Michael Kevane

Mais plus encore, le problème majeur dans le collimateur de ces éminents personnages n’est autre qu’une fraude fiscale à l’échelle continentale. « Il faut avoir ce chiffre en tête, poursuit Michel Camdessus, la fraude fiscale organisée par beaucoup de compagnies minières coûte globalement 38 milliards de dollars aux Etats africains. Une somme supérieure à l’aide au développement ». Ce que les institutions multilatérales comme le FMI, la Banque mondiale, la Banque africaine de développement et les grandes puissances comme les Etats-Unis ou l’Union européenne donnent à l’Afrique rapporte une trentaine de milliards de dollars par an.

via Les compagnies minières privent l’Afrique de 38 milliards de dollars – Afrique / Mines – RFI.

But what was driving these outcomes? Could covering the cost of school uniforms and tuition for these children during their nearly ten years of sponsorship mainly account for these impacts—or was it something else about being a sponsored child. We decided to ask Compassion what they thought made their program tick. Their response: “Try hope.” During their years of sponsorship, Compassion children spend an average of about 4,000 hours in after-school programming, much of which is devoted to nurturing their self-esteem and aspirations. So—we tried hope. In follow-up studies in Kenya, Bolivia, and Indonesia, we began to ask currently sponsored children about self-expectations: How far did they expect to reach in school? What did they hope and expect to be when they grew up?

In a follow-up study (using a similar IV strategy to the original) we find that the difference in educational and vocational aspirations between currently sponsored children and their counterfactuals roughly corresponded to the actual impacts we had found in adulthood after sponsored children had grown up. But if aspirations are important to development, a number of questions remain:

via Measuring Hope: Guest post by Bruce Wydick | Impact Evaluations.

The SRF attack took place just hours after the failure of a round of mediated negotiations in Addis Ababa between the Sudanese government and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement-North. The talks were sponsored by the African Union.  About 40 armoured military vehicles took part in the attack, which was the largest in Sudan since the fighting in Darfur State. Umm Ruwaba has never been attacked by any of the rebels before.  Analysts believe that this is an attempt by the rebels to flare-up the conflict in the heart of Sudan to thwart the efforts of the government as it tries to deal with the resultant chaos. Ten people, including seven police officers, were killed in Saturday’s attack, according to the state-run media.  The conflict between the Sudanese government and Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement-North broke out in the summer of 2011. According to the New York Times, most of the rebels of this movement, which used to fight alongside the South Sudanese rebels before South Sudan gained its independence two years ago, come from the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State in Sudan. Most of the rebels of the Sudanese Revolutionary Front are from the states of Darfur, South Kurdofan and Blue Nile.

via Sudanese lash out at army for failing to face rebel attacks.  I love also the circular newspapering, where the New York Times is a source!

Life expectancy at birth is 55 years, mean years of schooling for adults over 25 is…. 1.3 years. Yikes!  GNI per capita in PPP terms is $1,222. ( Digression: This is because you can have someone work for you all day for a dollar, so all the personal services provided in the economy are revalued by PPP; GNI at market exchange rate is far lower, so as any visitor to Burkina know, you can have someone work on your hair for hours, but not purchase a jar of jam).

Burkina’s trend HDI seems, from the HDI website, to be about the same as the rest of Africa.  The country started from a very low base.  A landlocked country in the Sahel with neighbors who are not up to much, except for Ghana which is anglophone and has few ties to Burkina, means growth will likely be slow.

Government official growth policy is known as SCADD, and seems to be a typical hodgepodge document without any clearly communicated emphases.  I think if you asked any ordinary Burkinabè what the development strategy of the regime was, they would be hard-pressed to answer.  That may not be a bad thing; no development economist worth talking to would say that “the strategy” is out there waiting to be implemented.  But the lack of clear vision for pro-poor growth means there is an appearance of little accountability, and so reinforces a pervasive attitude that among the upper-reaches of the regime it is business as usual with corruption everywhere, and this is not a good recipe for promoting legitimacy and eventual regime transition.

Dès 2000, Salif Diallo, alors tout-puissant bras droit de Blaise Compaoré, avait demandé sa tête, sans succès. Diallo n’a cessé, durant la dernière décennie, de s’ériger en sentinelle face aux ambitions présumées du frère. Mais, à ce jeu, il a perdu. En 2008, il est envoyé très loin, à Vienne, en Autriche, où il est nommé ambassadeur. Il y restera trois ans. Depuis son retour, Diallo n’a pu que constater la mainmise accrue de son ennemi. C’est François, dit-on, qui fait et défait les ministres. Dans le gouvernement de Luc Adolphe Tiao, plusieurs de ses proches occupent des postes stratégiques : Lucien Marie Noël Bembamba (son beau-frère) à l’Économie et aux Finances ; Jérôme Bougouma (un cousin) à l’Administration territoriale et à la Sécurité ; Lamoussa Salif Kaboré (un vieil ami) aux Mines et à l’Énergie… D’autres de ses lieutenants jouent un rôle prépondérant au CDP depuis mars. Assimi Kouanda en est donc le patron officiel. Jean-Christophe Ilboudo est chargé des structures du parti et de la mobilisation des cadres. Gaston Soubeiga est le secrétaire administratif adjoint. Tous viennent de la Fedap-BC.

via Imprimer : Burkina Faso : François, l’autre Compaoré : JeuneAfrique.com.

In the initial study, the researchers provided each of two groups of wild monkeys with a box of maize corn dyed pink and another dyed blue. The blue corn was made to taste repulsive and the monkeys soon learned to eat only pink corn. Two other groups were trained in this way to eat only blue corn.  A new generation of infants were later offered both colours of food — neither tasting badly — and the adult monkeys present appeared to remember which colour they had previously preferred. Almost every infant copied the rest of the group, eating only the one preferred colour of corn.  The crucial discovery came when males began to migrate between groups during the mating season.

The researchers found that of the ten males who moved to groups eating a different coloured corn to the one they were used to, all but one switched to the new local norm immediately.

via ‘When in Rome’: Monkeys found to conform to social norms.

Strange because Umm Ruwaba is further east than El Obeid and En Nahud… how on earth did they get past those places?  And why not attack El Obeid itself?

Fighters with the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, attacked the town of Umm Ruwaba in North Kordofan State, which lies between Darfur to the west and Khartoum to the northeast, on Saturday. The assault is a rare venture outside Darfur and South Kordofan State for the rebels.

via Rebels From Darfur Attack in North Kordofan State – NYTimes.com.

Plowing is recognized across many rural societies as a gendered activity, with men controlling the plow .  Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2013) have suggested that there exists a strong correlation between the suitability of soils and climate for the plow and the likelihood that a social group from that region, centuries later, will be less favorable to women across a range of rights and responsibilities.  They follow Boserup in arguing that the technology of the plow favored persons with upper body strength: the plowman must bear down on the plow as the oxen pull it through the soil.  Because the plow had such enormous potential to raise productivity (oxen and plowman could do in one day what previously might have taken weeks), men reaped disproportionate rewards following its introduction.  These rewards were, the argument goes, not shared with women, but rather used to cement structures and norms of male dominance.

I noted recently that Michael Pollan has a new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.  The blurb: “The premise of this book is that cooking — defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques  people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and rink — is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we do.”  So… since women are masters of cooking like men are masters of plowing, are gender rights better in places where cooking would yield relatively high returns?