refugee

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.”

2 June 2017

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Nora Rosenberg et al’s “The effect of HIV counselling and testing on HIV acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review” finds that despite big investments in HIV counselling and testing, we don’t know much about its impact on prevention. That is because this impact has not been systematically evaluated: only 8 decently-designed studies were found for sub-Saharan Africa. And they show that individual HIV counselling and testing is neither consistently good nor bad for prevention. These important findings come out of a systematic review of the literature on the topic. Systematic reviews are often seen as the “poor relation” of research methods. They don’t bring academic glory. Yet, as argued here before, they produce the most useful evidence for policy makers. And with the advances of natural language processing and text mining techniques, we could automate large parts of the search process to increase our capacity to conduct systematic reviews that inform our work. I, for one, am excited about the future of systematic reviews.

I spoke to several colleagues about Mia Schaefer’s “The new kid” this week. The school-commissioned personal essay describes a 14-year-old’s mixed emotions about having a new baby brother. I thought she did a good job at articulating this. But of course, as the mother, I am biased.

My graph is from SITRA’s “This is how we create a circular economy in Finland” because it is super clear and because SITRA is hosting the World Circular Economy Forum next week. We pointed to the rise of the circular (or sharing) economy, in Horizons, two years ago. When looking at the list of speakers it struck me that all UN professionals engaging in that conversation were environmentalists. Why? There are huge opportunities for “social” practitioners in this space from restructuring service delivery systems, to reducing inequalities, to formalizing invisible economic relations, to fundraising. So I was happy to also see this week that NESTA had selected 8 organizations from the social sector to support via their ShareLab Fund.

My quote this week is from Cate Blanchett’s interview with David Miliband in Town and Country: “Being a mother was, for me, undeniably a central point of connection to the refugee crisis. Learning that more than 10 million of the world’s refugees are children, and then meeting refugee parents in Jordan and Lebanon who had fled to protect the lives and futures of their children—well, that was personally heartbreaking and galvanizing. As a parent I connected with their desire to protect their children and provide them with every possible opportunity in life: a safe home, an education—but most important, a childhood free from the horrors of war.”

And to make you smile at the end of a week full of bad world news, you get this.

3 March 2017

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I am not sure I can speak rationally about Melissa Fleming’s “A hope more powerful than the sea: The journey of Doaa Al Zamel” given how much I cried reading it. Fleming walks us through Doaa’s life from the teenager in Daraa, Syria witnessing the Arab Spring and its violent repression; to the young woman who flees with her family to Egypt where they are first greeted with compassion but soon threatened daily; to the determined woman who tells her fiancé that “it is better to have a quick death in the sea than a slow death in Egypt”; to the amazingly strong and selfless human being who survives 4 days in the sea holding on to a plastic ring and two babies while 500 people drown around her. In a strange way, I was less shaken by Doaa’s own story than by the atrocities she witnesses. Maybe because I knew from the outset that she would survive or because it was not her own voice sharing the story? The worst parts of that story involve children. Their fate throughout the book is simply unbearable: from the small group of boys, as young as 12, who defy authorities and get arrested and tortured, igniting the revolution; to the unborn child whose pregnant mother wearing a fake life vest boards an unsafe dinghy desperate for a better future; to hundreds of horrified children being moved by smugglers from one boat to the next before all drowning. Fleming, UNHCR chief spokesperson, wanted to raise awareness about the global refugee crisis. She was searching for human stories that would “build bridges of empathy to the public” and give readers real insights into the Syrian war and the lives of refugees. She succeeded. It worked on me, but I was already on the right side of the crowd. Could this book change the perspective of someone who in principle opposes granting asylum, resettlement or work visa to refugees? How does individual storytelling lead to action beyond the life of the protagonist?

Will 2017 be the year of universal basic income (UBI)? As flagged over a year ago, a growing tech crowd argues that UBI is an effective response to the rise of robots, and could capture support from liberals and conservatives alike. In 2017, a good number of countries, from Finland to India, are piloting UBI schemes or considering replacing welfare programs with UBI. Last week end, Annie Lowrey’s “The future of not working” got the development crowd going on the web about the pros and cons for developing countries. World Bank quants said interesting-but-get-your-methodology-in-order, cash-transfer gurus said no-way, and development philanthropists said not-quite-yet. A fun debate to watch.

My graph this week is from the Varkey Foundation’s “What the world’s young people think and feel” and shows that on average young people are pessimistic about the future. Labelled “the most comprehensive and up-to-date attempt to understand the lives of Generation Z”, the paper presents results from a representative survey conducted with 20,000 15-21 year-olds in 20 countries in late 2016. It tells us that Indonesia’s youth is super happy while Japan’s is very unhappy; that young people do not think their leaders are doing enough to help refugees; or that young people are very supportive of the rights agenda in general but maybe not free speech (!).

My quote this week is from David Cameron’s “Even in an age of austerity, aid works. We have to keep giving”: “There are huge gaps in our understanding of what makes states fragile. That is why I am chairing the new Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development. My co-chairs will be Donald Kaberuka, the special envoy of the African Union Peace Fund and the former president of the African Development Bank, and Adnan Khan, research and policy director of the International Growth Centre.”

17 February 2017

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Katja Bego’s “The end of the web” predicts a balkanization of the internet as a result of co-existing forces: the rise of cyber-attacks targeting critical infrastructure such as air traffic control towers or nuclear plants; the increasing vulnerability of the web’s under-sea system of cables; the failure to design an internet governance system; the non-neutrality of big techs; and the growing number of countries building alternative island internets. She also sees an opportunity in this chaos to create a new decentralized internet and tells Europe to go for it. No matter how probable the prediction, envisioning our business model with no internet or a fragmented one is a useful scenario to consider when stress-testing the delivery of our strategies.

I’ve flagged the growing impact of the refugee crisis on in-donor expenditures before but in “Making waves: Implications of the irregular migration and refugee situation on official development assistance spending and practices in Europe” Knoll and Sheriff systematically review what’s happening in Denmark, the EU, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. They show a significant increase of in-donor spending (fourfold in Sweden!) affecting long-term Official Development Assistance (ODA); and a reallocation of ODA to humanitarian contexts with direct ties to EU migration, affecting the funding of far-away crises. They also document a shift in the discourse away from maximizing-the-positive-impacts-of-migration towards dealing-with-the-many-challenges-associated-with-migration (eg, smuggling, border governance, return and reintegration). They show how refugee-related data are all over the place and call on better harmonization of reporting via the OECD-DAC. Three other things caught my attention. One, policy papers increasingly make reference to “root causes” by which they mean youth unemployment, access to basic services for refugees and host communities, peace and security, human rights, governance and resilience. But, this growing focus has not led to any changes in funding practices. Two, when ODA is used to support voluntary return and reintegration, higher development impacts are “expected for projects supporting migrants faced with specific socio-economic vulnerabilities”. But programmes are typically not accompanied by vulnerability assessments nor sustainability evaluations. Three, the crisis has accelerated efforts to link humanitarian and development approaches. Most donors are discussing joint strategies and some have started to combine funding (eg Germany tying refugee cash-for-work programmes with funding for permanent waste management structures in Lebanon).

My graph this week is from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world) which just updated their profile of inequalities in China combining unpublished fiscal and wealth data with national accounts and surveys. It shows higher level of inequalities than previously estimated: “the share of the poorest 50% in the national income in China fell from 28% to 15% between 1978 and 2015, while the income of the 10% richest rose from 26% to 41%.” Launched in January, WID.world is a Piketty-driven open-access database with income and wealth time series from an increasingly large number of countries. It is a space to watch as the expanding network of associated economists looks into disaggregating datasets.

Two quotes reflecting different (generational? geographical?) perspectives of the vibe at the World Government Summit. Take your pick! Geopolitical Futures’ George Friedman: “Nations are going to be much more important than multinational organizations. [The] complex commitments by all countries to each other haven’t been working well for most countries so I think we are going to see the nation-state far more important than it was.” And Impact Squared Noa Gafni: “Many of the conversations that took place during the Summit revealed the days of multilateralism are not over. Although traditional players such as the United Kingdom and United States appear to be taking a step back, many frontier markets see this as an opportunity to play a more prominent role.”

And in case you need a boost, read the Bill and Melinda Gates’ 2017 Annual Letter.

27 January 2017

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Read Pierre Bayard’s “How to talk about books you haven’t read” and feel better. Or don’t read it and try to engage in a conversation about it. Not only is this ok, but it will also enrich the conversation and enhance your creativity. This is Bayard’s thesis. He first explores different forms of “non-reading”: a. the book you have never opened, b. the book you only have heard of, c. the book you have skimmed, and d. the book you have forgotten. Is d. better than a.? It does not matter says Bayard. What matters is to change one’s mindset: consider non-reading as an activity, and make a clear distinction between reading a book and talking about it. The latter involves a third party and should be guided by the context and nature of your relationship with that person, not the content of the book. Engaging in the conversation at that level can be done in different ways: by referring to the broader “collective library” to which a particular book belongs, connecting to arguments other people make, or simply using one’s creativity to invent what the book is about. In the end, for Bayard, it is about talking about one’s “inner library”. Bayard gives guidance about how to talk about a book you haven’t read with a large audience, a professor, the author (!?), and a loved one. He uses literature classics to illustrate his points. Like this Oscar Wilde quote: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.” It is a refreshing and funny book. So drop the guilt and test it out. And if you want more, there is a sequel: “How to talk about places you’ve never been“.

Tristan Harris’ “Tech companies design your life, here’s why you should care” is a good wake up call. Google’s former product philosopher argues that big techs are destroying our agency capacity by high jacking our attention through a bunch of tricks that feed our needs to be linked, looked, and liked. We’ve all thought about this before. But we also know that changing habits is hard. And in this case we are battling something bigger than us: hundreds of machine-augmented brains who spend their days thinking about how to keep us on the screen. Tech products are designed to hook us via instant gratifications that fill in any spare time we have, leaving no room for complex feelings like boredom or sadness to sink in. While it is problematic for us, it is detrimental for children and their emotional and social development. One can’t fix this alone. It’s all about changing the design, says Harris, so that tech products are aligned with a higher concept of a life well spent. And he believes it is possible. We brought Harris to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series to talk about “ethical design for digital natives” and it was enlightening.

My graph this week is from ILO’s “World employment social outlook: Trends 2017” which shows, using Gallup data, the share of working-age population (aged 15+) willing to permanently migrate outside of their countries. This number increased between 2009-2016 for all parts of the world but South (eastern) Asia and the Pacific. It is yet another signal that international migration either forced or voluntary, either conflict-, climate- or unemployment-generated, is on the rise. The report is worth a scan as it unpacks data on the growth of global unemployment per regions and gender (summary here, videos and interactive maps, here).

My quote this week is from Jim Estill in “The Canadian who spent C$1.5 million to rescue more than 200 Syrian refugees”: “I still don’t see what the big deal is. And I’m surprised more people don’t step up and do it. I didn’t want to grow old and say I stood by and did nothing. So I decided to do my small part.”

26 February 2016

Posted on February 26, 2016 Leave a Comment

It is always good to have a look at the OECD-DAC High Level Meeting Communiqué. The main take away this time around is the expansion of the ODA definition to include certain military and security activities. The donor rhetoric used to justify the change is that “development, human rights, and peace and security are indivisible and interrelated”. This Devex article gives a good overview of what the redefinition entails. Last week I flagged how “our” issues were increasingly on the agenda of security gatherings. Here we see that “our” crowd takes steps towards securitizing ODA. Activists rang alarm bells arguing that this would take even more aid money away from poorest countries, including fragile ones. Helen Clark agreed. Let me highlight 3 other points from the Communiqué that clearly relate to our work. One, a DAC definition of “violent extremism” [footnote 19 page 16] and a list of new ODA-eligible activities to prevent violent extremism that include education; working with civil society to prevent radicalization and promote community engagement; and research on the causes of violent extremism in developing countries. This sends a strong signal that violent extremism is no longer a taboo topic for development organizations. Two, donors are revisiting the use of the Rio markers to better track environment-related development finance. We could learn from this to track the environmental contributions of development operations. Three, donors are still discussing the ODA eligibility of in-donor refugee costs. This is another trend affecting ODA flows to poorest countries.

While all tech eyes are on the Mobile World Congress, some fintech entrepreneurs are meeting in South Africa to discuss how blockchain technology could disturb Africa’s financial infrastructure the same way mobiles reinvented Africa’s communication infrastructure. Elizabeth Gould’s “Africa’s big banks are betting on fintech startups and bitcoin to beat disruption” provides illustrations of the possible transformative power for the continent and quotes Barclays’ Head of Innovation: “Blockchain could be the most significant social and political innovation to impact Africa in 100 years”.

I also need to recommend Charles Duhigg’s “What google learned from its quest to build the perfect team”. The key to a perfect team is not about members being smart or having complementary competencies. It is all about “social sensitivity”. Trust me, read this. It will speak to you.

The Money Project’s “All of the world’s money and markets in one visualization” is mind-blowing. I could not cut and paste the whole graph so below is only the tip of the iceberg. Click on the link and scroll down to discover where the world’s money is. If, like me, you thought that the accumulation of global debt was one of the scariest economic trends, think again. There is worse, big-scale worse.

My quote this week is from Bill Gates’ 2016 Annual Letter: “Within the next 15 years—and especially if young people get involved—I expect the world will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our world.”