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26 Oct 03:17

Women Authors on African Politics Syllabi

by dadakim

syllabiHow many women authors are included in syllabi for courses on African Politics? The short answer is: very few.

I decided a few weeks ago to write a new syllabus for an undergraduate course on Contemporary African Politics. As I did the first time I designed a syllabus, I went online to look at those written by colleagues at other colleges and universities. It just so happens that this exploration coincided with a symposium on the gender gap at The Monkey Cage blog, which featured posts on the [lack of] citation of works by female scholars in the academic literature, with a mention about works by female scholars [not] making it onto graduate course reading lists. So, I was paying close attention to the female scholars on the African Politics syllabi I read.

I found so few women authors on the syllabi I came across that I decided to begin compiling a list of all the articles/chapters/etc. assigned in African Politics courses as represented in the syllabi I could find online. I wanted to identify the few women authors and scholars who were being included to help me with my syllabus, and also to share with others. I was also curious if there were any patterns in who included female authors on their syllabi. Were female scholars more likely to do so? Were newer faculty more likely to do so?

I have only reviewed 10 syllabi, and the professors who wrote those syllabi are not representative of the universe of African Politics instructors (see the paragraph on methods below). This is a first crack at the limited information I have thus far, and I hope to collect more information and answer the questions I posed above. With that caveat, here is what I found:

The average proportion of assigned readings on African Politics Syllabi by women authors was 11.6%. One syllabus didn’t have a single reading that was authored solely by a woman or women. One syllabus’s proportion of women writers was as low as 2% (it had only one reading), and the highest proportion of readings written by women was 35%.

The syllabus with 35% readings written by women was sufficiently remarkable (half of the syllabi were in the single digits) that I reached out to the instructor to get some insights. Aili Tripp is Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been teaching African Politics for over twenty years. Over the phone earlier this week, I told her about what I had learned thus far from the syllabi collected and asked her about her approach to syllabus design and whether including women writers was a conscious decision from the outset.

Tripp said that she updates her syllabus each time she teaches the course, to include new pieces. (Given the growing number of women scholars writing on African Politics, this seems like one good way to increase the proportion of women writers in course readings). Tripp said she wasn’t that conscious about the proportions of writers by gender, but that she’s always looked to include women’s voices when teaching her class and that most important to her has been to include African perspectives. She includes on her syllabus not only scholarship by African women, but also memoirs, articles in the press, and video clips of African women thinkers (i.e., Nigerian economist, current Finance Minister of Nigeria and former World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) on her syllabus. Particularly if we are interested in the voices of African women, who represent a small but growing sector of published scholarship on African politics, it will be important to consider multiple ways of bringing their insights into the classroom.

Here are the “methods” or rules I followed in coming up with the numbers you see above: The non-representative sample of African Politics undergraduate course syllabi includes those designed by: Clark Gibson (UCSD), Guy Grossman (UPenn), Nahomi Ichino (Harvard), Carl Levan (American University), Staffan Lindberg (U-Florida), John McCauley (U-Maryland), Daniel Posner (UCLA), Andrew Reynolds (UNC), Alex Scacco (NYU), and Aili Tripp (UW-Madison). All syllabi were for courses taught in the last five years (2008-2013). Each syllabus entry counted as one assigned reading, regardless of length. For example, if a professor wrote “Herbst, Chapters 1 & 2”, that would count as one assigned reading; if a professor wrote for the next day of class “Herbst, Chapter 3”, that would count as a separate assigned reading. Articles without bylines – often, this included readings from The Economist – were not included in the count. When an author’s gender wasn’t obvious to me, I looked online for more information about the author. Co-authored papers by both female and male authors were assigned a fraction where the number of women authors was divided by the total number of authors. For example, the article by Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea,” counted as “half” of an article in the number of readings written by women. In calculating the ratio of women authors featured on syllabi, the total number of readings was the denominator and the numerator was the sum of readings written by women. Assigned readings were not limited to academic articles or textbooks written by scholars but also included works written by non-scholars; often, these were chapters from books by journalists formerly posted in Africa or from memoirs.

For those of you looking for articles and book chapters written by women to include on your syllabus, here are readings that appeared on more than one syllabus:

  • Boone, Catherine. 1998. “The Making of a Rentier Class: Wealth Accumulation and Political Control in Senegal.”
  • Chazan, Naomi. 1999. “The Diversity of African Politics: Trends and Approaches.”
  • Manning, Carrie. 2005. “Assessing African Party Systems after the Third Wave.”
  • Schmidt, Elizabeth. 2005. “Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa).”
  • Widner. Jennifer. 1994. “Political Reform in Anglophone and Francophone African Countries.”

There are newer pieces written by women scholars that I think will catch on, but one problem is a lag. Though there is an increasing number of women studying African politics (judged by the increasing number of women I see in the room at related meetings, see more below), our research takes time to get published, time to get read by others, and then others have to take the time to update their syllabi, and whenever we add something new, we invariably have to take something old off – no simple task.

Although Aili Tripp sees some improvement from an earlier survey she did of a similar nature about 8 years ago for a Politics & Gender article, it is remarkable to me after having attended the most recent meeting of the African Politics Conference Group (APCG) at the American Political Science Association annual meeting that there is such a strong disconnect between what I saw in the room (APCG is chaired by a woman, its newly elected officers are all women, and all of this year’s APCG article and dissertation awards went to women) and what I am reading on our syllabi.

I am going to cast a wider net, so please, forward me your syllabi or those of others teaching African Politics (or feel free to post links in the comments). I also plan to use the same information to look at the proportion of readings assigned that were written by African authors. In addition to my curiosity of whether there are patterns in assigning readings by African authors, I wonder if doing so also relates to the number of women authors on a syllabus. For example: is there a substitution effect whereby assigning more African authors means assigning fewer readings by women authors since so many African authors assigned in African Politics courses are men?


Tagged: african politics, aili tripp, gender, monkey cage, syllabus, teaching
23 Oct 03:54

Google cars versus public transit: the US’s problem with public goods

by Ethan

I have an excellent job at a great university. I have a home that I love in a community I’ve lived in for two decades where I have deep ties of family and friendship. Unfortunately, that university and that hometown are about 250 kilometers from one another. And so, I’ve become an extreme commuter, traveling three or four hours each way once or twice a week so I can spend time with my students 3-4 days a week and with my wife and young son the rest of the time.

America is a commuter culture. Averaged out over a week, my commute is near the median American experience. Spend forty minutes driving each way to your job and you’ve got a longer commute than I in the weeks I make one trip to Cambridge. But, of course, I don’t get to go home every night. I stay two to three nights a week at a bed and breakfast in Cambridge, where my “ludicrously frequent guest” status gets me a break on a room. I spend less this way than I did my first year at MIT, when I rented an apartment that I never used on weekends or during school vacations.

This is not how I would choose to live if I could bend space and time, and I spend a decent amount of time trying to optimise my travel through audiobooks, podcasts, and phone calls made while driving. I also gripe about the commute probably far too often to my friends, who are considerate if not entirely sympathetic. (It’s hard to be sympathetic to a guy who has the job he wants, lives in a beautiful place, and simply has a long drive a few times a week.)

Hearing my predicament, one friend prescribed a solution: “You need a Google self-driving car!” The friend in question is a top programmer for a world-leading game company, and her enthusiasm for a technical solution parallels advice I’ve gotten from my technically oriented friends, who offer cutting edge technology that is either highly unlikely to materially affect my circumstances, or would improve some aspect of my commute rather than change its core nature. (Lots of friends forwarded me Elon Musk’s hyperloop proposal. And lots more have suggested tools I can use on my iPhone so that a synthetic voice will read my students’ assignments aloud while I drive.)

“I don’t want a Google car,” I tell her. “I want a train.”

In much of the world, a train wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to ask for. New England has a population density comparable to parts of Europe where commuting by train is commonplace. I live ten kilometers north of downtown Pittsfield, MA, which lies on a rail line that connects Albany, NY with Boston. There is, in fact, one train per day from Pittsfield to Boston. It takes almost six hours to make a journey that can take me as little as 2.5 hours (if there’s no traffic) to drive, and operates at a time that makes it impossible for me to use it for business travel. I want a European train, a Japanese train, not necessarily a bullet train, but something that could get me from the county seat of Berkshire county to the state capitol in under two hours.

Such a train exists on some of the proposed maps for high speed rail service in New England. But given the current government shutdown, and more broadly, a sense that government services are contracting rather than expanding, it’s very hard to imagine such a line ever being built. In fact, it’s much easier for me to imagine my semi-autonomous car speeding down the Mass Pike as part of a computer-controlled platoon than boarding a train in my little city and disembarking in a bigger one.

There’s something very odd about a world in which it’s easier to imagine a futuristic technology that doesn’t exist outside of lab tests than to envision expansion of a technology that’s in wide use around the world. How did we reach a state in America where highly speculative technologies, backed by private companies, are seen as a plausible future while routine, ordinary technologies backed by governments are seen as unrealistic and impossible?

The irony of the Google car for my circumstances is that it would be inferior in every way to a train. A semi-autonomous car might let me read or relax behind the wheel, but it would be little faster than my existing commute and as sensitive to traffic, which is the main factor that makes some trips 2.5 hours and some 4 hours. Even if my Google car is a gas-sipping Prius or a plug-in hybrid, it will be less energy efficient than a train, which achieves giant economies of scale in fuel usage even at higher speeds than individual vehicles. It keeps me sealed in my private compartment, rather than giving me an opportunity to see friends who make the same trip or meet new people.

There’s a logical response to my whiny demands for an easier commute: if there were a market for such a service, surely such a thing would exist. And if train service can’t be profitably provided between Pittsfield and Boston, why should Massachusetts taxpayers foot the bill for making my life marginally easier?

This line of reasoning became popular in the US during the Reagan/Thatcher revolution and has remained influential ever since. What government services can be privatized should be, and government dollars should go only towards services, like defense, that we can’t pay for in private markets. As the US postal service has reminded us recently, they remain open during the government shutdown because they are mandated by Congress to be revenue neutral. Ditto for Amtrak, which subsidizes money-losing long distance routes with profitable New England services and covers 88% of expenses through revenue, not through government support. Our obsession with privatization is so thorough in the US that we had no meaningful debate in the US about single payer healthcare, a system that would likely be far cheaper and more efficient than the commercial health insurance mandated under the Affordable Care Act – even when governments provide services more efficiently than private markets, the current orthodoxy dictates that private market solutions are the way to go.

The problem with private market solutions is that they often achieve a lower level of efficiency than public solutions. Medicare has tremendous power to negotiate with drug manufacturers, which brings down healthcare costs. Private insurers have less leverage, and we all pay higher prices for drugs as a result, especially those whose healthcare isn’t paid for my a government or private organization and who have no negotiating power. The current system works very well for drug companies, but poorly for anyone who needs and uses healthcare (which is to say, for virtually everyone.)

It’s possible that the same argument applies to transportation, though the argument is less direct. It’s not that a federal or state government can provide train service to western MA at a cost that’s substantially lower than a private company (though they might – Medicare’s aggressive audit process helps keep costs down by minimizing waste.) It’s more that transportation has ancillary financial benefits that are hard for anyone other than a state to claim.

Real estate in Boston is insanely expensive, either to buy or to rent. That’s because lots of people want to live and work in Boston and the supply of real estate is relatively scarce compared to demand. In much of the rest of Massachusetts (let’s say, anywhere west of I-495), jobs are relatively scare and real estate is plentiful. Cities like Worcester, Holyoke, Springfield, Greenfield and Pittsfield experienced peak population decades ago and have been on the decline ever since. These cities and their surrounding communities are nice places to live, though they suffer from a shrinking population and tax base.

If there were a high-speed rail corridor from Boston to Albany, through Worcester, Springfield and Pittsfield, we would expect real estate in those cities to become more valuable as people fed up with Boston rents moved to smaller cities and the countryside, using high speed rail to commute to schools and jobs. This would have the salubrious effect of increasing the tax base for the most vulnerable communities in MA, though it might decrease the tax base in the most densely settled parts of Massachusetts. Then again, lowered density might be a good thing – few people stuck on I-90 or I-93 on their way into Boston on a Monday morning think the city and its suburbs works especially well at current density.

This model of rail turning undesirable land into desirable land is basically the model that enabled westward expansion during the 19th century – the US government and rail companies struck a deal that shared ownership of land along the new rail lines. Railroad companies sold land to new immigrants and to those willing to trade urban density for rural opportunity to finance their construction, and the government used revenues from land sales to fill public coffers.

But western MA is not unclaimed land. High speed rail will make some landowners wealthy while leaving others relatively untouched. The only entity that can capture the value generated by an infrastructural improvement like high speed rail is a government – local, state or federal – which can claim a share of those increased property values through taxation. If high speed rail makes it possible to live in Springfield and work in Boston, it might – over time – generate enough traffic to make running the service profitable. In the short term, however, we’d see Springfield better able to pay for schools and public services, a not insignificant development for a community that’s facing severe economic problems.

Who loses? Residents of Boston and surrounding suburbs. We’d expect rents and property values to decrease somewhat as demand lessens. And we’d be generating public debt through a bond issue, much as when citizens throughout Massachusetts subsidized the Big Dig, despite the fact that the massive infrastructure project did little to benefit residents of Pittsfield, on the other side of the state. We would be engaged in a transfer or wealth from the wealthiest part of our state to some of the poorest, hoping that, in the long run, our poorer communities would become more self-sufficient and sustainable, and would do a better job of supporting the state as a whole.

Is such an investment worthwhile? I don’t know – it’s the sort of issue one would expect to debate, trying to determine whether future spending is likely to generate significant enough economic gains that a long term investment is worthwhile. But we seem to be losing the ability to have these long-term debates. Experts warn of crumbling infrastructure throughout the US, as exemplified by broken bridges and collapsing freeways. A quick trip to any city in the Middle East or Asia is a stark reminder of how antiquated most of our public transit systems are, in those places where they exist.

The US has a problem with public goods. After thirty years of hearing that government can do nothing right and that the private sector is inevitably more efficient, my generation and those younger tend not to look towards the government to solve problems. Instead, we look to the private sector, sometimes towards social ventures that promise to turn a profit while doing good, more often towards fast-growth private companies, where we hope their services will make the world a better place. Google can feel like a public good – like a library, it’s free for everyone to use, and it may have social benefits by increasing access to information. But it’s not a public good – we don’t have influence over what services Google does and doesn’t provide, and our investment is an investment of attention as recipients of ads, not taxation.

It’s unthinkable for most Americans to posit a government-built Google, as the French government proposed some years ago. But it’s likely that long established parts of our civic landscape, like libraries and universities, would be similarly unthinkable as public ventures if we were to start them today. (You want to lend intellectual property at zero cost to consumers who might copy and redistribute it, and you’d like local government to pay for it? What sort of socialist are you?!)

This unwillingness to consider the creation of new public goods restricts the solution space we consider. We look for solutions to the crisis in journalism but aren’t willing to consider national license models like the one that supports the BBC, or strong, funded national broadcasters like NHK or Deutsche Welle. We build markets to match consumers with health insurance but won’t consider expanding Medicare into a single-payer health system. We look towards MOOCs and underpaid lecturers rather than considering fundamental reforms to the structure of state universities. We consider a narrow range of options and complain when we find only lousy solutions.

My student Rodrigo Davies has been writing about civic crowdfunding, looking at cases where people join together online and raise money for projects we’d expect a government to otherwise provide. On the one hand, this is an exciting development, allowing neighbors to raise money and turn a vacant lot into a community garden quickly and efficiently. But we’re also starting to see cases where civic crowdfunding challenges services we expect governments to provide, like security. Three comparatively wealthy neighborhoods in Oakland have used crowdfunding to raise money for private security patrols to respond to concerns about crime in their communities. Oakland undoubtably has problems with crime, in part due to significant budget cuts in the past decade that have shrunk the police force.

It’s reasonable that communities that feel threatened would take steps to increase their safety. But if those steps focus only on communities wealthy enough to pay for their own security and don’t consider broader issues of security in the community, they are likely to have corrosive effects in the long term. Oakland as a whole may become more dangerous as select communities become safer. And people paying for private security are likely to feel less obligation to paying for high-quality policing for the city as a whole if they feel that private security is keeping them safe – look at the resentment people without kids and people whose kids are homeschooled or in private school express towards funding public schools.

On the one hand, I appreciate the innovation of crowdfunding, and think it’s done remarkable things for some artists and designers. On the other hand, looking towards crowdfunding to solve civic problems seems like a woefully unimaginative solution to an interesting set of problems. It’s the sort of solution we’d expect at a moment where we’ve given up on the ability to influence our government and demand creative, large-scale solutions to pressing problems, where we look to new technologies for solutions or pool our funds to hire someone to do the work we once expected our governments to do.

23 Oct 03:25

Governments asked to repeal insult laws

by Anthony Kasunda

Trapence: She should sign the declarationThe Malawi Government has been asked to heed the call to repeal insult and defamation laws that limit media freedom and freedom of expression. Centre for the Development of People (Cedep) executive director Gift Trapence, said this on Saturday at the Forum on the Participation of NGOs in the 54th Session of the African Commission for Human [&hellip

The post Governments asked to repeal insult laws appeared first on The Nation Online.

21 Oct 10:40

a foreigner’s take from inside the Malawi budget office

by dadakim

There wasn’t much for me to do when I first joined the Budget Division of Malawi’s Ministry of Finance back in 2006… One of the very first things I worked on was an attempt to reconcile the difference between expenditure ceilings set by my department and actual reports of expenditure from the Accountant General’s department.

“paying for gas in Malawi” by skuarua, shared with cc license via Flickr

That’s the start of a blog post by Matt Collin, currently a Research Officer at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies and formerly (2006-2008) an ODI Fellow working as a Budget Officer in Malawi’s Ministry of Finance. Matt reflects on his experience with Malawi’s Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS), the software platform used to transfer funds from the Ministry of Finance to other ministries, who in turn use the platform to make payments:

I quickly noticed that IFMIS-generated reports seriously deviated from what was being approved by the Budget Division, sometimes even showing expenditure which was above and beyond what had been mandated by our department.

At my director’s prompting, I visited the relevant department at the Account General’s to request more detailed reports from IFMIS. The likely culprit was some of data problem, and I was curious to get to the bottom of it, seeing the whole exercise as a problem with some sort of technical solution. While the civil servants I spoke to at the AG were friendly enough and agreed to send me reports, upon my return to the Ministry of Finance it was later made clear to me that the AG wasn’t too fond of this unknown fresh-faced mzungu making random requests. Not long after, more pressing work diverted my attention, and this particular issue faded into the background.

Matt writes these reflections in the wake of Malawi’s Cashgate scandal, where evidence continues to mount on the great theft of public funds through the IFMIS.

There is one excerpt in particular from Matt’s blog post that stuck with me:

…when finance systems don’t work properly, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between corruption and incompetence.

That bit underscores an important challenge in investigating financial discrepancies: do you accuse someone of being clever (and stealing) or stupid (and not equipped to do a job)? Either way, you’re insulting someone. That’s not an easy situation to be in when you’re a foreigner — and that’s one reason why the fact that forensic auditors are being flown in from Britain sits a bit uneasy with me. I try to think about how governments of developed countries deal with financial irregularities — I can’t remember a recent scandal where forensic auditors from another country were flown in. I recognize that pervasive cases might require external (non-governmental) auditors, but how “external”? Does it require auditors from outside the country (international auditing firms have branches in Malawi)? If so, would a group of Zambian auditors not be far enough removed? Why does corruption in Malawi require British oversight in the postcolonial period?


Tagged: auditing, cashgate, corruption, finance, ifmis, malawi, matt collin, mzungu, postcolonial
15 Oct 23:19

Citadels of learning, Boko Haram’s new slaughter fields – By Alkasim Abdulkadir

by AfricanArgumentsEditor
Alkasim-Abdulkadir

Alkasim Abdukadir: Boko Haram’s impact on education and its attendant infrastructure has set back the North Eastern corner several years.

The insurgency in Nigeria’s North Eastern corner has once more brought into sharp relief the precarious balance between life and death in the region. Scores of people are killed on a daily basis and the frequency has also ensured a sense of ‘tragedy fatigue’ amongst the country’s populace.

The sustained escalation of attacks by the Nigerian army on insurgent hideouts has motivated the insurgents to retaliate, targeting areas regarded as soft targets like schools. This became more notable after the offensive at Kasiya forest, which left about 16 soldiers dead alongside 150 insurgents; one of the most deadly face offs between the Nigerian Army and the insurgents.

But the Gujba emirate in Yobe State had not previously seen the kind of the violence that tore up the College of Agriculture located in the sleepy town 2 weeks ago. The attack at Gujba saw the insurgents round up scores of students and shoot them dead. With phone networks switched off by the authorities it became impossible to call for help from Damaturu, some 30 kilometers away. Most of the dead were discovered the next morning beside the fence of the institution – the slaughter lasting for almost two hours.

One of the survivors, Idris, who was widely quoted, said they started gathering students into groups outside, and then they opened fire and killed one group before moving onto the next and killing them. According to the Provost of the College, those killed were between the ages of 18 and 22. This also shows that the demography of the victims of the insurgents is changing; they are now focusing on young people.

The most horrific and gut-wrenching of these attacks was the one that occurred in the town of Mamudo near Potiskum in Yobe State. On 6th July, insurgents attacked a secondary school in Mamudo and killed 41 students and their teacher. The average secondary school leaving age in Nigeria is around 18, which means the average age of those who were killed is around 15. This exemplifies the fact that the war now being waged is often against young defenseless people.

It is interesting to note that the targets have metamorphosed over time and the violence is settling into a pattern – from policemen (who were the initial targets) to churches, government officials and administrative buildings to soldiers, markets and mosques, before most recently focusing on commuters on the highway and educational facilities.

According to Lucy Freeman, Amnesty International’s deputy Africa director, “Hundreds have been killed in these horrific attacks, thousands of children have been forced out of schools across communities in northern Nigeria and many teachers have been forced to flee for their safety,”

“Attacks against schoolchildren, teachers and school buildings demonstrate an absolute disregard for the right to life and the right to education.”

In its report Education under attack in Nigeria, Amnesty International said this year alone at least 70 teachers and scores of pupils have been slaughtered and many others wounded. Some 50 schools have been burned or seriously damaged and more than 60 others have been forced to close.

 

The total number of those killed at Gujba came to 90 students, one of the most violent attacks on an educational institution since the insurgency began.

On 16 May, BH gunmen fired on a dormitory in Damaturu, killing seven students and two teachers. On 17 May BH opened fire on an examination hall at Ansaruddeen Private School in the Jajeri area of Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, killing 15 students. According to Yobe State officials BH has burnt down 205 schools in the state in the past year.

In Adamawa State too, one of the state’s initially under the veil of the State of Emergency, last year in the town of Mubi, the Federal Polytechnic at its Wuro Patuje off-campus residence was consumed by the violence. Though the incident happened on the 1st of October 2012, a year later it is still not clear whether the cause was student cultists, a student union election gone wrong or a soft target attack by Boko Haram insurgents.

The greatest fall out of this tragedy is its impact on the state of education in a region already grappling with low student enrolment. Already in Borno State, the epicenter of the insurgency, an estimated 15,000 thousand students have been forced out of school. The army, already overstretched, cannot guarantee the safety of those who seek an education nor guard all the schools in the states of Yobe and Borno.

In major Northern capitals, the ubiquitous Almajiri child – the itinerant Koranic scholar – is a familiar feature, with kids as young as 3, armed with bowls, begging for food and abandoning the Koranic study for which they have embarked. The Almajiri children aside, Nigeria as a country already has a globally high number out of school children, with the figure hovering around 10 million.

With the recurring attacks, the impact on education and its attendant infrastructure has set back the North Eastern corner several years. But most tragic are the lives the insurgents have cut short – young Nigerians whose only crime was to seek an education.

Alkasim Abdulkadir, is an international freelance journalist and editor at www.citizensplatform.net, alkasim.abdulkadir@gmail.com

15 Oct 14:33

when your research population organizes against you, NYC sex worker edition

by dadakim

We wondered about veracity of Venkatesh['s] “findings”—he said he had “followed” 270 sex worker subjects in NYC but none of our membership had ever been contacted by him nor knew of anyone who had been—so we carefully examined the investigations he said he had done with sex workers over a ten year period. We found that his “research history” simply did not add up. Claims in articles online, in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and on the Freakonomics blog regarding the dates, locations and numbers of people in his research were wildly inconsistent. His conclusions, for example about large numbers sex workers advertising on Facebook, were easily shown by other researchers and commentators to be incorrect. Other conclusions such as the fiction that “there’s usually a 25% surcharge” to have sex without a condom not only bore no relationship to reality but also endangered sex workers and public health programs working with them.

We were so concerned by what we uncovered that in October 2011 we wrote a letter to the Columbia IRB to the Columbia University Institutional Review Board (IRB) and to the Sociology Department asking for some clarity about Sudhir Venkatesh’s research. Specifically, we asked for the research project titles, dates of research, and IRB approval numbers for each of the years he claimed to have conducted research while at Columbia University. We also wished to make Columbia University’s IRB and the Sociology Department aware of that the research appeared to create additional harms and risks for sex workers in the New York area. Our action is an example of the degree to which communities of sex workers have organized and the degree to which we will question research that we find harmful. We are no longer a “gift that keeps on giving” for Venkatesh, we are a community that speaks for itself.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University. The quote above is from a post on the The Sex Worker’s Outreach Project NYC (SWOP-NYC) blog. SWOP-NYC challenges claims made by Venkatesh about NYC sex workers in his published research, on the Freakonomics blog, and in Wired magazine. In a follow-up post, SWOP-NYC goes on to dismiss participant observation as “a bizarre form of research” that is “a holdover from a previous era”. Ouch.


Tagged: ethics, participant observation, replication, research, sex workers, sudhir venkatesh, swop-nyc
12 Oct 14:28

another intervention gone wrong: decreasing women’s civic participation

by dadakim

…this paper investigates two potential explanations for the gender gap in participation: asymmetric costs to participation and deficits of civic information…I examine whether increasing civic information and skills can close the gender gap in civic participation. I find it cannot – and the particular intervention I study even exacerbates the problem. Experimental evidence reveals that a randomly assigned civic education intervention in Mali increased civic participation among men while causing a decrease among women. Focus groups and interviews suggest that, in a place where women are traditionally unwelcome actors in the public sphere, the intervention heightened the salience of women’s participation thus increasing social costs to participation. As evidence of a more general phenomenon, I show that socio-economic determinants of gender discrimination within Mali help explain cross-country variation in the gender gap in civic participation on the African continent.

That is from the introduction of a working paper, Why women participate less in civic activity: Evidence from Mali, by Jessica Gottlieb to be discussed at next week’s MGAPE (Midwest Group in African Political Economy) meeting, hosted by Indiana University care of Jen Brass, one of MGAPE’s founding members.

I hope to be updating from the meeting next Friday. The other papers on the docket are:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Related haba na haba posts:


Tagged: civic engagement, gender, jen brass, Jessica Gottlieb, Mali, mgape
12 Oct 08:35

why Banda dissolved Malawi’s cabinet

by dadakim

Just a couple of hours ago, Malawi President Joyce Banda dissolved her cabinet. The official statement read:

“Her Excellency Dr Joyce Banda, President of the Republic of Malawi, in exercise of the powers conferred upon her by Section 94 (1) and Section 95 (2) of the Constitution of the Republic of Malawi, has today, 10th October 2013, dissolved Cabinet. Following the dissolution of the cabinet, all ministerial matters will revert to the Presidency through Controlling Officers. Her Excellency the President will announce a new Cabinet in due course.”

The dissolution of cabinet occurred the same day there was a demonstration in the capital, reported in The Nation (Malawi’s major daily newspaper):

The marchers carried placards with the words ‘Joyce Banda walephera kuyendetsa dziko la Malawi’ [Joyce Banda has failed to govern this country] ‘Mphwiyo chira msanga uzafotokoze’ [Mphwiyo should explain the looting] ‘Akulu a boma onse apume panthawi imene kubaku kukufufuzidwa’ [Top government officials should resign to pave way for investigations] among others.

The dissolution of cabinet and the preceding protest followed revelations of a corruption scandal, starting in late September about cash being stolen from government. To give some background, Malawi uses an Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) payment platform, and it is alleged that through this platform, government accountants had been making fraudulent payments and stockpiling cash in their homes and vehicles. The scandal is referred to as “Cashgate“, and has been widely reported on in Malawi in the past few weeks.

Prior to arrests associated with the Cashgate scandal, Malawi’s Budget Director Paul Mphwiyo was shot on September 13, after having received numerous death threats in connection with his cracking down on fraudulent government contracts and embezzling loopholes. Mphwiyo was only appointed budget director in July of this year.

Much of these developments surrounding the Cashgate scandal unfolded during President Joyce Banda’s 23-day trip out of the country, partly spent at the UN General Assembly meeting. During her absence, news and rumors circulated that the corruption of the Cashgate scandal reached high up into the administration, and there were reports that President Banda had known about the embezzling as early as five months ago. A major opponent for President Banda in the upcoming May 2014 tripartite elections, MCP Presidential Candidate Lazarus Chakwera, publicly called for her to cut her trip short and return to Malawi to deal with the Cashgate saga. The civil society leader who organized today’s demonstration had also previously called for the President to return home early, and even went so far as to call for her resignation.

There was pressure from donors to do something about the Cashgate scandal as early as the days following the shooting of Budget Director Mphwiyo. In a jointly released statement, major donors — including the British High Commission and the US Embassy — said:

We are greatly concerned about the reported events surrounding the shooting of the Budget Director Mr Paul Mphwiyo. These are worrying developments that potentially risk Malawi’s stability, rule of law and reputation. We urge swift and credible investigations that leave no stone unturned, allowing the investigating authorities to act without fear, intimidation or hindrance. Should the Malawi authorities require international assistance to their investigations into this and other cases, we are willing to respond.

There has been growing concern in Malawi about corruption. We welcome the government’s acceptance that much more needs to be done. We encourage further political will to support the determination of those prepared within government and in state institutions to act against corruption, building on the recently announced measures to strengthen accounting systems and controlling measures. We encourage a strong coalition with others in Malawi society to ensure success and confirm our continued support to them in order that we achieve results.

The European Union is set to release $39 million in budget support to Malawi in December, but warned the government that it would not release the funds before these budget concerns were dealt with. The German ambassador warned his country was closely following events to determine future support.

In sum, it is not at all surprising that President Banda dissolved cabinet. There was pressure from donors, civil society, ordinary Malawians, all while her political opponents have been using the scandal to demonstrate her weakness in governing the country in the run-up to the elections. If the EU payment does not come through in December (the start of Malawi’s hunger season), Banda stands no chance of winning the elections in May 2014.

The question is, where does she go from here? Malawian academic Boniface Dulani had already pointed out Banda’s original cabinet was largely a recycling of ministers from previous administrations. Though sacking her cabinet is one step in the right direction, it will certainly not be sufficient to appease civil society, donors, or ordinary Malawians. She will have to make haste in resolving the Cashgate scandal, especially if she expects to stay in office come May.

—————————————————–

Writer Jimmy Kainja participated in the demonstration that preceded the cabinet dissolution. He posted a photo of his own placard to Twitter.

I was at the demos today. The placard asks Lipenga Finance Min to resign. I hope he won't be back in the new cabinet http://t.co/AjmYM9Pxi9
Kainja Jimmy (@jkainja) October 10, 2013


31 Jul 13:35

ethnicity and opinions on male circumcision, newly/finally published research

by dadakim

Last month a paper I wrote with Michelle Poulin, “Ethnic identity, region and attitudes towards male circumcision in a high HIV-prevalence country”, was published in Global Public Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice. Though the title probably reads a bit specific and perhaps as even uninteresting, the paper’s findings are somewhat controversial — controversial because we show evidence of a potential problem for male circumcision as HIV prevention tool. We find that ethnic identity can shape how one views male circumcision. More specifically, the data show that people from ethnic groups that don’t typically practice male circumcision have negative opinions toward circumcision.

Here is the paper’s abstract (forgive the British English–GPH is published in the UK):

We study how considerations of male circumcision (MC) as both a favourable practice and as protective against HIV are linked with ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa, where many ethnic groups do not traditionally circumcise. We focus on Malawi, a country with a high HIV prevalence but low MC prevalence. Survey data from a population-based random sample in rural Malawi (N =3400) were analysed for ethnoregional patterns in attitudes towards MC. We used logit regression models to measure how reported circumcision status, region of residence and ethnic identity relate to attitudes towards circumcision. Overall, Malawians reported more negative than positive opinions about MC, but attitudes towards circumcision varied by ethnicity and region. The implications for agencies and governments aggressively scaling up the provision of MC are clear; acceptance of circumcision as a tool for HIV prevention could be low in societies divided by ethnoregional identities that also shape the practice of circumcision.

This paper was rejected by seven different journals before we sent it to GPH. I have not learned to love rejection, but I have learned to pick up the pieces and move on. In the case of this paper, we took what little feedback we received and try to improve the manuscript.

There was some feedback, however, that I didn’t quite know what to do with. At a journal not-to-be-named, we received two positive reviews from reviewers, and a long list of problems with the manuscript from the editorial board, which ended with:

The paper is authored by two experts from Texas, none from Malawi. A Malawian co-author would have provided valuable insights not otherwise obtainable.

Has anyone else ever received something like that in a review?


Tagged: ethnicity, HIV, hiv/aids, malawi, male circumcision, Michelle Poulin
31 Jul 13:35

summer reading

by dadakim

This summer has been fantastic in terms of getting to read. I don’t know whether I can attribute that to an improved environment, not having an opportunity to watch TV at night, or because of the great many interesting books available on Kindle from my public library, but I’m grateful all the same.

“Forbes Library” taken March 12, 2005 by Kris, shared with cc license via Flickr

What I’ve read thus far (yes, I’m late to the game on quite a few of these):

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (best thing I’ve read in years, by the way)
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss
The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo

What I hope to read/finish reading before the summer ends:

Ghana must go by Taiye Selasi
My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
Heterosexual Africa? by Marc Epprecht
Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous by Dorothy Hodgson

Do haba na haba readers have any recommendations from their summer reading lists?


31 Jul 13:35

friends don’t let friends take Lariam, but what about pregnant friends?

by dadakim

“Lariam” by Francesco Terzini, shared with cc license via Flickr

The New York Times reported on Monday’s announcement by the US Federal Drug Administration that mefloquine hydrochloride — aka Lariam — “must carry the so-called black box warning on its label because of the danger that the drug could cause serious neurological and psychiatric side effects, some of which can become permanent.” For those who don’t know, Lariam is often taken as prophylaxis against malaria.

In the decade I’ve traveled to malaria-endemic countries, I’ve never taken Lariam. Word on the street was that Lariam would make you have weird dreams (more like nightmares) and, for some people, hallucinations. What’s new about the news is the evidence that these side effects don’t necessarily stop when you stop taking Lariam, but instead can persist long after. (For the record, Jason Kerwin was way ahead of the curve on this one.)

Lariam is not the only anti-malarial prophylaxis one can take. When I travel to malaria-endemic countries (and am not pregnant) I always take Malarone, which has been shown in randomized double-blind trials to be as effective as Lariam as malarial prophylaxis, but to have fewer adverse effects. I always thought the travelers I met in malaria-endemic countries taking Lariam were a little odd, probably because of a pre-conceived bias I had based on what I already heard of Lariam. I wondered why they would take this drug that could potentially make them hallucinate in a place that is not their home? They could take Malarone, like me (but it is expensive). Or doxycycline, like some of my friends (but it makes people sensitive to the sun). Or something else.

In fact, because there are many options, I wondered why the news about Lariam even mattered — just take something else! One oft-cited upside to Lariam is that it’s taken weekly (instead of daily, like Malarone and Doxycycline). A friend also remarked on a Facebook posting of the NYT article, “Unfortunately [Lariam] is also the only anti-malarial safe (and effective) to take during pregnancy.” I wondered: is that true?

Malaria prevention during pregnancy is particularly important to me, as someone who has been pregnant in a malaria-endemic country and who fields questions from other potential travelers (and potentially pregnant travelers) about how to prevent getting a disease that puts an expectant mother’s life at risk (consequences of infection are more severe in non-immune women), as well as the life of her unborn child. From the World Health Organization (WHO):

Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to malaria as pregnancy reduces a woman’s immunity to malaria, making her more susceptible to malaria infection and increasing the risk of illness, severe anaemia and death. For the unborn child, maternal malaria increases the risk of spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, premature delivery and low birth weight – a leading cause of child mortality.

When I became pregnant, I stopped taking anti-malarials, exclusively wore long sleeves and pants, and never went out at dusk. It wasn’t ideal to take nothing, but my doctor said pregnancy was contraindicated with the anti-malarial I was taking and that I needed to quit. Since then I’ve wondered why there isn’t better prophylaxis for pregnant moms. Ward and colleagues describe the puzzle exactly in a 2007 article in THE LANCET Infectious Diseases:

Despite the clear need for safe and effective antimalarial drugs for use in pregnancy, the pharmaceutical industry is reluctant to develop drugs specifically for this indication, and in almost all cases in which a new drug is being developed, use in pregnancy is contraindicated.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends mefloquine (aka Lariam) for prophylaxis in pregnant women. Chloroquine has also been used in pregnant women, but has lost favor because of the rise of chloroquine-resistant strains of malaria. The CDC advises against pregnant women using Malarone, Doxycycline, and Primaquine.

So what does an expectant mother do if she plans to travel to a malaria-endemic country? Most docs I’ve interacted with simply say: don’t go. That advice is echoed by the CDC and the WHO. And, it isn’t just limited to the chance of catching malaria, but to other potential risks.

I wish I had more information. Ward et al. (2007) conclude their study by saying more research is needed:

Use of antimalarial drugs in pregnant women continues to be a problem in which the risks to the woman and fetus are not completely known. More information on the correct doses to be given to pregnant women is desperately needed. Large-scale trials and post-market surveillance systems to monitor drug safety in pregnancy are required.

Below is a list of some potentially useful resources. If haba na haba readers have any additional information, please share in the comments.


Tagged: anti-malarial, health, lariam, malaria, malarone, pregnancy, pregnant, prophylaxis, travel
23 Jun 02:16

Nairobi-Lusaka by road, Part I

by Ken Opalo
Dadakim

I've done this from Nairobi to Arusha, but that was nearly 10 years ago!

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The towering Uhuru Heights under construction in Dar es Salaam combines office space with residential apartments

Lusaka must be the only African capital (or major city) that is not a frenzied construction site. No new major roads are being constructed downtown. My quick look only found two new constructions of tall-ish buildings downtown. Lusaka feels really sleepy compared to the three other African capitals/major cities that I have been to in the last three months  - Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Accra. Dar es Salaam, in particular, is impressive. The city is constructing a rapid bus transportation system with a dedicated lane. Citywide construction of “office space cum residential apartments” mark the landscape promising a rich experience of downtown living for city residents in the near future (I wish Nairobi did more of this….)

The guy who runs the place I am staying at in Lusaka tells me that the only construction going on in town is of shopping malls and expensive residential houses that no one will afford. President Michael Sata, he argues, is bent on turning Zambia into Zimbabwe.

Michael Sata (a.k.a King Cobra) may not go the way of uncle Bob in Zim but he is definitely not the hope for change that Zambians voted for back in 2011. The growth in the economy (6% on average in the last decade, 7.3% last year) is barely trickling down and the ruling PF seems too preoccupied with killing the opposition to care. The old duo of loose-mouth Scott and erratic and forgetful Sata seem out of ideas on how to translate the country’s economic growth into wider socio-economic transformation. Indeed the African Development Bank in its latest report on the Zambian economy noted that “Zambia has yet to achieve significant gains in social and human development. The poverty headcount remains high, with about 60% of the population still living below the poverty line.” The economy is imbalanced, heavily dependent of capital-intensive copper mining that it barely taxes (80% of exports, but paltry 6% of revenue).

I was first here two years ago for reconnaissance research and have come back for more work. The pace is a nice change from Nairobi. It is also warmer than Nairobi at this time of the year (well at least before nightfall) – just after three years in California and seven months in Nairobi and I have become a little soft on cold weather (Moving to Chicago this fall will be fun!!)

This time round instead of doing air (Nairobi-Dar), rail (Dar-Kapiri) and road (Kapiri-Lusaka), I decided to do it all by road. This turned out to be a terrible idea.

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Sign post on the Tanzanian side of Namanga

Leaving Nairobi was itself an adventure. Despite Vanessa’s well-intentioned “alarm clock” calls to make sure I was up and ready by 5 AM, I missed my bus (I also missed my bus the first time, which is why I flew to Dar es Salaam). However, this time round it was my dad who was dropping me off and because he is a lot more daring that me and my brother, he decided to chase the bus (we were barely five minutes late, thank you very much Nairobi traffic at 5:45 AM). We did not catch my bus (Dar Express), but caught up with its competitor (name withheld for legal reasons, see below) after it had been stopped by the traffic police on Mombasa road for lack of a passenger license (it had a cargo license). Let’s just say that I was mightily impressed by my dad’s driving skills. I wish I were as daring.

So after the police got their cut (which I later found out was Kshs 5000, about US $60) we set off on the journey to Dar. The conductor on the new bus was kind enough to give me a free ride to Namanga (only Tanzanians can do this!!!) with hopes of catching up with Dar Express – in the end we did not, and I had to pay Kshs 2000 for the rest of the journey. The last time I was on the Nairobi-Arusha road was in 2009 when it was all no more than a dirt track that left you caked in thick red-brown dust. Now it is all paved. Nairobi-Namanga took a dizzying three hours. Just over an hour and a half after that we were in Arusha. After Arusha we sped to Moshi where we were caught up in the Prime Minister’s motorcade as he went to the city referral hospital to visit victims of the recent bombing at an opposition rally in Arusha (Arusha is the Chadema (Tanzania’s main opposition party) stronghold; but even in Dar the few people I spoke to about politics did not have nice things to say about the CCM government, especially with regard to rising inequality and corruption – yeah, I just totally Tom-Friedmanned that one).

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The 922 kilometer (573 miles) Nairobi-Dar road

I must say that the Nairobi-Dar road is impressive. Save for about one hour total of patches that were still being done about two hours outside of Moshi, most of the road is paved. Sometimes I forget how massive (and hence empty) Tanzania is. Namanga-Arusha is marked by flat plains, rolling hills and mountains. In the plains cattle rearing appeared to be the economic mainstay (unfortunately, with school age kids herding tens of cattle and sheep – wake up, Tanzania ministry of education). The hilly and mountainous areas mostly have maize and coffee. After the hills there are vast sisal plantations that stretch from horizon to horizon. Arusha and Moshi are the only big towns on the Namanga-Dar route. I particularly like Moshi (or may be I just don’t like touristy, expensive Arusha). It is a town with character, combining a provincial feeling with urban comforts. It also has some nice public monuments.

I rarely see weigh bridges on Kenyan roads (besides the infamous two in Gilgil and on Mombasa road) but in Tanzania they are plenty. And they are not just for the trucks, but also cater for passenger buses. Most of the trucks on the route were connecting Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern DRC to the port in Dar. The passengers on the bus consisted of businesspeople (mostly Kenyans and Congolese), random travelers like myself, and tourists (most of who alighted at Arusha). On the Kenyan side, between Nairobi and Namanga we had a total of 5 police stops. On the Tanzanian side between Namanga and Dar there were 6 police stops and about 4-5 weigh bridge stops – the Tanzanians definitely police their roads more keenly. The police on the Tanzanian side were on the lookout for khat/miraa (illegal in Tanzania, and a beloved commodity of truckers) from Kenya and other contraband. True to EAC hospitality, I did not have any problems with immigration at Namanga (unlike in Nakonde, Zambia) or at any of the police check points (officers came on board to check passports). Talking to Tanzanians reminded me of just how bad Kenyan Swahili is – we must sound to Tanzanians like the Congolese sound to us whenever they speak whatever it is they call Swahili (*ducks and runs*).

The bus arrived in Dar es Salaam about 20 hours after leaving Nairobi (Not bad for a US $42 ticket), despite having been made to believe that the trip would take 13 hours. It didn’t help that I ignored Vanessa’s advice to pack food, hoping to buy stuff on the road – the first food stop was six hours into the trip, I had not had breakfast. Exhausted, hungry and mad at myself for taking the hard way to Dar I decided to get a room at the Peacock Hotel. It is not fancy (probably a 4 star?) but it has hot water, the rooms are spacious, and there’s fast internet. They also have a nice restaurant downstairs (Tausi) and are within walking distance to the port and other sites of interest in Dar – a Subway, Indian restaurant, the national library, banks, etc.

I had a day to burn in Dar reading, writing and walking around in readiness for the second leg of my trip to Lusaka, again by road.


Filed under: africa Tagged: Arusha, arusha bombing, CCM, Chadema, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, check points, copper mining in zambia, Dar es Salaam, Dar Express, economic growth in zambia, government of zambia, guy scott, Kenya, lusaka, michael Sata, moshi, Nairobi, namanga, peacock hotel, police stops, tanzania, the zambian economy
23 Jun 02:10

Not whether but how much

by Jason Kerwin

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Hewlett Foundation’s Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) conference in Uganda, which brought together both Hewlett-funded organizations running education interventions and outside researchers tasked with evaluating the projects. (My advisor and I are working with Mango Tree Uganda to evaluate their Primary Literacy Project.) Evaluation was one of the central themes of the conference, with a particular focus on learning from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). While RCTs are clearly the gold standard for evaluations nowadays, we nevertheless had a healthy discussion of their limitations. One area that got a lot of discussion was that while randomized trials are great for measuring the impact of a program, they typically tell you less about why a program did or did not work well.

We didn’t get into a more fundamental reason that RCTs are seeing pushback, however: the fact that they are framed as answering yes/no questions. Consider the perspective of someone working at an NGO considering an RCT framed that way. In that case a randomized trial is a complicated endeavor that costs a lot of effort and money and has only two possible outcomes: either you (1) learn that your intervention works, which is no surprise and life goes on as usual, or you (2) get told that your program is ineffective. In the latter case, you’re probably inclined to distrust the results: what the hell do researchers know about your program? Are they even measuring it correctly? Moreover, the results aren’t even particularly useful: as noted above, learning that your program isn’t working doesn’t tell you how to fix it.

This yes/no way of thinking about randomized trials is deeply flawed – they usually aren’t even that valuable for yes/no questions. If your question is “does this program we’re running do anything?” and the RCT tells you “no”, what it’s really saying is that no effect can be detected given the size of the sample used for the analysis. That’s not the same as telling you that your program doesn’t work; it’s the best possible estimate of the effect size given the data your collected, and telling you that the best guess is small enough that we can’t rule out no effect at all.

It is true that running a randomized trial will get you an unbiased answer to the “yes” side of the yes/no does-this-work question: if you find a statisticall significant effect, you can be fairly confident that it’s real. But it also tells you a whole lot more. First off, if properly done it will give you a quantitative answer to the question of what a given treatment does. Suppose you’re looking at raising vaccination rates, and the treatment group in your RCT has a rate that is 20 percentage points higher than the control group, significant at the 0.01 level. That’s not just “yes, it works”, it’s “it does about this much”. This is the best possible estimate of what the program is doing, even if it isn’t statistically significant. Better yet, RCTs also give you a lower and an upper bound on what that how much figure is. If your 99% confidence interval is 5 percentage points on either side, then you know with very high confidence that your program’s effect is no less than 15 percentage points (but no more than 25).*

I think a lot of implementers’ unease about RCTs would be mitigated if we focused more on the magnitudes of measured impacts instead of on significance stars. “We can’t rule out a zero effect” is uninformative, useless, and frankly a bit hostile – what we should be talking about is our best estiamte of a program’s effect, given the way it was implemented during the RCT. That alone won’t tell us why a program had less of an impact than we hoped, but it’s a whole lot better than just a thumbs down.

*Many of my stats professors would want to strangle me for putting it this way. 99% refers to the share of identically constructed confidence intervals that would contain the true effect of the program, if you ran your experiment repeatedly. This is different from there being a 99% chance of the effect being in a certain range: the effect is a fixed value, so it’s either in the interval or not. It’s the confidence intervals that vary randomly, not the true value being estimated. The uncertainty is in whether the confidence interval contains the true value of the effect, rather than in whether the true value of the effect lies in the range. If that sounds like pure semantics to you, well, you’re not alone.

21 Jun 19:41

Friday Puzzler: Where Are All the Female Bloggers?

by politicalviolenceataglance

By Taylor Marvin and Barbara F. Walter

Blogging on international relations is dominated by male writers. The Monkey Cage’s regular authors are entirely male, Duck of Minerva’s permanent contributors are 75 percent male, and all of Foreign Policy’s individual author-headlined blogs are written by men. A quarter of The Smoke Filled Room’s contributors are female, and while Political Violence @ a Glance was founded by two women, 65 percent of our listed contributors are male. These numbers are especially puzzling given that the majority of students majoring in international relations and a majority of students in professional schools of international affairs are female.

So today’s puzzler is this: Why are the leading voices of the IR blogosphere male? Or, to put it another way, why are so few women represented in the big blogs covering IR?


Filed under: Media Tagged: Blogging, Gender
20 Jun 11:34

SONGS OF A NEW ERA: POPULAR MUSIC AND POLITICAL EXPRESSION IN THE IVOIRIAN CRISIS

by Schumann, A.

This article examines political discourses in "patriotic" zouglou songs during the Ivoirian crisis from 2002 to 2007, and reveals far-reaching and interwoven changes in the conduct of politics in post-Houphouët-Boigny Côte d'Ivoire: a more populist style of politics, a resurgent nationalism, and a newly engaged public sphere. Documenting the infrastructural arrangements that made "patriotic" recordings and performances possible through the activities of political entrepreneurs in the Ivoirian music business, the article reveals the struggle of musicians to retain control of their art form. It argues that a new generation of political actors used popular music as a tool of popular mobilization, and that the idioms of "praise" and "protest" do not capture the complex ways in which musicians positioned themselves in relation to politics. Instead, zouglou music became a contested space where politicians from both camps tried to co-opt musicians. The article thus contributes conceptually to the study of popular music and political discourse in Africa, and empirically to our understanding of recent Ivoirian political history.

20 Jun 01:42

things I’ll miss in College Station

by dadakim
Dadakim

just one more week.

#texasforever

As I announced earlier, we are moving. It’s a very happy move for me and the family, but there are a few things about this place I’ll miss. I already miss having a best friend, smart colleague, and fellow mom-to-two in the office right next door to mine, but she left for greener pastures a few weeks ago, so I guess she doesn’t technically count as something I’ll miss in College Station.

This list is more about those things that other people who move to College Station might be interested in checking out — from the perspective of a tenure-track mom of two young children who has strong opinions about the things she likes–YMMV.

__Our neighborhood__

We love our neighborhood. The homes are modest by College Station (gown) standards, there is a community pool, and our favorite: there is a nice park just around the block from us. The park is great because in addition to having a half court, a volleyball sandpit, and a playground for kids, it has a 1/3 mile loop nature walk where we’ve seen turtles, deer, lizards, rabbits, snakes, and many different kinds of birds. Our neighbors are pretty great, too (minus this one guy who doesn’t take proper care of his dog). We’ll miss walks in the park (especially on the maze of trails among the trees) and at the nearby duck pond, where we saw a team of ducklings grow up this spring.

One other benefit of our neighborhood is the public school for which we are zoned. It just so happens that our elementary school offers a dual-language (Spanish) program. Our daughter has learned quite a bit just in Kinder and we’re sad she won’t have the same opportunity when we move.

__Food__

In my opinion (shaped by decades of living in CA’s Central Valley and then a decade in LA), College Station has very few good dining options. There are lots of chain restaurants, the fancy places just can’t quite get it right, and there’s no good sushi or Thai food here. Contrary to my expectations, Mexican food here has been pretty bad, with the exception of El Vale, a small family-owned restaurant in Bryan (College Station’s sister city). The Indian place (Taz) is pretty good too (lunch buffet is great, takeout dinner is OK).

Surprisingly, there is very good Korean food here. My favorite restaurant in town is Ohana Korean Grill, where you can watch K-Pop on the flat screens while you eat some of the tastiest Korean food you can get anywhere (this from someone who has had a lot of food in LA’s K-Town). We often order takeout from Ohana too. There’s also a decent Korean grocer in Bryan; his wife makes the best kimchi around, but they don’t sell it in small batches. The small strip mall joint, Choi’s restaurant, is good for lunch.

We also love to eat at Grub Burger Bar; anyone who says there’s a better burger somewhere else is plain wrong. The place that comes closest is The Proudest Monkey (in downtown Bryan), but I might be biased since a friend of mine is the owner and once when eating there, I was given a dessert on the house.* I highly recommend the chorizo burger with a fried egg.

__Services__

For all my four-eyed friends: there’s a great optometrist in town (Urban Optics), with a fantastic selection of eyeglasses. People often ask me where I went to purchase my glasses because they don’t believe that I bought them here.

I’ve gotten the best haircut of my life just a week ago here in College Station and am sad that my hair stylist isn’t moving with me to Western Mass. Her name is Summer and she works at Celebrity Spa and Salon, which is kinda fancy for College Station, but not in an uppity (or expensive) way.

__On Campus__

Perhaps my best experience at TAMU has been with the NSF ADVANCE Center for Women Faculty. I was fortunate to be selected as an NSF ADVANCE Scholar, which is a great program for early-career scientists (social scientists included). The ADVANCE center also coordinated a couple of POWER writing workshops from which I learned a lot. Following on one of these workshops, some friends and I started a writing club, which the ADVANCE Center also supported. Thanks in no small part to my writing club, last summer I got seven papers under review. In addition to NSF ADVANCE facilitating my professional goals, it was a great place to meet other hardworking and interesting academics who just so happened to be women of color facing some similar challenges and offering helpful strategies on how to navigate.

There’s also a new center on campus that I wish I was sticking around to watch grow and develop: the USAID HESN-sponsored Conflict and Development Center, aka ConDev. There is a hardworking and friendly group of folks leading ConDev and they are already engaging and starting some meaningful conversations about development in post-conflict societies.

Since we’re packing up and moving in a week’s time, the next haba na haba post will likely be from the road or from MA. Ta-ta, Texas!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* I don’t mind when bloggers promote a place where they got something once for free — but I mind when they don’t tell their readers. In fuller disclosure: my getting a free dessert had nothing to do with knowing the owner. It was just a friendly gesture from the other owner (whom I don’t know) when I inquired about sweets since there weren’t any on the menu in the first few weeks they were open.


Tagged: College Station
19 Jun 13:57

Japan raises its game in Africa – By Magnus Taylor

by AfricanArgumentsEditor

When will Abe go to Africa?

The fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) has just taken place in Japan hosting an array of African Heads of State, international development agencies, the Chairperson of UN and the AU. The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) held an event last week to tell us about it.

JICA briefings are normally events most notable for the lunch – a consistently excellent array of sushi, teriyaki and noodles – there is a temptation to arrive half way through the presentation, applaud politely and then tuck in. However, on this occasion, that would have been a mistake – Japanese interaction with Africa seems to be changing. Or, to put it another way, they have substantially raised their game.

Japan’s relationship with African countries has previously been very ‘soft’ – based largely on development assistance – worthy, but to be honest, boring. This will, it seems, continue, but under the new mantra of ‘Abenomics’ (the economic doctrine of Prime Minister Abe) interaction with the continent will focus more on what benefit Japan can accrue from its investments.

So, whilst attendees at the JICA lunch would be familiar with pronouncements on projects such as the ABE initiative (African Business Education) what was less familiar was analysis that Japan is keen to develop African human resources in order to help it develop its own industries in the continent.

Most notably this will focus on the energy sector – Japan is very interested in developing, and presumably reaping the energy benefits of, for example, Mozambique’s huge new natural gas finds. Tanzania and Angola were also listed as countries of interest in this regard.

Additionally, Japan may want to move some of its domestic productive capacity to ‘Greenfield’ sites within Africa. Information was a little sketchy on what this might consist of, but perhaps parts of the pharmaceutical industry might be relocated to countries such as South Africa, with existing capacity.

Although not completely ignored, the elephant in the room in these discussions is China. One question might be to what extent Japan’s attempt to assert itself in Africa is part of a bigger strategic battle between the two Asian powers. An example of this is the part Japan has played in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. This only seemed to become a reality when China started to play its own role in international operations there.

Interestingly, Japan’s role in security operations of this nature also appears to be part of the process of reintegrating the country into a global security system where Japan is able to deploy its troops abroad. Its base in Djibouti represents its first since the Second World War, one result of which was the rewriting of the Japanese constitution making illegal the foreign deployment of its troops.

Japan’s message of ‘partnership’ with African countries; developing energy, human resources and infrastructure is, reportedly, exactly what African heads of state wanted to hear. Prime Minister Abe was also prepared to talk to every African leader who attended the TICAD meeting. However, it’s been 20 years since a Japanese PM has visited Africa, so the call now will be for Abe to follow up his TICAD outreach with some on-the-ground diplomacy.

Magnus Taylor is Editor of African Arguments.

19 Jun 13:47

Back to basics

by junkcharts

Today, we review one of the basic principles Ed Tufte very effectively advocated in his famous book: use gridlines and data labels only if absolutely necessary. The enemy is redundancy.

Here is a chart that appeared in the New York Times Real Estate pages: (with this article)

Nyt_tallbldg

The gridlines serve no purpose. Between the axis labels and the data labels, the designer should pick one. If the data labels are used, then the vertical axis can be removed entirely without affecting our ability to understand the data. One can also argue that the data labels do not convey any real information since the average person is unlikely to be able to process 1004 feet versus 1250 feet. Why not remove the data labels and retain only the axis labels?

I'd be willing to go so far as to remove all data from the chart itself. This is because the Empire State Building has been chosen as the reference point. The assumption behind this choice is that the readers have a sense of "tallness" of the Empire State Building. It is then sufficient to just place columns of different heights next to the Empire State Building. To make the comparison a little easier, one can draw a reference line from the top of the Empire State, like this:

  Redo_nyttallbldg

 

19 Jun 13:40

Gay Marriage and Goodluck Jonathan’s Tricky Position

by Guest Blogger for John Campbell
President Goodluck Jonathan presents his administration's midterm report during Democracy Day in Abuja May 29, 2013. (Afolabi Sotunde/Courtesy Reuters)

This is a guest post by Dominic Bocci, assistant director at the Council on Foreign Relations’ David Rockefeller Studies Program.

The passage of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill on May 31, 2013, by the Nigerian House of Representatives places President Goodluck Jonathan in a tricky position. Not signing the bill risks alienating his own government and signaling to the general public that he does not support one of the few issues that brings the majority of Nigerians together. Alternatively, signing such legislation may cost the country substantial sums of international aid and investment. Either way, gay marriage—an otherwise unlikely political issue—may significantly influence the Nigerian political debate leading up to the 2015 national elections.

The bill, which received unanimous approval in the House, has inched another step forward to becoming law in the oil-rich nation. In the simplest terms, the bill prohibits same-sex marriage contracts from being issued or recognized by the state. However, if President Jonathan signs the current version, the law would also enable courts to levy criminal charges against public displays of affection between individuals of the same sex. It would further make it a criminal offense to establish or operate gay organizations in Nigeria—incurring penalties of mandatory imprisonment if found guilty.

Recent studies have found Nigerians to be overwhelmingly against accepting homosexuality, even in comparison to other African nations with anti-gay legislation. However, according to Nigerian civil society groups, the recent version passed by the House places more than just the LGBT community at risk. Both Nigerians and international aid workers implementing HIV/AIDS-prevention programs may be prosecuted under the new law if their efforts are construed as promoting same-sex relationships.

If President Jonathan signs the bill, questions loom as to what extent the law will be enforced and if the international community will retreat. In 2011 when the Nigerian Senate passed a similar bill, the United Kingdom threatened to withdraw aid; but the Nigerian Senate did not back down.

Even more may be at stake for Nigeria this time. Since the 2011 passage of the Senate-version of the bill, the Obama Administration has publicly affirmed its stance towards the advancement of LGBT rights across the globe—even suggesting that the United States might tie aid to support of LGBT rights. However, it remains an open question whether the United States will divest aid from countries with anti-LGBT legislation, particularly in light of President Obama’s previous statement that “Africa’s future is up to Africans.”

The recently passed bill has the potential to violate not only international treaties and conventions—many of which Nigeria has signed—but also the country’s Constitution. There is justifiable fear that this law will be used to abridge Nigerians’ right to freedom of speech, association, and assembly. Yet, the bill’s enactment may also lead to political blackmailing and rampant abuse by the country’s security forces.

19 Jun 11:40

Dear Vice Magazine: How Could You Do This?

by Amanda Taub

When I was sixteen, Iris Chang gave the graduation address at my high school, from which she had graduated the decade before. It remains, to this day, one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

Statue of Iris Chang at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial

I wish that I could find a video or transcript of the speech, because it is difficult to do justice to it without access to the text, but she exhorted us to resist the forces of cynicism and disappointment, and told us that we had the power to change the world, and somehow managed to make it seem more like a road map than a collection of graduation-day platitudes.

At the time, Iris was only thirty, but she had already published two books, including The Rape of Nanking, a meticulously-researched account of Japanese atrocities during their conquest of that city during World War II. At sixteen, I was not yet planning to go into the human rights field, but I remember watching her give that speech, and thinking that if I grew up to be someone like her, who did the things that she did, that would be something to be proud of.

Many times, since then, I have thought about her speech when I have felt tempted to be the kind of person who just gets on with life and doesn’t bother reaching for something better. At those times, I have remembered seeing her, up on that stage, telling a room of fascinated children that we would have moments when cynicism and surrender seemed like attractive options, but that she believed we would be strong enough to overcome them. And then I have decided that cynicism can wait for another day.

I am not the only one she affected that way. Author Paula Kamen once wrote in Salon about turning “Iris Chang” into a verb, meaning to think big. She encouraged her university students to “Iris Chang it”: “Just decide what you want and go get it. To the point of being naive.”

This isn’t a funny post, because six years after she gave that graduation speech, Iris Chang killed herself.

And then this week, for reasons beyond my understanding, Vice Magazine decided that the way to remember her, and the personal costs she bore in her attempts to stand in solidarity with the victims of horrific crimes, was to publish a photograph of a fashion model reenacting the scene of her suicide. Which was accompanied by a caption explaining where to buy the outfit the model was wearing. And which was part of a multi-page spread called “Last Words,” which also contained stylishly accessorized reenactments of the suicides of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sanmao, and Elise Cowen, and of one of Dorothy Parker’s unsuccessful suicide attempts.

Iris had a son, who was two years old when she died, and is only eleven now. She had a husband, and parents, all of whom are still alive. If seeing the photo was enough to make me burst into tears, I can only imagine how her family must have felt when they saw it. (I fervently hope that they did not). There is no question in my mind that Vice did her family a disservice when they decided to publish it.

But the magazine’s decision to publish this spread was also a disservice to its readers. Iris and the other writers depicted in the spread have expanded our world through their work, and made it a more interesting, vital, and just place. Vice could have depicted them in a way that honored that work, and encouraged their readers to seek it out, thereby making their own worlds bigger and more exciting. Instead, it depicted them as nothing but a group of high-gloss deaths, good for selling clothes and not much more. There was nothing about that photograph that would lead someone to, say, read Iris Chang’s Atlantic piece on the “Oskar Schindler of China.” How unfortunate that is. I cannot understand why anyone in the writing business would want to so undermine the value of extraordinary writing, but apparently Vice did.

Vice has removed the article from their website, and replaced it with an unimpressive apology of the “sorry you felt offended” variety. I hope that they will do more than that to make this right.

13 Jun 18:33

Religious leaders ask Malawi’s circumcised men: ‘Zip up those pants!’

by thomas
Religious leaders in Malawi are strongly advising the country’s male community not to take circumcision as a license of engaging into promiscuous behavior by taking advantage of the researches that indicated reduction of chances of getting HIV to men whose sexual reproductive organs have gone under the knife. Some religions, such as Islam, consider circumcision [...]
13 Jun 18:32

Shedding light on aid: Using night lights to analyze the effectiveness of geocoded aid in Malawi

by noreply@blogger.com (Christian Peratsakis)

The current aid effectiveness debate largely relies on cross-national evidence. This post introduces an innovative measurement technique to evaluate sub-national aid effectiveness. I introduce night light intensity as a measure of the relative level of economic activity in an area, and combine this dataset with a comprehensive geocoded aid dataset, which makes it possible to undertake a first-of-its-kind spatial analysis of aid effectiveness.

Disaggregated datasets

Light intensity from towns in Malawi was measured using stable night light images taken from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS). Using these images, one can observe towns in Malawi that emit light, and measure changes in the light intensity from year to year. A proxy for economic activity was created by aggregating night light intensity pixels in every town in the country for each year between 2005-2010.

Figure 1: Night light cluster locations between 2005-2010
Yellow dots are centered on the brightest pixel within the night light cluster. 
Note that both Lilongwe City and Blantyre City are excluded.



Figure 2: Geocoded aid project locations
Green dots represent geocoded aid projects in Malawi -- 2,113 in total. 
Note that one green  dot can represent multiple aid projects. 
The earliest aid project start date is 1998 and latest aid project planned finish date is 2016.



Figure 3: Aid and night light locations
The stable night light images were overlaid on the geocoded aid projects using ArcGIS10. 
This combined map enables analysis at the subnational level. 
Note that the North of Malawi has fewer aid projects than the South. 
In addition, there are more towns, as indicated by the prevalence of night lights, in the South.



Figure 4: Aid project locations within the night light cluster
F16 2005 stable night lights, Mzuzu, Malawi. 33.592 and -11.89 decimal degrees. 
Only aid projects within the grid are included in the sample. 
The 21 x 21 grid is centered on the brightest pixel. 
In addition to analyzing night light intensity and aid within each 21 x 21 grid, analysis is conducted between each grid to provide a spatial component to the research.  


Rainfall in Malawi is highly variable, and is one of the main factors driving variation in agricultural productivity. Therefore, a precipitation control variable was also created. Malawi’s rainfall data from 2005-2010 are publicly available from the World AgroMeteorological Information Service for the October to April growing season. These data are available for multiple weather stations in Malawi. Using Google Earth, each weather station can be placed in a district, and allocated to a town.


Results and conclusion

Both a random effects panel model and a spatial dynamic panel model were applied to the data. Aid's impact on economic activity, as captured through the degree of night light intensity, is somewhat sensitive to the type of econometric technique employed. Nevertheless, completed aid projects have a statistically significant, positive impact on night light intensity in a town. With these data, I also identified a negative spatial correlation for night light intensity between neighboring towns, which suggests that some form of mobility exists with regards to commerce or resources: positive shocks in one location are associated with negative shocks in surrounding locations.


This blog post was written by Daniel Schmid, an analyst for the New Zealand Defense Force. This is an excerpt from his dissertation submitted for a Masters of Business in Economics degree at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The dissertation abstract is available here: http://otago.ourarchive.ac.nz/handle/10523/3751

AidData is a free service, but it relies on support from its users. Support AidData Now
13 Jun 18:30

Malawi data: the bootcamp and a bleg

by dadakim
Dadakim

Please share any information you have on publicly available data from Malawi for my upcoming post!

There is some excitement in Lilongwe surrounding Malawi’s first-ever Data Literacy Bootcamp, where participants are now in their second day of learning how to find, extract, and analyze public data. Though the bootcamp had limited spaces for participants (30 journalists, 30 coders, and 30 “digital creatives”), you can already find the tools that were shared with participants online. The first place to start is the Malawi Databootcamp web site (where I’m told more resources will be posted later). There is already some straightforward instructions on how to use Google Fusion Tables from one workshop at Malawi Databootcamp that shares publicly the data on all foreign aid projects in Malawi from 2011-2016 (note that some of the other data sources in that workshop site are currently “protected” and unavailable to the public). Updates from bootcamp participants are available on Twitter using the hashtag #dbootcamp (note: there’s a related Bolivia #dbootcamp that will also appear in the search). There are a few Malawians tweeting from the bootcamp — I recommend following @chimxy and @ctenthani.

Intro 2 World Bank Group Open Finances open data website& mobile application by Julia Bezgacheva #dbootcamp #Malawi http://t.co/FvbA6W9S6P
Chimwemwe Sumani (@chimxy) June 13, 2013

In other news, a dissertation recently filed in New Zealand uses night-light data in Malawi, joined to Malawi AidData, to show the impact of aid “on economic activity, as captured through the degree of night light intensity.” (HT Brad Parks.)

Folks often ask me about available data in Malawi, and in a later post, I will put together a round-up of some standard datasets, some new datasets, and other data resources. Colleagues who study Malawi, please email me about datasets you use so I can include them (or feel free to post them in the comments here).


11 Jun 11:39

The Bridging the Gap Project

by John Sides
Dadakim

Brent Durbin is one of my new colleagues at Smith!

This week we will be featuring posts from the organizers of the Bridging the Gap Project, Brent Durbin, James Goldgeier, and Bruce Jentleson.  The mission of this project is quite close to our own, and we’re pleased to feature them.  In this post, Brent Durbin provides an overview the project.

*****

For the past several years, we at the Bridging the Gap Project have been trying to help scholars of international affairs and comparative politics promote their work beyond academia and build relationships with the broader foreign policy community. Our name comes from the eponymous book by Alexander George, who encouraged his students and colleagues to pursue research that was methodologically rigorous but also relevant to real-world policy problems. Alex saw such knowledge as “critical to the development and choice of sound policies,” and we agree. The experience and interaction also flow back to our core roles as professors, providing insights for our research and enhancing our teaching.

This week, we will convene the third annual International Policy Summer Institute (IPSI) at American University’s School of International Service. Designed as an intimate, hands-on workshop that includes intensive media training, IPSI has garnered scores of qualified applications for its 12-15 slots each year. Participants include professors of all ranks from top political science programs. IPSI brings these scholars together with practitioners, editors, media experts, think tankers, and others who can help them understand how to make their research more influential in foreign policy. (For graduate students out there, we also run our annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference.)

This year we’ll be blogging during the IPSI program. (Previous participants have written about IPSI here and here.) After each day of the institute, through June 13, a member of the Bridging the Gap team will write up key lessons from these meetings here on the Monkey Cage. These posts will address the three main themes of IPSI:

  • How to make research more policy relevant and accessible;

  • How to have a broader policy impact from within the academy, aside from research;

  • How to get involved in policy work, whether short-term or for good.

If these topics interest you, check back later this week for more. (While our focus is on international affairs research and U.S. foreign policy, we hope readers in other fields will find the discussion useful.) Of course, we invite you to add your experiences, suggestions, caveats, and critiques along the way.

We are grateful to The Monkey Cage for sharing its space (doubly so to John and Henry, who will also speak at IPSI on Tuesday), and to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for sponsoring our ongoing efforts to strengthen relations between scholars and the broader foreign policy community.

11 Jun 11:24

Getting back to blogging

by Boni Dulani
Dadakim

I recommend following Boni's blog and Twitter feed for Malawi Politics updates.

Nine months. That is how long it has taken since the last substantive entry on this blog. I apologize to all readers for this silence. I know nine months is such a long time - it is an entire academic year; a period long enough for farmers to plant and harvest their crop; long enough for a mother to conceive and give birth to a child. A baby born since my last post might actually be learning to speak. I have no excuse and can only apologize to my readers.
So much has happened during the last nine months- some good, some bad and some ugly. Through it all, I am grateful for the gift of life.
Great Hall Complex at Chanco- My office is on the third flour
I returned to Malawi in mid October of 2012 and rejoined the faculty at the University of Malawi, Chancellor College. Chanco has changed very little: the classrooms remain bare and mostly derelict; there is a shortage of office space; the library, which was built in the early 70s for a student population of under 500, now has to cater for 5,000+ undergraduate and graduate students with very little resource allocation for purchasing new books. The Internet on campus remains frustratingly slow (although I now have very fast wi-fi connection on my home network, thanks to Burco's wimax system). Oh, and the University of Malawi salary remains such an embarrassment!
I have also kept up with my Afrobarometer work as Fieldwork Operations Manager. With 34 surveys completed, we now only have one more country before we reach our target of 35 countries- a major achievement as this represents  75% increase form the 20 countries that were covered in the Round 4 surveys.
For the most part, it has been great getting back and operating from Malawi. I no longer have to make the long trans-Atlantic flights between the USA and Africa. That said, I have increasingly found that it is a lot more difficult to travel within Africa from Africa than it is flying from the US. Flight schedules within Africa are a lot more difficult while securing visas is another major pain as there are few embassies around.
My apologies once more to followers of this blog for my long silence. It is such a shame that at a time when I have first hand experience of Malawi politics, I have kept quite. I am back and will be writing and sharing my thoughts as the country prepares for the 2014 general elections. Stay tuned. Ooh,m and follow me on twitter @BoniDulani

11 Jun 11:23

Chart of the Day: What do Africans think their governments should be doing?

by Lee Crawfurd
Dadakim

note how far AIDS is down the list.

Afrobarometer asked over 33,000 Africans between 2010 and 2012 what the most important problem facing their country that government should address is. Here are their answers. With apologies for the tiny font, but it's worth reading down the full list (I left off a few of the country-specific responses at the bottom).

Data from: Benin 2012, Botswana 2012, Burkina Faso 2012, Burundi 2012, Cape Verde 2011, Ghana 2012, Kenya 2011, Lesotho 2012, Liberia 2012, Malawi 2012, Mali 2012, Mauritius 2012, Namibia 2012, Nigeria 2012, Sierra Leone 2012, South-Africa 2011, Tanzania 2012, Togo 2012, Uganda 2012, Zimbabwe 2012 (Base=33598; Weighted results)


I'm quite surprised by how high up water supply is, but less surprised by the top 3 of unemployment, the economy, and poverty. The public policy challenge is still, first and foremost, about broad-based inclusive economic growth. Interesting to compare this with Justin Sandefur's analysis of what African researchers care about (jobs).

The tragedy is that we don't really have a clue what policy instruments can create jobs. For most of sub-Saharan Africa the challenge is a lack of demand for labour. What is needed is a way of linking African workers with consumers who have money - who are mostly in rich countries. This link could come in 3 ways:

1: Trade. Africans stay where they are and export things to rich countries. This one looks difficult in most countries, which are uncompetitive with poor Asian countries in manufacturing, and don't yet have the skills or infrastructure for high-tech service exports. Gains to agricultural productivity holds some promise, but faces serious barriers to getting going.
2: Migration. The Africans come to rich countries. An economic no-brainer, and a political non-starter.
3: Tourism. The rich people go to Africa. Tourism? Really?

There will probably be marginal improvements in all 3 areas, but its hard to see where the really big shift that could get millions of Africans up to rich country poverty lines of around $12.50 per day over the next generation is going to come from.

The very easy to use online Afrobarometer data analysis tool is here.

[and before anyone says it, of course Africa is not a country, but actually the patterns look pretty similar when you look at the country-level data, I just couldn't figure out a good way of showing that data visually - very open to suggestion]
10 Jun 14:54

mbalimbali

by dadakim
10 Jun 14:51

Clash over chieftaincy in Mchinji

by thomas
Dadakim

the fight for TA Zulu has been going on for years.

Despite persistent calls from government, including President Joyce Banda, to royal families to formulate transparent and proper succession chieftaincy plans, Malawi continues witnessing increased number of wrangles over the same. A recent incident has occurred in the boarder district of Mchinji where two camps have emerged fighting for the Zulu chieftaincy. Reports say Traditional Authority [...]
10 Jun 14:46

Another Malawian musician joins politics: DPP

by thomas
It is that season again when artists join the politics bandwagon. As election season approaches, several artists have been known to dump the trade to try their hands at the more lucrative political field. Leading the pack this election season is musician Collins Chitimbe who has announced his intention to contest the Blantyre City South [...]
10 Jun 14:40

Love It or Logit, or: Man, People *Really* Care About Binary Dependent Variables

by Marc F. Bellemare
Dadakim

If you can't read the whole thing, at least read the last sentence.

Last Monday’s post, in which I ranted a bit about the opposition to estimating linear probability models (LPM) instead of probits and logits, turned out to be very popular. In fact, that post is now in my top three most popular posts ever.

(Credit: xkcd.)
(Credit: xkcd.)

Last Monday morning, when my wife left for work, I told her I was expecting a meager number of page views that day given my choice of post topic. I was wrong: people really care about binary dependent variables.

The post generated quite a bit of commentary. Some said that if you have experimental data, you would not want to run a regression. But that’s not completely true. Sure, with experimental data, you can run a t-test comparing the means of the control and treatment groups. But I can think of many cases where you would still want to run a regression in order to increase the precision of your estimate of the treatment effect.

The most interesting response came from Penn State’s Christopher Zorn in a post on his blog. If you want to read the remainder of this post, I suggest you read his post and come back for mine (and make sure to add his blog to your RSS feed while you’re at it).

Done? Okay, here goes:

  1.  I did not read the King and Roberts working paper Christopher links to (with my upcoming move halfway across the country, I need all the time I can get to work on my own research), but in the comments to my post, Conner responds “The King and Roberts results are more relevant for the case when identification of all parameters of interest requires that we have the correct model, e.g., forecasting probabilities. This isn’t the case when looking at binary treatment assignment and are interested in estimating average treatment effects. You just need the expectation of the error term to be the same in the treatment and control groups. King and Roberts more or less make this point themselves on page 3 of their paper.” Moreover, the probit standard errors model one kind of variance (that due to the Bernoulli structure of the dependent variable), but they are not robust to other kinds of heteroskedasticity. And with heteroskedasticity, the probit and logit coefficients are inconsistent, even with robust standard errors (ht: Tim Beatty.)
  2. I must insist that forecasting probabilities is not what I am interested in. Most of the time, I’m interested in getting as close as possible to the average treatment effect. If you are interested in forecasting probabilities, then by all means estimate a probit or a logit.
  3. On nonlinear functional forms, in the example Christopher gives (the likelihood that extremely poor or extremely wealthy people will purchase a TV will not change much if their income increases by $1,000, but the change will be much larger for someone with an average income), the nonlinear function is best modeled by including both income and its square, so as to model nonlinearities in the impact of income on the likelihood that someone purchases a television. But even then, this assumes that we know the exact shape of the nonlinear relationship.

And in response to Christopher’s last two points, I do not use R, but I plugged his example in Stata. What happens here is that the LPM will give a coefficient estimate of 0.6, but the logit omits x altogether because in those cases where x = 1, y is perfectly predicted, i.e., whenever x = 1, y = 1. Having compaed the LPM with fixed effects with the conditional logit with fixed effects for one of the applications I have worked on, the latter does the same thing.

I don’t know that not dropping those observations is a bad thing, though: Even in Christopher’s example, those observations contain a lot of information about the relationship between x and y, namely that the two are highly positively correlated. To see this, supposed you wanted to know the likelihood that people who smoke will die of lung cancer. You collect individual data on smoking and on causes of death, and you find that everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer, but that only about half of the people who don’t smoke die of lung cancer.

If you wanted to know how the decision to start smoking changes the likelihood that someone will die of lung cancer, would you throw away all the observations for which an individual is a smoker? I wouldn’t, as they contain valuable information that help us quantify the marginal impact of the decision to smoke on the likelihood of dying from lung cancer.

With that said, I add the caveat that I am not an econometrician and that, to paraphrase a soon-to-be-colleague, I have strong opinions that are weakly held. It looks as though one’s preferred estimator for binary dependent variables is really all a matter of disciplinary cultural norms (economist love probits; other social scientists, not so much), if not of field cultural norms within disciplines.

So ultimately (and this deserved to be in bold), because no estimator is perfect, you should you always estimate all three (LPM, probit, and logit) and compare their results to make sure nothing is amiss.