Michael Kevane

A new paper Cycling to School finds that bicycles are even better than cash transfers (HT: Marginal Revolution).

We find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls’ enrolment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia, suggesting that the coordinated provision of bicycles to girls may have generated externalities beyond the cash value of the program, including improved safety from girls cycling to school in groups, and changes in patriarchal social norms that proscribed female mobility outside the village, which inhibited female secondary school participation.

Not to ring by own bicycle bell, but I argued/intuited something similar for South Sudan back in 2005 (eight long years ago… where has the time gone?) in a short opinion piece on the Joint Assessment Mission report for Forced Migration Review:

Why not give away the $8bn?  When we consider that reconstruction spending is to target around 20 million marginalised Sudanese (of a total population of around 32 million) then you have spending of about $160 per person. After subtracting modest bureaucratic, consultancy and other delivery costs, this amounts to an annual payment of $150 for each poor person in Sudan for the next few years. Most poor people would undoubtedly prefer to receive such a sum as an income supplement rather than as a bundle of services. Why did the JAM authors assume that they could plan more wisely, and government counterparts in the GoS or SPLM could spend more effectively, than poor citizens in Bahr al-Ghazal or the Nuba Mountains or the Red Sea Hills? Why should we not trust Sudanese to make strategic and livelihoods-enhancing choices – a farmer to buy a younger and stronger donkey, parents to send their children to a better school, or a tea-seller to invest in another set of tea glasses?
It is disappointing that no consideration seems to have been given to an income support scheme, at the least for elderly women and families with school-age children. Numerous studies have shown that these programmes can be just as effective as government spending, and they have ripple effects throughout the private sector.  Education and roads are at the core of the JAM budget. One has to ask whether the private sector cannot manage education successfully, especially in the south where Christian missionaries and NGOs are more than willing to subsidise schooling. Everybody likes the idea of building roads. But the poor, in Sudan and elsewhere, know that their benefits go disproportionately to the rich. No doubt they would rather have bicycles, yet bicycles merit no mention at all in the JAM documents. As Sudan rebuilds, there is a real danger that the smart and the rich will take advantage of public investment, while everyone else stays at the bottom of the well.

It is good to see the emphasis validated.  Sad, too, because the hyper-governmentalized vision that triumphed in South Sudan (apex: giraffe shaped new capital city) will take the new country (in a John Kerry “It’s a guarantee” kind of way) not to Rwanda but to C.A.R.   In Burkina Faso, BTW, bicycles are fast becoming second-hand news, and what everyone now wants is an Apsonic  motorized rickshaw.

I started thinking about this awhile ago.  When I read The Bridge in the Jungle.  If I get some more good suggestions I will update… so put them in comments please.

1. Beppe Fenoglio, Ruin, He is an amazing writer about the Piedmont area of Italy, and his short novels from the 1930s and 1940s are well-worth reading.  I first read Ruin as a random selection while browsing in San Jose Public Library.  I mean random: I said to myself I would pick a random short novel off the shelf to read.  Ruin was it.  Wow.  Here’s a nice appreciation of a new French translation.
2. B. Traven, The Bridge in the Jungle, I found this outside of George Akerlof’s office as he was culling his book collection. Phenomenal writing, and a great mystery goes with it: nobody really knows who B. Traven was (a German anarchist living in Mexico?). Reading this means you are then justified in watching Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the all-time great movies.
3. Daniel Mason, A Far Country.  A very flattering New York Times review suggests looking at the film Black Orpheus to better appreciate the book: who could disagree with that happy suggestion?
4. Alan Garner, The Stone Book Quartet  What I like about Garner’s four very short novellas is that despite being about very poor English country-folk, there is magic, mystery, fulfillment and beauty all around.  Everything is from the point of view of an adult’s memory of how it feels to be a child; so a ride down a hill on a sled is like a climb of Mt. Everest… we all know that feeling, of those special moments in our childhood, and we know that our children experience events in similar ways. Reading Garner is a wonderful way of capturing that feeling.
5. Uwem Akpan, Say You Are One of Them.  OK, ultra-depressing poverty, Africa-variety. This is to shock naive young students: yes, this is all real, and you are playing video games.
6. Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Poisson d’or , not my favorite novel, but pretty grim.  And in intermediate level French.  But as numerous readers on GoodReads note, you never really develop much attachment to the protagonist, partly because she seems a little robot-like.
7. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah.  I have not read this in 25 years, but I vividly recall the shock of reading how corruption is linked, metaphorically, to shit.  As a novel about corruption, it does the job well.
8. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.  I’m surprised there is no African ripoff, really.  This is both a novel about being really poor, in a world where plenty of people are very well off, and a novel that poor people want to read (i.e. like much 19th century literature from Dickens onwards…).  Great way to understand people’s lives under industrialization.
9. God’s Bits of Wood by  Ousmane Sembène.  I was assigned this in college, many years ago.  It stands the test of time pretty well, especially for understanding factory-style poverty.
10. The Pearl.  Steinbeck.  I think it illustrates the whole “poor have cognitive difficulties” approach very nicely.  Would be interesting to go through it carefully and count all the bad choices people make.

With almost every intervention, she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project. At one point, the Millennium Villages Project persuades the farmers in Ruhiira to grow maize instead of their traditional crop, called matoke. “The results were fantastic,” she reports, a bumper crop. Except there were no buyers for the maize, so most of it wound up being eaten by rats. In Dertu, Sachs’s staff decided it should set up a livestock market. It flopped. Efforts to convince villagers to start small businesses largely failed. The critical problem of getting clean water to the villages was enormously expensive.

Ultimately, reports Munk, Dertu was abandoned by the Millennium Villages Project while Ruhiira is today lauded as one of the project’s most successful villages. “There is no question the lives of people in Ruhiira have been improved,” Munk told me. “I’ve seen it.” But she is dubious about what that means — other than the fact that if you pump millions of dollars into an isolated African village, the villagers’ lives will be better. (Sachs’s defenders say that most of her reporting was done before the project really found its footing.)

via Fighting Poverty, and Critics – NYTimes.com.