virtually transformed in just a few years by a revolution in mobile telephony, Ethiopia stumbles along with its inept and useless government-run services. Everywhere else, a plethora of South African, home-grown and European providers has leapt into the market to provide Africans with an extraordinary array of cheaper and more efficient services, now used even by the poorest of farmers, for instance, to check spot prices for agricultural goods in markets miles away. And the mobile-phone revolution has created thousands of new livelihoods; at times it seems as if every boy on a street corner is hawking a top-up card. Not in Ethiopia.
It is the same story in financial services, where, despite the growth of some smaller private banks, no foreign banks are allowed. Micro-finance schemes have expanded exponentially, but it remains almost impossible to find start-up loans for small or medium businesses.

From a paper by Xavier Sala‐i‐Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy:

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala‐i‐Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970‐2006. We show that:

1. African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly.
2. If present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time.
3. The growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it.
4. African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral‐rich as well as mineral‐poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below‐ or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.

The British PM Gordon Brown, seems to have changed his position on Aid.In a speech on international development he stated that:

Some argue that it is the presence of big international corporations that is the cause of the problems in developing countries, but I disagree. Indeed, I believe it is the absence of business - and not the presence of business - that blights the lives of poor people, leaving them dependent on aid and denying them the opportunity to work, denying them the chance to support their families and denying them the means to ensure their children get the chance to succeed.
Economic growth alone has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty over the last 25 years, accounting for over 80 per cent of poverty reduction.
And the countries whose economies are growing fastest, like Rwanda and Ghana represented here today, are those that are making progress on the Millennium Development Goals - with countries whose economies are growing more slowly falling behind.
So we need to fully acknowledge the critical importance of the private sector in driving development - focusing our attention not on an old one-dimensional welfarist approach but on enterprise, on free and fair trade and open markets, and on harnessing the power of innovation -- the building blocks of growth.
Developing countries - including Ghana and Rwanda - are already working hard to put in place the macroeconomic stability, supportive regulatory environment and measures to tackle corruption that are necessary for business and trade to thrive.

Today we need a new approach --- moving beyond minimum standards, beyond philanthropy and beyond traditional corporate social responsibility - important though they are - to develop long-term business initiatives that mobilise the resources and talents that are the central strengths of global business...From delivering financial services via mobile phones so that millions of people have access to basic bank accounts for the first time; to providing rural farmers with electronic price and weather information so they can decide when best to harvest and sell their crops; to sourcing ingredients from local supply chains to develop the base of the local economy --- each one of these initiatives is providing innovative solutions to the problems we face and spreading enterprise and opportunity across the developing world.

CK Prahalad comments that China and India "...represent 900 million people in poverty, a larger number than the entire population of Africa. There are about 600 million in Africa who live on less than $3 per day. Why, then, do China and India evoke fear and anger, while Africa elicits pity and guilt?...Despite the magnitude of their respective poverty problems, China and India may have a chance of meeting the Millennium Development Goals established by U.N. Their economies are following the lead of other countries that have raised their populations into a middle-class economic base. For example, between 1975 and 2004, GDP per capita in South Korea increased fourfold. Over the same period, Malaysian incomes rose threefold.
On the other hand, in those decades, per capita incomes in Nigeria declined by a tenth. Why? During the period 1955-2004, the West and multilateral institutions invested more than $1 trillion in aid and subsidies in emerging economies. But poverty persists. It would seem, therefore, that we need to challenge the role of aid and subsidies in promoting sustainable economic development. If poverty cannot be eradicated with humanitarian handouts alone, what is the alternative?...The G-8, led by Tony Blair and supported by Jeffery Sachs and Bono, believe that debt relief and a doubling of aid from rich countries to poor, especially in Africa, is the way to go. A less popular alternative focuses on the involvement of the private sector in poverty alleviation through the development of market-based ecosystems.
Irrespective of which route we take, we need to build an infrastructure to deal with poverty. There is an implicit aid overhead. According to Prof. Sachs, out of every dollar of aid given to Africa, an estimated 16% went to consultants from donor countries, 26% went into emergency aid and relief operations, and 14% went into debt servicing. How much of the remaining 40% escaped corrupt officials to benefit the intended recipients is not known..."
Via NextBillion

Bill Easterly sounds a note of caution in FP:

For Jeffrey Sachs the crash is an opportunity to gain support for the hopelessly utopian Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty, achieving gender equality, and improving the general state of the planet through a centrally planned, government-led Big Push. “The US could find $700 billion for a bailout of its corrupt and errant banks but couldn’t find a small fraction of that for the world’s poor and dying,” he wrote in September. “The laggards in the struggle for the [goals] are not the poor countries ... the laggards are the rich world.” To Sachs and his acolytes, poor people can’t prosper without Western-country plans—and the crash only serves to turn Western governments inward. Therefore, progress on poverty is bound to suffer...[continue reading]

Chika Onyeani of Africa Sun Times writes in his provocative book,'Capitalist Nigger' that "...A community cannot survive when its so-called educated citizens are morally and intellectually bankrupt and decrepit. You cannot have a community whose intelligentsia are mere parasites of other cultures...A people which regards itself as independent should be able to produce independent thought. Yet, Africans still depend on Europeans, 40 years after "gaining" their independence from their former colonial masters and at a new millennium, to furnish us with books on any subject. Our so-called elites cannot devote enough time to research to duplicate the same research already conducted and articulate it in a language Africans can understand. It is any wonder then that we go to school and still come out illiterates..."

Claessens, Stijn and Feijen, Erik H.B make a case for developing the financial sector in developing countries:

Financial sector development can contribute substantially to attaining the most important Millennium Development Goal: alleviation of extreme poverty. Policies which could foster financial sector development with wide access are multiple and include: ensuring a stable macroeconomic environment, enhancing financial sector regulation and enforcement, creating a proper credit information institutional infrastructure, and enforcing property rights. The importance of these policies for financial sector development has been well-documented in other research, but our findings give more impetus to furthering financial sector development,especially when it gives access to financial services for a broad class of people.