conflict

30 June 2017

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Nelson and Detrixhe’s “The World Bank’s “pandemic bonds” are designed so investors pay in the event of an outbreak” explains how the just-launched pandemic bonds work. Investors who buy bonds basically act as pandemic insurers. This allows the Bank to release money to poor countries as soon as an outbreak occurs. Take Ebola, $100 million could have been made available as early as July 2014 with such instruments but “money did not begin to flow on this scale until three months later, by which time the number of deaths had increased tenfold”. So that’s a useful tool. And investors are ready to take the risk: the pandemic bond sale was 200% oversubscribed. These instruments have been used for years by insurance companies to transfer risks of natural disasters to financial markets. And they could be applied to other emergencies beyond health and natural catastrophes.

Ziad Haider’s “The case for a Global Council for Refugees” calls for the creation of a new structure that would bring together private efforts supporting refugees. It illustrates how the private sector already helps refugees, mostly around getting jobs. It points to similar business alliances in other areas, e.g. the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS. It lays out the main functions a Global Council for Refugees would play: repository of existing initiatives to avoid duplication; one stop-shop for partners; peer-to-peer catalyst, and advocacy amplifier.

My map this week is from IFAD’s “Sending money home: contributing to the SDGs, one family at a time” which presents the flows and trends in remittances during 2007-2016. The report is full of great facts. 1 billion people are involved with remittances: either sending or receiving. Half of remittance senders are women. Remittances flows to developing countries grew by 51% over the past decade while migration from these countries only grew by 28%. And look at Asia-Pacific: remittances increased by 87%!

My quote this week is from Iraqi Nori Sharif, the videographer of the brutally disturbing “Nowhere to hide”: “It is difficult to diagnose this war. It is an undiagnosed war. You can see all the symptoms: death, pain, sorrow. But you don’t understand the disease.”

23 June 2017

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Youseff Mahmoud et al’s “Entrepreneurship for sustaining peace” is the curtain raiser for one of the International Peace Institute conversation series on prevention and sustaining peace. Mahmoud is argues that the UN refocus on prevention be accompanied by a shift away from deterring conflict towards sustaining peace. Conceptually this means moving away from a highly politicized and securitized approach to prevention. Operationally this means moving away from crisis management tools only. Adopting the sustaining peace approach, this article looks at how economic opportunities contribute to peaceful societies by offering more dignified lives and countering sentiments of marginalization for entrepreneurs, their families, and their communities. It uses two examples to illustrate how that works: Colombia and Tunisia. It highlights the unique potential of youth entrepreneurship by pointing to the correlation between positive peace and the Youth Development Index and arguing that the demographic dividend could also contribute to sustaining peace. And it provides 3 operational recommendations for UN field operations and country teams: map existing entrepreneurial initiatives that have explicit peacebuilding benefits; develop an integrated entrepreneurship development strategy; and encourage host countries to create environment supportive of youth-led social entrepreneurship as part of peace operations.

Several people shared the IOM’s “UN-biased” video with me this week. It speaks of decision biases in the work place and how they affect hiring decisions, in the United Nations. Some numbers. Where equally qualified candidates are considered, mothers are 79% less likely to be hired. Women take 5.4 years to be promoted to a P4 level whereas men take 4.6 years. In performance reviews, women receive 2.5 times more feedback about aggressive communication styles than men. Overall 62% men work in hardship duty stations, and while 30% of applicants are women, they are not selected. At senior level, 16% of males versus 40% of females are more likely to be divorced, separated or single. The video also suggests 5 very practical recommendations to counter biases in recruitment. Just take 5 minutes and watch it. Go IOM!

My graph this week is from CBInsights’ “Google is ramping up pharma activity” and shows that google has made as many pharma deals (6) in the first half of 2017 as it did during the 2010-14 period. While all eyes are on Amazon investing in the food industry, google is moving in the healthcare space with expectations of transforming the sector. What strikes me is tech giants strengthening their monopolies with one hand while growing their philanthropic arms with the other: over the same week Amazon Bezos bought Whole Foods, he also crowdsourced ideas for how to spend his billions.

My quote is from Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech at the Facebook’s first Communities Summit because, as flagged earlier, it marks another step in how the social media platform is being transformed into a new type of global governance entity: “The idea behind our new mission is to bring the world closer together. Ending poverty, curing diseases, stopping climate change, spreading freedom and tolerance, stopping violence: there is no single group or even country that can take these things on alone. So we have to build a world where people come together to take on these big meaningful efforts. This is not going to happen top down […] We want to help one billion people join [Facebook] meaningful communities and bring the world closer together.”

12 May 2017

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The Economist’s “A growing share of aid is spent by private firms, not charities” is worth reading as it crunches US and UK aid data to put numbers behind this trend: 25% of USAID and 22% of DFID spending went to private firms in 2016, both on the rise. The drivers behind this growth are: a shift from project-delivery to system-shaping requiring technical advice that firms are best equipped to provide; a “doing more with less” aid culture leading to more outsourcing; and private contractors’ ability to quickly match time-bound freelancer teams with complex development problems. Private contracts are also getting bigger leading to the market concentration of contractors and a growing number of consortium where small fish are used as “bid candy” by lead contractors. The Economist documents some of problems associated with these trends including higher delivery costs and risks of frauds, calling for aid agencies to take a close look at their bidding and contract practices.

WFP’s “At the root of exodus” puts numbers on the food/conflict/migration nexus. It models data from 88 countries with negative net migration and 178 countries with outflow of refugees during 1990-2015. It shows that the number of people migrating increases by 1.9% for each percent increase in the number of food-insecure people, and by 0.4% for each additional year of conflict. It also shows that migration can increase food insecurity both for those leaving and those staying behind, and that food insecurity is a significant determinant of the incidence and intensity of armed conflict. The study complements these findings with qualitative data collected through focus group discussions with 231 migrants from 10 countries in Greece, Italy, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and validated via 570 household phone surveys in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Once on the move, food and economic security are key determinants of whether people keep going or settle. Half of Syrians interviewed in Jordan and Lebanon want to move elsewhere while only a quarter of those in Turkey plan to.

My visual this week is from the Developing Human Connectome Project which just released its first open access data. The EU-funded project aims at creating 3D brain maps of fetuses and newborns to understand how the human brain develops and what triggers certain afflictions like autism. Adult brain maps already exists. So these guys are focusing on the 20-44 weeks post-conception window, and doing MRIs on hundreds of babies in the womb.

My quote this week is from Eurasia Ian Bremmer’s “The wave to come”: “Nationalism is alive and well, partly because the problems that provoked it are still with us. […] Now here’s the really bad news: an even larger crisis is coming. The popular fury convulsing Europe and the U.S. may well spill over into the rest of the world. Just as the financial crisis, which began in the West, produced rumbling aftershocks around the globe, so the nationalist explosion will rattle the politics of countries on every continent.”

7 April 0217

Posted on April 7, 2017 Leave a Comment

The World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings are approaching and development finance conversations are buzzing in DC. In a CGDev Financing the future event Mark Suzman tells us that we are not good enough at telling the aid success story. It reminded me that when we brought Kevin Rudd to talk about the future of the UN 2 years ago, he also pointed to a similar PR failure. Suzman also flags the need to invest in (input, output and outcome) data that can speak about these success stories. Overall an interesting conversation on what the future mix of ODA, private contributions and domestic resources could look like. Another growing conversation, flagged a couple weeks ago, is on universal basic income (UBI) with an interesting perspective this week from Diane Coyle arguing for a shift from UBI, focusing on the individual, to universal basic services focusing on the collective. Finally, several of you pointed to the ongoing chicken vs cash conversation so I need to flag it here for the benefits of those who might have missed it.

This week, a friend mentioned that she wanted to buy Amy Cuddy’s Presence: bringing your boldest self to your biggest challenges. Here is where I tell her to save her money. This book was recommended to me by the coach who led my last 360-degree feedback exercise. She was a good coach. But it is not worth buying the book. You’ll get the gist of Cuddy’s thesis in her Ted talk which you have probably seen already as it is the second most viewed (40 million viewers). Her core argument is that mindsets can be changed by adopting specific body behaviors. A few minutes of “power pose” before an interview can increase your (non-verbal) performance. The book expands on this by harvesting evidence from large bodies of research and by distilling the millions of testimonies she received following her TED talk. But, in my view, it does add any substantive meat to the bone. Some, including her research partner, have questioned the validity of the science behind Cuddy’s argument. What I would like to question personally is the underlying assumption of her work that associates performance with confidence, and leadership with success. This made me think of this recent piece by Susan Cain “Not leadership material? Good. The world needs followers”. But then I am not very clear about my position as I also want to appear confident and like to see my kids display confidence. And while I am in full disclosure mode, I admit to have done power poses before recent interviews.

My graph of the week is from EBRD’s Transition 2016-2017. It shows that people born at the time of the transition from a planned to a market economy are on average 1 cm shorter than those born earlier or later. This is comparable to impact observed for babies born or turning one in a war zone! The rest of the report is super interesting due to new data coming from the third round of wellbeing surveys conducted with 51,000 households in 39 post-communist countries and giving a picture of what type of adults those born in the transition years have become.

My quote this week is from the Ellen Macarthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy report “Each year, USD 80-120 billion plastic packaging material value is lost to the economy. Given projected growth in production, in a business-as-usual scenario, by 2050 oceans could contain more plastics than fish.”

10 March 2017

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Wild, Booth and Valters’ “Putting theory into practice: How DFID is doing development differently” should have been 5 pages long so more people would read it. The ODI authors spent one year helping DFID change its practices and they document the experience in this paper. At the programme level, these changes look like moving from giving grants to CSOs to using DFID’s political savviness to help CSOs strategically connect with governments, parliaments and the media; or moving from financing the construction of a water and sanitation rural infrastructure to a pay-by-result system that pushes district authorities to construct and maintain the infrastructure. That means a problem driven approach with an emphasis on DFID’s facilitation role and the use of ‘everyday political analysis’. At the process and procedure level, these changes look like distilling mountains of guidelines into a handful of principles, smart rules or top tips.

I spent my Tuesday lunch break listening to NYU CIC’s Sarah Cliffe give an overview of conflict-related trends. Here is my summary. Four main trends: (i) there are more and more protracted crises, and humanitarian work has become development work; (ii) following a drop in international wars after WWII, conflicts and crises are increasingly internationalized again; (iii) multiple and combined sources of risks (eg populism, population growth, resource scarcities) make crises and conflicts harder to solve; (iv) populations are losing confidence in the ability of national and international entities to solve conflicts. Four underlying factors to these trends: (a) decades of inattention to inequalities; (b) lack of investment in shared identities; (c) shifting geopolitical patterns; (d) innovations in ICT. Three big picture solutions: 1. Strengthen the humanitarian-development continuum for better prevention; 2. Join the political/security part of the international system with its humanitarian-development part; 3. Rethink economic and migration models. I found this helpful in structuring my thoughts.

My graph this week is from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s new “Inclusive internet index”. Commissioned by Facebook’s Internet.org, the index codes four enablers of internet inclusion for 75 countries: availability, affordability, relevance, readiness. At the aggregate level, no big surprise in terms of who comes first. But breaking down results by country or enabler gives less expected results. Malaysia comes first and Chile fourth for readiness with Kazakhstan and Argentina at the 10^th and 11^th places. And Nepal, Tanzania and Senegal have the highest overall rankings of low income countries (56^th, 57^th, 58^th).

My quote this week is from Anthony Heyes in “Air pollution brings down the stock market”: “Animals that breathe polluted air fight more than those that breathe cleaner air. People perform less well across a variety of tasks on polluted days than on less polluted days. Peach pickers pick fewer peaches. Baseball umpires are worse at calling balls and strikes. Call center employees field fewer calls.”

4 December 2015

Posted on December 4, 2015 Leave a Comment

You can add Frances Jensen’s “The teenage brain” to your Christmas gifts list. It is a useful and accessible read for anybody working with adolescents, including at home. She digests the latest neuroscience findings on brain development to show that adolescence is a critical window of vulnerabilities and opportunities. As connectivity of the brain matures from back to front lobes through childhood, 20% remains unwired when kids enter their teens. She shows the effects of stress, substance abuse, and physical shocks on the adolescent brain development and discusses implications for education and justice systems inter alia. This is mind-blowing stuff that Jensen thinks should be made widely available to practioners, parents and adolescents themselves. So we invited her to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series, see here.

Some of you asked me what I read about ISIS. Like many of you, probably too much. But here are some of the (non-book) write-ups that helped me think and take a long view. On the origins of ISIS, I found Tim Urban’s “From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s full story” clear and useful. On what ISIS is, I was interested in Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS really wants” because of the debate it triggered around the role of religion vs other pull factors attracting recruits. Lydia Wilson’s “What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters”, for instance, points to “humiliated and enraged young men [seeking] a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.” For the Francophones, I would add Olivier Roy’s “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste” because of his thought-provoking thesis, based on the study of recruits’ profiles, that we are witnessing the Islamization of (youth) radicalism rather than the radicalization of Islam [English speakers can read his Quartz interview here]. And Alain Bertho’s “Il faut être clair un monde a pris fin et il n’y aura pas de retour en arrière” which contrasts ISIS with the 1970ies political terrorism and post-communist social rebellions, and looks at the ideological vacuum they fill for destabilized young people. But I would like to hear which readings you found useful.

I found myself glued to the Bloomberg Carbon Clock, a real-time estimate of the global atmospheric CO2 level. Not very constructive. So my visual this week is from ITU’s “Measuring the information society report 2015”. The good news: 3.2 billion people are online, and 95% of the global population are covered by mobile-cellular networks. The interesting trend: Over the past year, mobile broadband subscriptions (47.2%) overtook households with internet access (46.4%). The bad news: multiple digital divides persist between and within countries; between rural and urban areas; between men and women; between rich and poor; between the more and less educated; and between social groups. The projections: by 2020 53% of people will be online globally; 45% in developing countries; but only 11% in LDCs.

My quote this week is from Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.”