violence

8 January 2016

Posted on January 8, 2016 Leave a Comment

The most important document I read over the past couple of weeks is Deschamps and al’s “Taking action on sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers”. This is the report of an independent review on sexual exploitation and abuse by international peacekeeping forces in the Central African Republic. The brutal facts: In 2013-14, several children from the M’Poko IDP camp aged 9-13 were sexually abused by peacekeepers in exchange for military food rations and small amounts of money. The report is appalling. It shows how the UN system systematically failed to timely and appropriately protect and care for these children, and to properly investigate, report and follow up on the violations. Many parts of the UN are judged at fault. The report describes a machinery caught up in the implementation of its complex procedures and the fragmentation of its responsibilities where action and accountability are always someone else’s business. It shows how the system ends up not delivering its most fundamental human rights functions. Shockingly, more staff time was devoted to assigning blame for a leaked document than to caring for the abused kids. This should be mandatory reading for every UN staff member.

Davis and al’s “Do socially responsible firms pay more taxes?” looks at the relation between corporate tax payments and corporate social responsibility (CSR). I read it after this Economist article whet my appetite. Using data from a large set of US companies, Davis and al analyze links between tax and CSR behaviors between 2002-11. They show that high CSR firms are avoiding taxes the most and are spending the most on tax lobbying. This indicates that CSR and tax payments are used as substitutes not complements by [US] firms. These findings are important because UN CSR approach and guidelines (including our Children Rights and Business Principles) view corporate tax payments as positive contributions to social welfare. As the authors conclude: “If policy makers are trying to improve social welfare, understanding this trade-off is important in the design of tax laws”.

My visual of the week is Sander and al’s “The global flow of people”. It depicts migration flows within and between regions. It shows that the largest movements happen between South and East Asia, Latin to North America, and within Africa. The authors also have a “Global flow of refugees” version which clearly shows that most movements are regional in nature.

My quote this week is from Lucy Kellaway’s ”Big brother management: Farewell performance review, hello data systems”: “In 2016 the job of management will be taken away from managers. […] The most visible sign of the new world will be the end of the annual career appraisal. […] The end started half way through 2015 when Deloitte and then Accenture announced that they were getting rid of their performance review. Deloitte let slip that it spent an unconscionable 2m hours a year to produce yearly reports for its 65,000 people—making it among the biggest corporate wastes of time ever invented.”

2 October 2015

Posted on October 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

I enjoyed Gillian Tett’s “The silo effect: The peril of expertise and the promise of breaking down barriers“. The Financial Times US Managing Director uses a cultural anthropology approach (nice!) to show how strong compartmentalization of expertise made some companies lose their edge while “silo-busting” kept others innovative and adaptive. She uses stories from the worlds of finance, technology, and government to illustrate. And she shows how people, technology and management can help break down specialist silos.
People can help by changing their mindsets, questioning existing taxonomies used to organize the world, or jumping from one field to another. For instance, the Cleveland Clinic gained in efficiency by reorganizing its structure around multidisciplinary centers focusing on body parts or broad ailments (the way patients describe illness) rather than around medical disciplines (the way education segments professions between physicians, surgeons, nurses and therapists). What if we were structured around multidisciplinary teams focusing on, say, age-specific issues?
Technology can help by offering analytical tools that mesh silo data, or facilitating cross-company horizontal communication. For instance, computer analytics from OpenTable was used by the Chicago Police to crunch violence data from different departments with temperature patterns. This generated real-time crime predictions that significantly reduced Chicago’s murder rate. What if we had investigative data science teams to better predict complex issues affecting children?
Management can help by rewarding those who promote inter-disciplinarity, or running internal social experiments that cluster people across specialities (e.g., common induction programmes and staff rotation across disciplines). For instance, Facebook’s Hackamonth encourages staff who have worked on the same thing for 12-18 months to work with a different department for a few months. What if we had a line of stretch assignments that would aim not at filling gaps but rather at disturbing and enhancing teams?

It is always good to have a quick look at the IMF and World Bank’s “curtain raisers” ahead of their Annual Meetings. Christine Lagarde focuses on the economy telling us that it is not looking very good, especially for emerging economies facing a fifth consecutive year of slowing growth. Jim Kim focuses on inequalities in a speech that could have been drafted in NY: importance of investing in children, from ECD to stunting elimination; promoting UHC and progressive social protection; and designing equitable tax collection systems. Fighting inequalities, he says, “starts with the pregnant woman who lives in a conflict zone.” But how does that message trickle down? How much of this rhetoric translates into the World Bank operations in your country?

My map of the week is from the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide’s Early Warning Project showing countries most likely to suffer onsets of state-led mass killing. The ranking combines statistical risks with expert opinions, and averages results from 3 “models”: Forecasts of political instability; forecasts of future coup attempts and new civil wars; and a machine-learning process that chews up experts’ opinions. Countries with the highest risks for mass killing today are Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

My quote of the week is from Quartz Akshat Rathi’s “If there is liquid water in Mars, no one – no even NASA – can get anywhere near it”: “The world’s space powers are bound by rules agreed to under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbid anyone from sending a mission, robot or human, close to a water source in the fear of contaminating it with life from Earth.”

2 July 2015

Posted on July 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

Publications on trends often focus on risks and threats, the depressing stuff. Inspired by the long week-end awaiting some of us, here is a selection of feel-good readings that came my way this week.

Ausubel’s “Nature Rebounds” presents positive trends with the combined effect of restoring nature. Farmland and forest use are reaching peaks; water, petroleum, and transportation uses are plateauing; and green vegetal cover expands. All this alongside a population growth slowdown. The paper concentrates on the US but Ausubel argues that “within a few decades, the same patterns, already evident in Europe and Japan, will be evident in many more places”. The only dark spot in this bright picture is oceans and fisheries damage. Technology optimism permeates the analysis. A little too much for my taste. Also it would have been useful to picture these trends vis-a-vis “planetary boundaries”. I asked myself: Is the rebound effect sufficient to stay within a safe environmental space? But overall this is a great read and a good reminder of the need to look back, to better look forward.

Roser’s “Visual history of the rise of political freedom and the decrease of violence” also takes the long view. The 19-slide presentation transports us from archeological evidence of widespread prehistorical violence when the share of people killed by other peoples was often more than 10%, all the way to today when the global rate of battle death is less than 1 for 100,000 people. The story, told through graphs and maps, links the decline of violence to improvements in education, literacy, political freedom and democracy. Like the rest of Roser’s work, this presentation exemplifies the power of good visualization.

My map of the week is from Bevington and al’s “A multitemporal, multivariate index to dynamically characterize vulnerability of children and adolescents in Nepal: Using science in humanitarian response”. While the title is a mouthful, the map distills all this complexity to show children vulnerabilities at the village level, in real time. You can zoom in and out, you can map specific vulnerabilities (children displaced, available schools, functional healthcare facilities) or specific hazards (landslide from rainfalls, landslide from earthquakes, landslide post-quake), or you can combine all this together in one map. The architecture behind the curtain triangulates data of different nature and frequency from the Nepal National Census to NASA’s high-resolution satellite imagery.

My quote of the week is from IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s Address at Grandes Conferences Catholiques: “If I had to pick the three most important structural tools to reduce excessive income inequality, it would be education, education, education.”[Emphasis in original]

19 June 2015

Posted on June 19, 2015 Leave a Comment

Ouch. Barnett and Walker’s “Regime change for humanitarian aid: how to make relief more accountable” is harsh on the humanitarian industry. It criticizes the Western-led ‘humanitarian club’ [yes, finger-pointing at UN agencies as members of that club as well] for their lack of accountability. It highlights the forces shaking the established system: the growing number of donors outside the club (Brazil, China, Turkey, and Gulf States), technology, diaspora groups, and local NGOs. It calls for a regime change and offers recommendations [which may not add up to an actual revolution] such as “reward evidence-based results”, “train workers and agencies in places likely to struggle in the face of an emergency”, “equal working relationships with local groups”, “a change in attitude […] to listen to those they aspire to serve”. In short: several valid points worth pondering over en route to the World Humanitarian Summit.

There are daily headlines and stories about refugees. But I give a thumb up to The Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley for great storytelling in “The Journey”, a recount of Hashem Alsouki’s journey from Syria to Sweden.

My map of the week is the 2015 Global Peace Index (GPI) map. Click and play: you can select countries, types of violence, and look at trends by moving the time scale. The GPI report is full of brutal stats such as: 1% of the world’s population is forcibly displaced, the number of IDPs grew by 131% in less than a decade, and the 2014 violence price tag is $14.3 trillion (that’s 13.4% of global GDP!). The report also unpacks the trends which have made the world less peaceful since 2008.

My quote of the week is from Pope Francis’s Encyclical Laudato Si’ “Care for our Common Home”: “The twenty-first century, while maintaining systems of governance inherited from the past, is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tends to prevail over the political. [para. 175]”