The War on Poverty

The war on how to fight the war on poverty is evident in this "Grudge Match" in the Los Angeles Times between Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly and in this recent review of Sach' book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Easterly appearing in the March 2006 volume of The Journal of Economic Literature.

Here's Daniel Gross with a description of Easterly's "incremental reform" approach emphasizing solutions based in the private sector. Easterly's approach is seen by many as an alternative to Sach's "Big Push" which has been criticized by Easterly and others as being based upon "utopian social engineering":

Fighting Poverty With $2-a-Day Jobs, by Daniel Gross, Economic View, NY Times: Jacqueline Novogratz, a veteran of the Rockefeller Foundation and a former consultant to the World Bank, talks enthusiastically about the development of a company in Africa where some 2,000 women earn, on average, $1.80 a day producing antimalarial bed netting. With the assistance of a $350,000 loan from an American investor, the business started making the nets nearly three years ago and is likely to add 1,000 more jobs within the next year.

“They’re in the process of building a real company town there,” Ms. Novogratz said. Ms. Novogratz ... is the chief executive of the Acumen Fund, a philanthropic start-up based in New York that uses donations to make equity investments and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit companies in impoverished countries. One of the stars ... is the bed-netting maker, A to Z Manufacturing, a family-owned company in Tanzania ... where 80 percent of the population makes less than $2 a day.

Social activists have typically railed against large multinationals that have sought the lowest-priced labor... But for some members of a new generation of philanthropists, schooled in the techniques of venture capital and Wall Street, fighting poverty effectively relies on the creation of low-wage factories, as well as the establishment of lending institutions that charge rates that many Americans would deem usurious. Rather than work through global aid bureaucracies, they believe that affluent Westerners should become more directly involved ... and invest in and support businesses that are self-sustaining and replicable.

“To put it in the baldest possible terms, the more sweatshops the better,” said William Easterly, professor ... at New York University... Professor Easterly is not advocating the deliberate creation of workplaces with miserable conditions. “As you increase the number of factories demanding labor, wages will be driven up,” he said, and eventually such factories will not be sweatshops.

Ms. Novogratz says it can be difficult to tell well-off, philanthropy-minded Westerners that what Africa really needs is more $2-a-day jobs. But when they understand the alternatives, she said, such concerns tend to melt away. Before they found work at the netting factory in Tanzania, for example, many of the women were street vendors or domestic workers and earned less than $1 a day. A to Z’s wages place the women in Tanzania’s top quartile of earners...

Similar issues hold for the granting of very small loans, often called microlending. “Microfinance boosts the very best parts of capitalism, because it boosts people’s ability to make their own choices and to work their way out of poverty,” said Roy Jacobowitz ... at Acción International, a Boston-based group that has established and supported the creation of a network of microlending banks, mostly in Latin America.

The banks, many of which are for-profit companies, lend cash to poor people at annual rates that are higher than 20 percent. But in the markets where Acción’s affiliates operate, Mr. Jacobowitz said, borrowers have few options except for money lenders who charge 10 to 20 percent interest per day.

Many of the new venture philanthropists do not simply accept systems as they are. Abraham M. George, who immigrated to the United States from India in the late 1960’s and built a successful software company, started the George Foundation in 1995 to fight poverty in India. Among the foundation’s projects is a commercial banana farm, which employs largely unskilled women from untouchable castes in the rural area near Bangalore, one of India’s showpiece technology centers.

Mr. George set wages on the farm at about $40 a month, about what the Indian government says is the minimum needed to support a family of four. But he also provides free medical care and sets aside a portion of the farm’s profits to allow the women to acquire their own plots of land. “The total of these benefits is probably three or four times the going wage income they would receive elsewhere.” Mr. George said. ...

[T]he best thing venture philanthropy can do is to create competition for the labor and business of the poor. ... Today, Mr. Jacobowitz says, six regulated finance companies compete for the business of the poor in Bolivia, providing everything from housing loans to consumer credit. ... Thanks to the fierce competition, interest rates paid by poor Bolivians have fallen to 22 percent from 80 percent in the 1980’s.

Some experts are not fully convinced that small-scale private-sector efforts can make a significant difference. “When you look at the extent to which microfinance reaches people, it’s a small drop compared to what is needed,” said Anjini Kochar, senior research scholar and coordinator of the India Program at the Stanford Center for International Development.

But there is a great deal of ferment in the field... “The sort of top-down comprehensive attempt to fix everything in society has been a dismal failure as implemented by the big bureaucracies like the World Bank,” Professor Easterly said. “And I think it’s time to start thinking much more about bottom-up approaches that try to give new opportunities.”

I don't know enough about this area or the evidence to know if "dismal failure" is a fair characterization or not, but I do get the impression that the tide has turned against Sach's approach. But please fill us in if you can add more...

Comments

[Tymbrimi]

One the best things we can do as consumers for the poor is buy their products. Especially the products of child labor. For many young girls, we either buy the products they make, or they will be forced into a life of prostitution, either out of financial need, or by being sold into slavery by their destitute parents.
We should encourage businesses to provide employment opportunities for the young poor especially. "Buy products made by child labor!".

[anne]

'I don't know enough about this area or the evidence to know if "dismal failure" is a fair characterization or not, but I do get the impression that the tide has turned against Sach's approach.'

Yes; you know enough if you will think carefully of the matter beyond narrow minded rationales however widespread or conventional, rationales for a lack of empathy and generosity that has characterized the approach in Europe and America to Africa. You know enough to know how self-defeating and demeaning the approach to development described here is. Were all your colleagues to take Jeffrey Sachs to be wrong, no matter, you know enough to know what is right.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/africa/24africa.html?ex=1256270400&en=ec9c815729d47297&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

October 24, 2004

In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger
By CELIA W. DUGGER

MALINDI, Kenya - More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot, clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger, stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's classroom each day. Squeezed together on the concrete floor, they sit hip to hip, jostling for space, wildly waving their hands to get her to call on them. Their laps and the floor are their only desks.

One recent afternoon, the line of wiggly children waiting to have Mrs. Mwanyonyo check their work snaked around the bare, unfinished classroom walls. Girls and boys crowded around her, pressing their notebooks on her. Some cut in line. Fights broke out. Boys wrestled. Girls dashed from the room. Giggles and shrieks drowned out her soft voice.

Mrs. Mwanyonyo pulled a boy in front of her and eyed his attempt to list his numbers. "Can you write 1 and 2?" she asked quietly. His head sank to his chest as he shook it no. While she laboriously graded each child's work, the noise level rose to deafening. "Quiet, keep quiet!" she shouted, her voice on the edge of desperation.

Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.

Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.

The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened, often ill-managed education systems.

What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle.

Near the end of a school year that runs from January to November, Mrs. Mwanyonyo, an earnest wisp of a woman, is still struggling to teach most of her students the alphabet and basic counting. She knows the names of only half of them. She estimated that 100 of her 250 students - split into morning and afternoon shifts - would have to repeat the grade.

Salama Kazungu, a willowy girl of 12, sits among Mrs. Mwanyonyo's multitudes, her small shapely head rising above those of the 6- and 7-year-olds. She failed last year in the class of another first grade teacher who had 248 pupils. ("If I could have, I would have run away," the teacher confided, relieved he has just 110 pupils this year.)

Not Enough to Eat

It is hard for Salama to learn because her belly is often empty. Her mother sells charcoal but makes too little to buy enough food. Salama never eats breakfast. For supper, she often has only boiled greens foraged from the wild.

On her hungriest days, the child said, she looks at Mrs. Mwanyonyo and sees only darkness. She listens, but hears only a howling in her ears. Yet she is determined to continue. At 12, she has already had her fill of the African woman's lot: fetching water, collecting firewood and carrying it to market on her back like a beast of burden.

"I was always working and working," she said. "I told myself that the best way to get out of this is to come to school and get an education."

In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found it a great vote-getter. Deepening poverty had meant even small annual school fees - less than an American family would spend on a single fast-food meal - had put education beyond reach for millions.

The abolition of school fees is also owed to the changing politics of international aid. In the 1990's, the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, encouraged the collection of textbook fees. Its experts had reasoned that poor African countries often paid teacher salaries but allotted little or nothing for books. If parents did not buy them, there often were none.

But evidence began to mount that fees for books, tuition, building funds and other purposes posed an insurmountable barrier for the very poor.

In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished fees for four children per family. His message that education was free sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3 million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling enrollment to 5.7 million.

Then in 2000, world leaders met in New York and agreed on an agenda to reduce global poverty, setting as one of the main goals that every child should be able to complete an elementary education by 2015.

That same year, Congress, lobbied by advocacy groups for the poor, adopted legislation requiring that the United States oppose World Bank loans conditioned on user fees in education. In 2002, the World Bank, already supporting several free education initiatives, officially reversed its policy, deciding to oppose all such fees.

The tide had turned.

"In sub-Saharan Africa, almost all countries are under pressure to abolish school fees for primary education," said Cream Wright, education chief for the United Nations Children's Fund. "It will spread, especially if we show it works." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/international/africa/30africa.html?ex=1272513600&en=5c1a0fc83c0b49f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 30, 2005

A Would-Be Pilot, Hitting Turbulence on the Ground
By MICHAEL WINES

MASJAING, South Africa

IN a part of the world where so many young people never get off the ground, 17-year-old James Mokoena wants to be a pilot.

He will fly a fighter jet, but not just to wage aerial battles. Africa is full of hungry people and people sick with malaria, he said. Many of them need a James Mokoena to bring them food and medicine.

"I haven't been in a plane," he said, but dismissively. "I want to be in a plane for four, five years, and to know that I am in that plane - me. That I, James, am driving it."

He is standing outside his cement-stuccoed house, a four-room box on a dirt road in this township of about 30,000 on the Lesotho border. Inside is a single bed for him, three brothers and a sister. His mother is ill. His father never got past the sixth grade. Everything here fairly shouts that James's dream is folly.

Except James himself. Two years ago, having completed his elementary years at the township primary school, he walked the mile from Masjaing to Fouriesburg, the far wealthier town on the other side of the highway. There, he announced that he wanted a better education than he could get at Masjaing's uninspiring local high school, from which few students ever graduate, and that he wished to enroll in the eighth grade.

"I asked him whether he realized there were school fees to be paid, and he said his father would pay them," said Irina Grice, the principal at Fouriesburg Intermediate School. "His father came, but oh, his clothes were torn, and he was very, very poor.

"But the father said, 'The child chose, and he wants to be in this school.' "

One in three of South Africa's 37 million blacks live in townships like Masjaing, slums built to keep them away from white people when they were not mining whites' coal or cleaning whites' houses. Of those township dwellers over age 15, well over half are jobless. Of those with jobs, about 6 in 10 earn less than $250 a month. The townships are economic and social sinkholes, poverty traps in a nation where the rich-poor gap is among the widest on earth.

JEREMANE MOKOENA - he calls himself James, he said, because he dislikes his first name - wants out of Masjaing. He wants out of the underclass that apartheid created and into the world of opportunity that apartheid's demise has opened up for other, luckier youths.

Few of his friends here - boys idling on the dusty soccer pitch and clustered on gravel street corners, clueless about how impending manhood will shut off their escape route - have the pluck for the journey James so clearly craves. For those who do try, success is rare. Failure, and consignment to a life in society's cellar, is crushing.

Slim, with a shy, if broad smile and a tendency to look away when talking, James resembles anything but a pioneer. But nobody should underestimate his grit.

"My father, he works," James said. "He keeps on telling me that life is very strong, like a rock. You have to push it forward. You have to stand for yourself, not just wait to have somebody come and say, 'James, go forward.' "

His father, 44-year-old Petrus Mokoena, is James's unlikely inspiration. A gaunt man in threadbare blue coveralls and a fluorescent red jacket, he works a split shift for the Masjaing (pronounced mush-a-ENG) sanitation department, collecting trash in the predawn hours, catching some sleep, then collecting more trash in the afternoon.

For this, Mr. Mokoena earns under $300 a month. Fouriesburg Intermediate wanted $40 for tuition. Mr. Mokoena paid it. Apartheid, he said, kept him an indentured and ignorant laborer on a white-owned farm his entire youth.

"I want James to see that not to go to school is a bad thing," said Mr. Mokoena, speaking in Sotho, his only language. "I want him to speak English and to write English."

Forty dollars is no small sacrifice. Ms. Grice said she once asked James why he was doing poorly in one subject. "He said, 'I can't finish off the work before it's dark, and we don't have electricity,' " she said.

"So I said to him, 'It's possible to study by candlelight.' And he said, 'We don't have any candles.' " ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/africa/24africa.html?ex=1256270400&en=ec9c815729d47297&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger
By CELIA W. DUGGER

Word that education was free spread swiftly from child to child. And the children themselves have hungrily seized the opportunity.

Joseph Lolo, 16, had worked six days a week since he was 13 grazing and watering the local headmaster's cows. The headmaster, Peter Mzungu, paid the boy $4 a month and gave him Sundays off.

Joseph had watched enviously as the headmaster's children returned from school each day in their crisp uniforms. He longed to attend the public school the headmaster ran. But his family was too poor to pay the fees.

Then last year, Joseph heard that fees had been abolished. Slowly, his resolve to go to school strengthened. This year, he went to his father, a crab trapper, who told him he should keep looking after Mr. Mzungu's cattle. The family needed the extra income. They live in two tiny, falling-down shacks. Only six of Joseph's 13 siblings have survived. Hunger and sickness have plagued the family.

But Joseph said he asked his father, "What will save me if I don't go to school?"

Next, Joseph went to the headmaster, quit his job and asked for a spot at the headmaster's school, Kadzuhoni Primary.

A tall strapping boy whose ears stick out from his closely shorn head, Joseph looks like a giant among the Lilliputians in the class of 83 first graders. The floor of the classroom is loose dirt and the children sit on ragged chunks of coral rock that tear holes in their shorts and skirts.

Joseph, who always sits against the wall, looks sheepish when the teacher insists they all stand to recite a child's refrain, "Head, shoulders, knees and toes." He towers over the other children, and his deep voice stands out among their high pitched ones. Still, he pats each body part along with them.

He feels lucky to be there. His teacher, Chengo Yeri, said he is a clever student, ranked fifth in the class. Joseph worked again for the headmaster during the August recess and used most of his earnings to buy a uniform so he can fit in better.

On a recent morning, Mr. Yeri spelled out colors in English and asked the students, whose native language is Giriama, to say the word aloud. "B-l-a-c-k," Mr. Yeri said. Joseph's hand flew up, his fingers snapping. Mr. Yeri called on him, and Joseph whispered the correct word, a glint of triumph in his eyes.

"Say black, all of you," the teacher replied, and they all chorused Joseph's answer in unison.

On the other side of the stone and concrete wall sat Dama Sulubu, 13, in Randu Nzai's class of 128 second graders.

Dama is excruciatingly shy, but she has a will of iron. None of the four girls born to her father's three wives had ever gone to school. Dama's chances for an education shrank further when her mother, the youngest wife, fought with her father and left home four years ago. Dama became the responsibility of the elder wife, who felt a girl's place was working in the fields, not studying in school, Dama and other family members said.

Several months before school fees were abolished, she left home, complaining there was not enough to eat, and found a $10 a month job in a nearby town as a live-in maid. At 11, she worked long hours mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets, cooking the meals and tending the children. But when the woman stopped paying her, Dama quit and took a bus home.

Like Joseph, Dama had made up her mind. She wanted an education and she would not be denied. She went to her father, a farmer and cow herder.

"Dama fought to get into school," said her illiterate father, Chula Mbita, as he sat in their dusty courtyard, chickens pecking around his feet. "She came to me and said, 'Now that school is free, I have to go. All the children are going.' "

Her father consented. The elder mother said she supports Dama's desire to go to school, but Dama said, in fact, her father's senior wife is still opposed to her education. Asked if she would stay in school, Dama replied, "I have two hearts." One told her to keep going just to prove her elder mother wrong. The other heart told her to give up.

But Dama's teacher, Mr. Nzai, a natural showman who slides his oversize eyeglasses down his nose as he grades papers, has given her the little doses of encouragement lacking at home. He knows that it is the older girls in class who have defied family tradition to come to school - and it was the older girls he called on this day to tell a story aloud.

As Joseph was sounding out colors in English on one side of the wall, Dama rose to her feet on the other side to read from a picture book. Shyly, she held the book up high, so no one could see her face.

The session drew to an end, and Mr. Nzai called the girls to the front of the class. With great ceremony, he presented each with a sweet cracker, a special treat for children who never have enough to eat. And he shook each one by the hand, thanking them for their effort.

"You have participated very well," he told them with a courtly formality. "Let us clap for them because they have really tried."

The rhythmic clapping rose into the rafters as the children applauded their classmates' small victories and a teacher's tender mercies.

[anne]

We know what is right, and we have not the slightest excuse for being tired of the right; not the slightest excuse. We know.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/30/international/africa/30africa.html?ex=1272513600&en=5c1a0fc83c0b49f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

A Would-Be Pilot, Hitting Turbulence on the Ground
By MICHAEL WINES

It is James, the one with a shot at a future, who has become the family's center of gravity.

Petrus Mokoena passes many evenings drinking Lesotho beer. His wife MaDibeo, silent and vacant-eyed in her mysterious illness, has left a hole in the household and a gnawing fear in her children's bellies. Tiny 7-year-old Mampho and her 9-year-old brother Thabiso now demand James's attention instead of hers. So do the cleaning and cooking.

James's handsome older brother Dibeo, 19, spent four straight years in the ninth grade at Ypokaleng High, the school James escaped.

That leaves 13-year-old Joseph, as charismatic and quick-witted as James is quiet and deliberative, as perhaps his brother's closest companion.

There are girls, of course, and James said he was somewhat interested. But "if I had a girlfriend, I couldn't think as well," he said. "I don't have a girlfriend so that I can focus."

In truth, James has few close friends. Awkward and shy, he is in transit between worlds, and not really comfortable in either.

Some evenings, Mr. Mokoena frets over the cost of his son's schooling and how James, now the household's most educated member, is moving beyond his rough-hewn father.

"My father told me that since I was in this school, I was beginning to lose my culture," James said. "That I am becoming a white person. That I don't eat with my hand; I eat with a fork."

But each weekday night for the last two years, as Mr. Mokoena left to collect trash, he took a pen with him to mark his time sheet. And when he returned about 6 a.m., just as James began to stir in his crowded bed, he gave his son the pen to use that day at school.

Then James donned his Fouriesburg uniform and walked the mile to his other world.

RIGIDLY Afrikaner and all-white under apartheid a decade ago, the Fouriesburg school has since become almost all black. Most white students stampeded to prep schools when apartheid ended; the current student body consists mostly of better-off blacks and a few whites who cannot afford private schooling.

James was neither. "He has the worst situation, in that the children tend to look down on him and see him as really poor," said Mick Andrew, a 67-year-old English literature teacher and the closest thing James has to a mentor.

James made a show of sloughing off their ostracism. "Most of the time, at school, I don't do things for fun," he said. "I come, I do what I have to do, and I go home."

At home, he studied. When he first came to the school, in January 2003, his grades were abysmal, in part because of his poor English. In his first term, he failed five subjects. In his second, he failed only English.

Fouriesburg classes end at the ninth grade. As the December end of term loomed last year, James made elaborate plans to enroll in the 10th grade at a private school in Tweeling, 75 miles to the north. James said his father would pay tuition. He could help, he said, by selling candy and drinks....

[anne]

We know.

[camille roy]

One the best things we can do as consumers for the poor is buy their products. Especially the products of child labor. For many young girls, we either buy the products they make, or they will be forced into a life of prostitution, either out of financial need, or by being sold into slavery by their destitute parents. We should encourage businesses to provide employment opportunities for the young poor especially. "Buy products made by child labor!".

This is troll-style posting. What makes it so? This fellow Tymbrimi acts like a lurker who likes to jump in early on a discussion and drop a stinking load. He likes to be inflammatory. He likes shock. He never, ever, addresses a counter-argument, because point-counter point is not what he's about. I suspect that he gets off on disturbing liberals with his spew (the true point). He reminds me of Bush, the poseur Bush, who has nothing of substance to offer the world other than his twittering gut.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/international/africa/04village.html

April 4, 2005

Kenyan Village Serves as Test Case in Fight on Poverty
By MARC LACEY

SAURI, Kenya - Patricia Awino Odera had her handmade hoe cocked over her head the other day, her face scrunched up into a scowl, sweat pouring from her brow, her labors the very image of futility. Then hope descended onto her cornfield.

"No, no, no, no!" cried Herine Okoth, an agricultural extension worker, as she marched over the freshly tilled land. "Stop!"

Ms. Odera, a frail-looking 54-year-old grandmother who had never had a day of schooling in her life, had thrown fertilizer in with her corn seeds and spaced her holes too closely, both of which would reduce the harvest she and her children would get.

"We agreed that you'd put the fertilizer in first, separate from the maize," Ms. Okoth said. "It's not so difficult. It's like this. Fertilizer first. Then cover it with some dirt. Then throw in the seeds. Then cover those. It's not hard at all."

This settlement in western Kenya, where Ms. Odera lives, has become a giant test tube, and Ms. Okoth's instruction is one part of that experiment. Eventually there will be 10 such test villages, scattered across the world's poorest continent.

Led by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, the project aims to fight poverty in all its aspects - from health and education to agriculture and energy in one focused area - to prove that conditions for millions of people like Ms. Odera and her neighbors can be improved in just five years.

It is an important and uncertain gambit. If it fails, initiatives like that pushed recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to greatly increase foreign aid to Africa may seem foolhardy. If a single village cannot be turned around with focused attention, how can whole communities and even countries be revitalized?

The project led by Mr. Sachs grew out of the Millennium Development Goals, benchmarks created by the United Nations in 2000 aimed at prodding the world into reducing hunger and sickness by half, increasing school enrollment, and generally improving the lives of the poorest of the poor. Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, appointed Mr. Sachs to oversee its poverty reduction efforts.

But setting the millennium goals - and putting in place a deadline of 2015 for seeing them through - has so far not meant much to people like Ms. Odera. Today the projections for reaching those goals keep slipping further and further into the future. It is now estimated that many of those goals will be reached decades late.

By then, Ms. Odera will be long gone. Her children may be dead, too. Her grandchildren, many of whom have already lost their parents to disease, will be well along in poverty-stricken lives of their own.

That looming failure is what spurred Mr. Sachs and his colleagues to select a particular village with dismal social indicators - this one - where they would apply a more focused antipoverty strategy to prove that, with enough attention, the goals could be reached quicker than people think. Sauri's remoteness is one of the factors that has allowed poverty to get such a foothold here. It is a forgotten place in a country that has seen corruption devastate its national economy.

Ms. Okoth, who interrupted Ms. Odera's planting, is one of dozens of experts working to make sure that this Millennium Village Project does not become another pie-in-the-sky effort.

The researchers behind the program are keeping track of every penny they spend, trying to demonstrate that for a modest amount, somewhere around $110 per person, a village can be tugged out of poverty.

They have tried to measure exactly how bad Sauri was at the start of the project last fall. Every home was surveyed to get an accurate portrait of the population. Blood tests were taken among a smaller group for a nutritional analysis, because many villagers eat only once a day, and show it.

Blood will also be tested to determine how widespread the malaria parasite is, and then again later, to see whether the mosquito bed nets given to every villager help keep more people, especially children, alive.

A new health clinic has gone up in Sauri. Villagers did the labor, and the project pitched in the sacks of cement, the sheets of tin and the white and blue paint. The Kenyan government must provide the drugs, one of many contributions required of the government to make the project fly.

Before the arrival of the health clinic, villagers relied on the district hospital, which got its first government doctor recently as part of the project. It had been without one since 1994.

At the hospital, there is an ambulance up on blocks; it has not moved for five years. The villagers will receive a free truck to share, which will double as an ambulance and a way for farmers to get their produce to market....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/opinion/08wed1.html?ex=1275883200&en=e4bcde64fb1d169b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 8, 2005

Crumbs for Africa

President Bush kept a remarkably straight face yesterday when he strode to the microphones with Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, and told the world that the United States would now get around to spending $674 million in emergency aid that Congress had already approved for needy countries. That's it. Not a penny more to buy treated mosquito nets to help save the thousands of children in Sierra Leone who die every year of preventable malaria. Nothing more to train and pay teachers so 11-year-old girls in Kenya may go to school. And not a cent more to help Ghana develop the programs it needs to get legions of young boys off the streets.

Mr. Blair, who will be the host when the G-8, the club of eight leading economic powers, holds its annual meeting next month, is trying to line up pledges to double overall aid for Africa over the next 10 years. That extra $25 billion a year would do all those things, and much more, to raise the continent from dire poverty. Before getting to Washington, Mr. Blair had done very well, securing pledges of large increases from European Union members.

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent. As Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist in charge of the United Nations' Millennium Project, put it so well, the notion that there is a flood of American aid going to Africa "is one of our great national myths."

The United States currently gives just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent....

[anne]

Imagine, we are suddenly ever so tired of looking to public development programs in areas that are terribly in need of such programs, as if we have proferred more than a fig for public development in any event, especially when it is actually in our interest to extend ourselves in Africa, when it is in our interest and is our obligation to get development projects wrong until we get them right.

[anne]

William Easterly has set out to sneer at any and every possible significant public development or aid project in Africa, so a move to free public schooling will reflexively be criticized as fostering quantity over quality. Well, then, how much have we contributed to African schooling lately. Try even getting an agreement among the developed countries to support agricultural imports from developing countries, or more viably to support agricultural subsidies in poorer countries. Try to come away with an agreement in Russia on financing vaccine and drug development for the poorest countries. Try to foster even vaccine development for Africa, then tell us about how overly generous we are.

[anne]

Brazil understands well what generousity is about. Having developed a generic drug manufacturing base, when Brazil, which has a wonderful public health program, needs a drug there is always the implied threat that the drug will be offered at a fair price to Brazil and the patent holder or Brazil will make the drug anyway. This is how the development game has to be played, but much of Africa has no base yet to play any such game. So, where then is assiostance?

[Miguel]

"One the best things we can do as consumers for the poor is buy their products. Especially the products of child labor"

Every child employed in a factory means an adult who is not employed in that factory.

[anne]

Miquel:

"Every child employed in a factory means an adult who is not employed in that factory."

Precisely; thanks Miquel and Camille.

[Isabel]

"According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent."

I've seen that before, and it's frightening. And coupled with it's mirror image, the perception Americans have of farming subsidies, for example, it's surprizing any dollar is given at all (I'm mentioning Americans just because I don't know of any similar polls for Europeans).

"...it is in our interest and is our obligation to get development projects wrong until we get them right."

I like that!

And Anne, his name is MiGuel, not MiQuel (and dont pronounce the U!)... ;-)

[anne]

Ah, I understand and I had wondered :)

[Bruce Webb]

Tymbrinni if an ass of course.

And this discussion misses the whole point of sweatshops. Setting up a factory that pays $2.00 a day to make anti-malarial bed netting, presumedly for local sale to other people making wages at that level (since the market for anti-malarial bed netting is not particularly hopping at the Gap or on 5th Ave) is not to establish a sweatshop, it is to recognize the local market. Setting up a factory that pays $2.00 a day to make Nike shoes that sell for $150 to Americans, that is a sweatshop. The problem is not necessarily that children or women are working it is that the amount they gain from the sale of their labor is totally out of proportion to the profit being made in between. Paying $40 for a shirt at the mall is not doing a favor for the woman who may have netted a nickle making it and only thoroughly dishonest tricksters would attempt to sell that garbagy an argument.

(In the Startide Rising world the Tymbrinni are known galaxy wide as tricksters, why our Tymbrinni picked the name is obvious, he fashions himself as a troll a clever cut above the other trolls. As if no one else had ever read a book)

[Chris Mann]

Bruce, exploited or not, these people in sweatshops are getting a better deal than what they had.

As I see it these people can be well fed and be making $2 a day working for Nike, or they can make less than $1 a day working a farm after a bunch of American hippies makes their employment a PR issue and forces Nike out of their country.

[Miguel]

"As I see it these people can be well fed and be making $2 a day working for Nike, or they can make less than $1 a day working a farm after a bunch of American hippies makes their employment a PR issue and forces Nike out of their country."

Or they can be making $2.5 a day if Nike (to avoid the anti-Nike campagns) raise their wages.

[anne]

Miguel:

"Or they can be making $2.5 a day if Nike (to avoid the anti-Nike campagns) raise their wages."

Again, thank you Miguel, as Isabel has translated and instructed :)

[anne]

The neo-colonialist mythology that development entails a stage, an interminable stage, of intolerable exploitation, with no hope of betterment should be beyond thought rather than becoming a contemporary justification for development that can never be. Then, when there really is development, really is a development model that is transforming the lives of more than a billion people, we fret and regret each development step. Fortunately China is not to be so treated.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29talkingpoints.html

March 29, 2006

The Scandal of 'Poor People's Diseases'
By TINA ROSENBERG

Why One Million Africans a Year Die of Malaria

Malaria used to be common as far north as Canada and Britain. It killed Oliver Cromwell. Shakespeare refers to it, as "ague," in eight of his plays. But today, many Americans don't even realize it is still around. Malaria is all but invisible despite the fact that it is one of the world's top killers, with over a million victims a year in Africa alone. It is the leading cause of death for children under five in Africa. Because rural children don't lobby, malaria is ignored even in Africa. Governments have come to accept a million child deaths as the natural order of things.

Malaria's victims suffer from their invisibility. One way is through lack of money to fight the disease. International organizations and aid agencies talk a lot about malaria. But they have not backed their talk with money. The solutions they push have been things poor people can buy for themselves, because most donors are unwilling to finance more effective measures. All over Africa, a main cure for malaria is chloroquine. The great advantage of chloroquine is that it costs only a few pennies, so even poor African families can buy it. It just has one small problem – in most places it doesn't work. The parasite has become resistant to it. There is a new, effective cure, called artemisinin-based combination therapy. Countries should be switching to it rapidly, but they are not, because it's much more expensive – around $1.40 for an adult cure, 40 cents for a child. That doesn't seem like much to save a life, but it's more than most malaria-stricken families can afford. That means rich-country donors would have to pay. Until recently, they haven't.

Now the United Nations' Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is starting to help countries switch to a malaria cure that actually works. Wealthy nations are also eager to help prevent the spread of malaria – as long as it doesn't cost much. The hot prevention tool today is an insecticide-treated net to hang over a bed. These bed nets are very effective, if people can get them. But people can't, because donors don't want to give them away. Even at the subsidized price of three dollars, the cost is high enough so that people living on a dollar a day do not buy them. One survey asked rural Africans what they would buy if they had the money. A bed net was sixth on the list. The first three items were a radio, a bicycle and, heartbreakingly, a plastic bucket.

Bed net sale programs generally do not work. In contrast, the country of Togo in 2004 gave away bed nets during its national measles vaccination days. Everyone who brought a child to be inoculated got a free bed net, or a voucher for one. Virtually overnight, Togo acquired an effective form of malaria prevention for most of its young children. But this is a solution many donors seem unwilling to finance.

The United States, of course, didn't beat malaria with bed nets. It killed mosquitoes with insecticide – something that African nations also did with much success half a century ago. Today, South Africa and Mozambique have drastically reduced malaria cases with a program to spray the insides of houses with small amounts of insecticide once or twice a year. Why don't other nations do this? Because it requires government financing, and that means rich countries have to pay. So far, they remain reluctant.

The truth is that many malaria victims would be better off if America still had the disease. If malaria still existed in America, we would be attacking it with DDT . In fact, we did exactly that. America sprayed DDT in large quantities on crops and cities. This was extremely irresponsible and did terrible environmental harm. But now we know that DDT can beat malaria without environmental damage, if it is used as it is in South Africa, sprayed in tiny amounts inside houses. DDT, however, is banned in the United States and Europe. That means that Washington has not, until the last few months, financed its use anywhere else and it has blocked the World Health Organization from issuing recommendations to use DDT. American officials maintained it was hypocritical to push an insecticide overseas that is banned at home. Americans are beginning to realize, however, that it is more hypocritical to deny Africa the ability to use responsibly the tools we used irresponsibly to beat malaria. Last year, President Bush announced a new program to fight malaria in Africa that he says will provide an additional $1.2 billion over the next five years. Such promises have a way of drying up, especially when they concern programs with little political constituency. But the program is well-conceived. It will give away bed nets, buy malaria drugs that work and finance indoor spraying. Eight countries in Africa are due to start spraying this year, and three will use DDT as their primary insecticide....

[anne]

Care to tell us more about the wonder of those damnable $2 a day jobs? Let's find what's left after $1.40 a day to treat adult malaria, or 40 cents left to treat a child:

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29talkingpoints.html

Malaria's victims suffer from their invisibility. One way is through lack of money to fight the disease. International organizations and aid agencies talk a lot about malaria. But they have not backed their talk with money. The solutions they push have been things poor people can buy for themselves, because most donors are unwilling to finance more effective measures. All over Africa, a main cure for malaria is chloroquine. The great advantage of chloroquine is that it costs only a few pennies, so even poor African families can buy it. It just has one small problem – in most places it doesn't work. The parasite has become resistant to it. There is a new, effective cure, called artemisinin-based combination therapy. Countries should be switching to it rapidly, but they are not, because it's much more expensive – around $1.40 for an adult cure, 40 cents for a child. That doesn't seem like much to save a life, but it's more than most malaria-stricken families can afford. That means rich-country donors would have to pay. Until recently, they haven't....

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29talkingpoints.html

The Scandal of 'Poor People's Diseases'
By TINA ROSENBERG

How a Beauty Regime Salvaged a Cure for Sleeping Sickness

The story of sleeping sickness is a scandalous illustration of the politics of neglected diseases — and of how much wealthy people drive the global medical market. After malaria, sleeping sickness is the most deadly parasitic disease. It is endemic in 36 African countries and is always fatal if it is not treated. The cure used in most places is melarsoprol – an arsenic-based drug so toxic that it collapses each vein into which it is injected and kills between two and eight percent of those who take it. There is another cure, eflornithine, so effective that it is called the "resurrection drug" – it makes people in comas get up and walk.

Eflornithine is an old anticancer drug that turned out to be not very effective against cancer. In the mid-1990's, the company that made the drug stopped making it. The fact that it was extraordinarily effective at treating sleeping sickness didn't matter, because victims of that disease had little money to pay for it. After it stopped production, the company, which is now known as Sanofi-Aventis, licensed the drug to the World Health Organization, which together with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, searched for another manufacturer. But by 2000, the existing stocks of eflornithine were dwindling and no other manufacturer was interested.It looked as though the miracle cure would disappear. Then lightening struck. Eflornithine reappeared in a six-page ad in Cosmopolitan magazine as the active ingredient in the Bristol- Myers Squibb product, Vaniqa, a new cream that impedes the growth of women's facial hair. Doctors Without Borders, which had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was launching an initiative to find cures for neglected diseases, seized the opportunity to launch a publicity campaign. Christiane Amanpour went to southern Sudan to report on eflornithine for "60 Minutes."

The predecessor to Sanofi-Aventis, which still controlled the rights to the drug, eventually agreed to donate a five-year supply, plus money for research, surveillance and training of health care workers, in a package totaling $25 million. The donation runs out this year, but there is a good chance it will be renewed. A Bristol-Myers Squibb spokesman inadvertently summed up the plight of sleeping sickness in 2001: "Before Vaniqa came on the scene, there was no reason to make eflornithine at all. Now there's a reason." The market agrees with him. Saving American complexions is a reason. Saving African lives, apparently, is not....

[anne]

What's $2 a day, when you have such friends, tra la:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/world/europe/16drugs.html?ex=1310702400&en=61e3d43f7bb41440&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

July 16, 2006

Disputes Stall Efforts to Finance Medicine for Poor Countries
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ROME — Hopes that world leaders meeting in Russia this weekend will agree to a much-anticipated program to help finance vaccines and drugs for the developing world are fading, with competing proposals stalled by political differences and rivalries, advocacy groups and international health experts familiar with the negotiations say.

"What's concerning is how politicized the whole thing has become," said Dr. Tido Von Schoen-Angerer of the Campaign for Essential Medicines at Doctors Without Borders. "It's a shame because each proposal had its merits."

The global problem of infectious disease is a major item on the agenda at the Group of 8 summit meeting, and many health experts were convinced that a plan to induce vaccine makers to focus more on the developing world, an idea endorsed earlier by Group of 8 committees, would be announced. But the proposal has been left out of the draft final communiqué, said a senior international official familiar with the negotiations. "This was an opportunity for a big push forward, and now it appears it's not going to happen," he said.

In the past few years, its has become a mantra of international meetings that rich countries need to help poor countries gain access to medicines and vaccines that are often inaccessible because of cost and patent protection....

[anne]

Yes; Lawrence Kohlberg would repeatedly ask students what they would do were a loved person to become gravely ill and there was a drug that might be bought but there was not money enough to buy the drug. Would you steal the drug? There was a time, when I fought, fought though they were such dears, with John Rawls and Israel Scheffler in a seminar over the question which I would not answer because I told them the belowed would simply die because the poor are not able to steal drugs.

[anne]

Who you going to save from AIDS on $2 a day?

December 2001 -

663,815,000 total population of sub-Saharan Africa.
291,310,000 population of adults 15 to 49.

28,500,000 sub-Saharan Africans HIV/AIDS positive.
26,000,000 adults 15 to 49. 9.0% adult rate.
15,000,000 women 15 to 49. 57.7% of infected.
2,600,000 children 0 to 14.

22,000,000 - 35,000,000 range of sub-Saharan Africans
HIV/AIDS positive.

6.41 - 11.39% range of women 15 to 24 infected.
3.13 - 5.56% range of men 15 to 24 infected.

19,400,000 deaths estimated for sub-Saharan Africa's
adults and children of diseases caused by AIDS from
beginning of epidemic to end 2001.

2,200,000 deaths of Africans from diseases caused by
AIDS in 2001.
500,000 deaths of children.

1,300,000 - 2,300,000 range of deaths for adults.
380,000 - 650,000 range of deaths for children.

3,400,000 Africans newly infected in 2001.
700,000 children newly infected.

11,000,000 orphans cumulatively at end 2001. An
orphan is described as a child who by 15 has had a
mother or both parents die of diseases caused by
AIDS. Mothers generally are the leading care takers
of Africa's children.

44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
37 countries studied.

20% or more adults infected in 7 African countries.
11% or more infected in 12 countries.
8% or more infected in 15 countries.
5% or more infected in 24 countries.

[My development of United Nations data.]

[anne]

11,572,000 total population of Malawi.
5,118,000 population of adults 15 to 49.

780,000 adults HIV/AIDS positive.
15.0% adult rate of infection.
56.4% of infected adults are women 15 to 49.
11.91 - 17.87% range of women 15 to 24 infected.
65,000 children 0 to 14.

80,000 AIDS deaths in 2001.
470,000 AIDS orphans cumulatively to 2002.

31,293,000 total population of Kenya.
15,333,000 population of adults 15 to 49.

2,300,000 adults HIV/AIDS positive.
15.0% adult rate of infection.
60.9% of infected adults are women 15 to 49.
12.45 - 18.67% range of women 15 to 24 infected.
220,000 children 0 to 14.

190,000 AIDS deaths in 2001.
890,000 AIDS orphans cumulatively to 2002.

43,792,000 total population of South Africa.
23,666,000 population of adults 15 to 49.

4,700,000 adults HIV/AIDS positive.
20.1% adult rate of infection.
57.5% of infected adults are women 15 to 49.
20.51 - 30.76% range of women 15 to 24 infected.
250,000 children 0 to 14.

360,000 AIDS deaths in 2001.
660,000 AIDS orphans cumulatively to 2002.

[My development of United Nations data.]

[anne]

Tanzania, since mention was made, and notice that AIDS in Africa is an illness of young adults and what I have long termed a disease of women:

35,965,000 total population of United Republic of
Tanzania.
16,701,000 population of adults 15 to 49.

1,300,000 adults HIV/AIDS positive.
7.8% adult rate of infection.
57.7% of infected adults are women 15 to 49.
6.44 - 9.67% range of women 15 to 24 infected.
170,000 children 0 to 14.

140,000 AIDS deaths in 2001.
810,000 AIDS orphans cumulatively to 2002.

[anne]

Imagine, a woman caring for a family and another woman's family as the other woman may be ill and what of the other children? Imagine, and I am not the least interested in some noe-colonialist fantasy about Africa and the hope that is Africa.

[anne]

The reason I use the expression "neo-colonialist" in describing the thesis of the post, is that when political-economic argument are made for Africa that we would not dream of making for America or Spain or Norway, argument showing not moral relativism based on the people being argued over then "neo-colonialist" is a suitable expression.

[Tom Geraghty]

The Man Without a Plan

Amartya Sen
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

. . . As it happens, the empirical picture of the actual effects of international aid . . . is far more complex than Easterly's shotgun summary suggests. . . .

. . . in fact, even he acknowledges the success of many international aid efforts, from the dissemination of deworming drugs and the use of oral rehydration therapy for diarrheal diseases to indoor spraying to control malaria and several programs to slow down the spread of AIDS. . . .

The challenge is to respond to the plight of the hopelessly impoverished without neglecting to insist that help come in useful and productive forms. In fact, Easterly makes exactly that point once the blast of rhetoric is turned down . . .
.

In some ways, the more interesting parts of Easterly's analysis lie in his case studies of particular programs. Many of those detailed depictions of donors' failures to foster development are indeed persuasive. And yet, there are very few cases cited in which aid has actually "done so much ill," as Easterly claims. Rather, sometimes it has simply not done much good. . . . There are also many examples that Easterly considers where aid helped rather than hindered -- which could have led him not to the total dismissal of the importance of aid, but to a more subtle rendering of the overall picture. . . .

A similar point can be made about Easterly's insistence that aid-oriented international institutions are doing unmitigated harm . . . these deficiencies call for better economic and political reasoning and a bigger voice for the poor in the governance of these organizations, rather than simple dismissal. Global institutions have important roles to play in the coordination of short- and long-term economic policies across the world. . . .

It is also worth noting that some of the studies on which Easterly draws . . . were produced by these very institutions. . . .

Perhaps the weakest link in Easterly's reasoning is his almost complete neglect of the distinctions between different types of economic problems. Easterly is well aware of the efficiency of market delivery when commodities are bought in a market and backed by suitable purchasing power, and he contrasts that with the usual infelicities and inefficiencies in getting aid to those who need it most. But the distinction between the two scenarios lies not only in the different ways of meeting the respective problems, but also in the nature of the problems themselves. There is something deeply misleading in the contrast he draws between them . . . there is a radical difference . . . between the enterprise of supplying "what is in demand" -- which is integrally linked to the buyers' ability to pay -- and that of supplying needed goods and services to people whose income and wealth do not allow a need to be converted into a market demand.

. . . There is much of merit in Easterly's perceptive vision about initiatives, incentives, and communication. . . . My hope is that the "searchers" among the readers of The White Man's Burden will look for the convincing arguments Easterly does provide rather than for those he does not.

[anne]

Thanks, and nicely abstracted, Tom :)

[Isabel]

"But for some members of a new generation of philanthropists, schooled in the techniques of venture capital and Wall Street, fighting poverty effectively relies on the creation of low-wage factories, as well as the establishment of lending institutions that charge rates that many Americans would deem usurious."

I've checked what Grameen has to say for itself. Here it is what I found:

http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/GBGlance.htm

Beeing very much finance-challenged (and having the disadvantadge of not counting in English) I can't be quite sure if these rates qualify as "usurious", but it doesn't seem like that to me. I would appreciate if someone makes it clear for me because:

1) If they are, I'll be very disappointed

2) If they aren't, either the article is dishonest, or it means that one does not NEED to practice usurious rates to stay in business, one CHOSES to do so.

[Bruce Webb]

"As I see it these people can be well fed and be making $2 a day working for Nike, or they can make less than $1 a day working a farm after a bunch of American hippies makes their employment a PR issue and forces Nike out of their country."

But are they being well-fed? Importing Philippine women to work in slave like conditions in the N. Marianas just so that your t-shirt can be legally marked "Made in America" is quite a different thing than setting up a factory to produce a locally used product, particularly if the profits (if any) are kept in country. Not all $2 a day jobs are created equal, the issue is the relation of employer profit to employee wage. A to Z manufacturing is described as a "family owned firm" in Tanzania. Well is that family living in a palace or a modest home? That is one key as to whether the operation is economically just or not. The other is the degree of coercion. Easterly seems to glide past that by equating all low wage manufacturing as "sweatshops". Which then enables people like Tymbrinni to claim they are doing slaves a favor by purchasing products made by slave labor.

[Holly W.]

Thank you, Bruce Webb; I was going to make the same comment you did concerning the relationship between employer profit and employee wage, and you've saved me the effort! :)

[anne]

Willaim Easterly's book "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,"

[anne]

Darn, here is the explanation I meant to post from Amartya Sen:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301fareviewessay85214/amartya-sen/the-man-without-a-plan.html?mode=print

March, 2006

The Man Without a Plan
By Amartya Sen - Foreign Affairs

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
By William Easterly.

Although a great champion of democracy, Easterly is also deeply critical of the majestic pretensions of a handful of world leaders who think they can impose democracy on other countries they know little about. The continuing debacle in Iraq affirms his general critique of grand plans. Easterly presents a similarly effective critique of the recent spell of imperial nostalgia -- a temptation to save the world by filling the void left by the decline of old empires with the activism of a new American one. Here he comes closest to responding to Kipling's exhortation:

Take up the White Man's burden --

The savage wars of peace --

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease.

Easterly writes, "Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, whose work on every topic but this I greatly admire, says that there is 'such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing. ... In many cases of economic "backwardness," a liberal empire can do better than a nation state.'" Easterly's skepticism of the benefits of such "liberal imperialism" is well presented. It could be supplemented by noting that there were big famines in India -- the subject of Kipling's eloquent phrase -- until the very end of the British imperial rule. The last one, the Bengal famine of 1943, killed between two million and three million people four years before Indian independence. Since the end of the Raj and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy, there has not been a single one....

[anne]

Rudyard Kipling was an apologist for colonialism, as the distasteful expression "white man's burden" is a pretense that colonialism would be accompanied by altruistic development rather than exploitation, which was absurd. Famine in India through the British Raj, was famine that the British turned from rather than prevented. Pretending that a contemporary aid program such a Doctor Without Borders might envision for national health care in Kenya, can be likened to colonial planning under the Raj, is reprehensible.

[Miguel]

http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/GBGlance.htm:

"It is owned by the poor borrowers of the bank who are mostly women. It works exclusively for them. Borrowers of Grameen Bank at present own 94 per cent of the total equity of the bank. Remaining 6 percent is owned by the government."

If the bank is owned by the borrowers, there is not any problem with "usurious" interest rates, because, in the end, the profits of the bank return to the borrowers.

[Isabel]

Mixing up low wages for producing things that will be sold at low prices in the local markets with low wages for producing things that will be sold at high profit in the Western countries, and calling both things "sweatshops", is more than reprehensible.

Just like hinting that, to be profitable, microcredits are offered at usurious rates, but it is a good thing anyway, because it is "better than nothing".

Which makes me wonder: why do most developed countries have laws against child labour, anyway? Poor families could certainly use the extra income, and it would also solve the problem of latch-key kids, that would learn from a tender age the virtues of industriousness and self-reliance.

[anne]

Isabel:

Mixing up low wages for producing things that will be sold at low prices in the local markets with low wages for producing things that will be sold at high profit in the Western countries, and calling both things "sweatshops", is more than reprehensible.

Just like hinting that, to be profitable, microcredits are offered at usurious rates, but it is a good thing anyway, because it is "better than nothing".

Which makes me wonder: why do most developed countries have laws against child labour, anyway? Poor families could certainly use the extra income, and it would also solve the problem of latch-key kids, that would learn from a tender age the virtues of industriousness and self-reliance.

[A perfect comment.]