Marshall Burke, a Research Associate at the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, in conjunction with several other researchers from the University of California Berkeley, NYU, and Harvard, has recently published a journal article which predicts that climate change will worsen armed conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa in the future.

The projections are based on a historical analysis of the relationship between temperatures and conflict over the period 1981-2002 in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The study finds a statistically significant positive correlation between temperature and the incidence of civil conflict (defined as involving at least 1,000 battled-related deaths).  Warmer than average years experienced a 50% greater likelihood of civil conflict.   

This is consistent with previous research which has found a link between precipitation and conflict; wars are more likely to occur after rain failures and in drier years.  When precipitation is incorporated into Burke’s regression, the temperature effect on conflict remains robust. 

The climate-conflict relationship is not surprising, given the key role of agriculture in many African economies, the evidence that higher temperatures hamper agricultural productivity, and other research which indicates a causal link between poor economic growth and civil conflict (e.g. Collier).   With limited irrigation and crop varieties, poor farmers may be ill-equipped to respond to adverse climate shocks, hurting their livelihoods and incomes.  Burke et. al. call urgently for policy measures to protect the poor from these adverse climate shocks.

Source:  Stanford University Food Security and Environment.

Despite international laws banning the export of unusable electronic products, an increasing amount of electronic waste, which cannot be easily,  cheaply, and legally disposed of in western countries, is ending up in the rubbish dumps of Ghana (and Nigeria, China, and India, for that matter). 

Labelled as “second-hand goods,” computers and televisions arrive by container ship into Tema Harbour and are dumped in the Agbogblashie scrap yard in Accra.  The electronic waste is then “processed” in the most rudimentary and dangerous ways – poor people from the nearby slums (often young boys) disassemble the computers by hand and burn wires to extract the copper, which can be resold as scrap.  Toxic fumes are released, and no protective equipment is worn.

While it is illegal to export e-waste from Europe, unscrupulous traders get around this by labelling old electronics for “reuse.”  It is suspected that some British recycling companies collect old computers, but instead of recycling them, they cut deals with Ghanaian business people to export them.

When Greenpeace published a report in August of last year about this practice, there was public outcry in the UK (not helped by the fact that some of the computers found in Agbogbloshie were labelled as belonging to the NHS and UK councils).  British citizens complained to the UK Environment Agency, which says it is investigating the issue.

Greenpeace believes that the solution to the problem lies in pressuring large electronic companies to take responsiblity for recycling their old products and institute global recycling schemes. 

Sources: Greenpeace and Ghana Business News.

When my boyfriend, who works in marketing, suggested to me a business book about Africa, I was intrigued.  For those working in the field of development, Vijay Mahajan’s Africa Rising is not likely to appear on the radar; it is published by the Wharton School of Business and focuses on business marketing, with the subtitle “How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think.”  But for anyone interested in the future of Africa, it is worth reading and offers a breath of fresh air.

Vijay Mahajan is an Indian business and marketing guru who has won several prestigious marketing industry awards and has consulted a host of Fortune 500 companies.  He was inspired to write Africa Rising after his 2005 book on emerging markets entitled The 86% Solution was awarded the 2007 Book of the Year Award from the American Marketing Association but was criticized for paying insufficient attention to Africa.  In The 86% Solution, Mahajan notes that companies have focused on marketing to the world’s wealthiest consumers in developed countries.  However, he argues the top 14% segment of the market is rapidly becoming saturated and future growth opportunities lie with “the other 86%” in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, where consumers may be poorer, but are consumers nonetheless.

In Africa Rising, Mahajan refreshingly presents Africa not as a charity case, but as a market opportunity.  In the same way that India was seen as a “lost cause” to business investors in the 1960s, and later went on to become an important and dynamic emerging market, Mahajan sees Africa as the next “rising star.”  To research the book, Mahajan went on a “consumer safari” through the continent, speaking with business leaders, consumers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and expatriates in the African diaspora. 

Mahajan segments the African market into three layers (Africa One, Africa Two, and Africa Three, roughly corresponding to the rich elite, the burgeoning middle class, and the poorest) and explores opportunities in retail, banking, youth-oriented products, infrastructure, media, and entertainment.  Throughout the book, he repeats the mantra “Africa is richer than you think,” noting that twelve Africa nations have GNI per capita greater than China’s, and twenty greater than India’s.  For a continent that is almost universally negatively perceived in the media and often ignored by the business community, it is reassuring to read a more positive account of Africa that highlights the opportunities for profit and growth which do exist.

That said, I did feel the book is overly simplistic in its view of Africa, often aggregating together many very diverse and heterogeneous countries and presenting them as a single homogenous market, and moreover ignoring the high degree of inequality that exists within African countries.  Although several African countries may indeed have a GNI per capita higher than China’s or India’s, this is not a very meaningful measure of the robustness of consumer markets when a) many of those countries GNI’s are skewed by their oil wealth (e.g. Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Gabon, Angola, etc.), and b) that aside, those 12 countries taken together have a combined population of 100 million spread across geographies as diverse as the Seychelles, Algeria, and Swaziland – hardly “one” market.

Moreover, Mahajan often overlooks significant infrastructural problems which present a real barrier to the profitability of businesses in Africa.  For example, he says the lack of reliable electricity supply in many countries creates a market for entrepreneurs to supply generators.  In my view, this is a bit rose-tinted, as a reliable electricity supply is a basic requirement for businesses to operate, and the inability of the state to provide this service means that businesses as diverse as factories, hotels, and restaurants have to incur substantial extra costs to acquire and operate generators, cutting into their profit margins.  While it is true that entrepreneurs can sometimes step in to compensate for market failures, surely we cannot expect the free market to spontaneously resolve what are serious structural constraints on growth in Africa.  In his excessive optimism, Mahajan ends up overlooking some of the significant barriers to development that do inhibit many African markets.

Just over two months ago, the small West African nation of Guinea featured prominently in the news because of the violence that took place in a football stadium in the capital Conakry on September 28^th, causing public outrage both within Guinea and in the international community. 

One-hundred and fifty-seven people were killed and 1,200 wounded when the military used tear gas and then opened fire into an unarmed crowd of 50,000 pro-democracy and opposition demonstrators.  In addition to shooting and bayoneting people, witnesses reported that soldiers publicly and violently raped a number of women.  Others accounts suggest that the military removed bodies to cover up the number of dead.  President and Captain Moussa Dadis Camara denied direct responsibility or knowledge for the assaults, saying that his soldiers were “uncontrollable.”  

Camara was initially popular after coming into power in December 2008 through a bloodless military coup hours after the death of Lansana Conte, the former president who had ruled for more than two decades and himself came to power through a coup in 1984.  Some Guineans liked Camara at the start because he came down hard on the drug-trafficking industry and made promises of democracy, including a pledge to hold a presidential election on January 31, 2010 in which he could not run.  

But as time has passed, Camara has held onto his power and started to backtrack on his promises.  Various statements he made led to rumors that he was planning to run in the January elections.  People started to speak out against his military rule and protest against him running for president.  This dissent is what motivated the rally on September 28^th which so tragically ended.    

As usual, shock stories of violence tend to dominate the news from Africa, and then the media goes quiet on the longer-term outcomes or deeper analysis.  Unfortunately, Camara is still in power, although the international community has put significant pressure on him.  In response to the attacks, France, Guinea’s former colonial power, suspended military ties with the country, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) instituted an arms embargo on Guinea in mid-October, and the African Union has called for Camara to step down and is threatening sanctions. 

Moreover, The United Nations Commission of Inquiry, with the support of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, has begun an investigation into the massacre.  The three-person commission is led by an Algerian judge and former foreign minister, Mohamed Bedjaoui, and its other two members are a former minister of Burundi and the senior lawyer of Mauritius.  Their goal is to get to the bottom of what happened on September 28^th while still ensuring protection for witnesses.  The commission expects to be in Guinea for no more than 10 days. 

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about Wangari Maathai’s Greenbelt Movement which pays women in Kenya to plant trees. One of the groups Maathai has worked with are the Ogiek, a small community of forest dwellers living in the Mau forest in Western Kenya. The Ogiek are estimated to number between 5,000 and 20,000 people and have traditionally lived as forest-dwelling hunter gatherers, hunting antelope and buffalo and harvesting honey; nowadays they also farm the land.

Over the past 15 years, 25% of the Mau forest has been destroyed due to logging and political mismanagement (the Kenyan government distributed pieces of it to its cronies). In addition to affecting the livelihoods of the Ogiek, this deforestation has had a wider environmental impact because the Mau forest feeds regional lakes and rivers. The Mau forest is the main “water tower” in Kenya, meaning the forest is elevated and absorbs water in the rainy season and releases it throughout the year. As trees have been cut down, soil erosion, floods, and dried up lakes have resulted.

After the drought this past summer which left Nairobi dry for weeks (and in the dark, since most electricity is hydro powered), the Kenyan government was compelled to act. It decided to replant trees in the Mau forest to replenish water sources and pledged to conserve the forest. However, this plan involved the eviction of human settlers including the Ogiek. The Ogiek are distrustful of the government’s motivations; high ranking politicians have stakes in the timber companies and logging continues in the forest.

Since taking office in June, Lamido Sanusi, the Nigerian Central Bank Governor, has undertaken a series of substantial reforms to the Nigerian financial sector in an effort to improve the image of Nigerian banks and the Nigerian economy as a whole.  His underlying goal is to build confidence among potential investors and attract foreign capital and investment.  

The latest of Sanusi’s aggressive anti-corruption moves was announced today – in line with the standards in other countries, new regulations have been introduced in Nigeria which require banks to report any “large” cash transactions (defined as over £1,000) between accounts belonging to “politically exposed people.”  These people include government officials, politicians, executives of state-owned companies, judges and court officials, soldiers, etc.  The goal is to identify potential bribe payments and fight corruption, fraud, and money laundering. 

Sanusi has made few friends in his aggressive campaign to clean up Nigeria’s banking system.  In his shakeup of the banking sector commencing in August, he fired the top executives of five major banks and sent several bank executives to court for fraud charges.  In an interview with the BBC, Sanusi asserted that a gradual approach to reform would not work and that better transparency and improved disclosure were critical to an effective financial system in Nigeria. 

Wangari Maathai is a prominent campaigner for the environment, women’s rights, and democracy.  She has dedicated her life, and at times risked her life for, sustainable development in Africa. 

Maathai was born in 1940 in Nyeri, a rural village in Kenya, to a family of illiterate peasant farmers who lived without running water or electricity.  She grew up with the forest in her back yard and trees were to become a focus of her life.  Her parents made an atypical choice to send her to school and at 13 she joined a Catholic boarding school.  She excelled at her exams and went on to study biology at university in Kansas with a scholarship from the US government.  She later returned to Kenya, became the first woman in the region to get a PhD, and became a professor. 

She grew up during Kenya’s period of colonial rule and witnessed how the British culled the forests to create tea plantations for export.  Such abuse of the country’s natural resources continued post-independence with Kenya’s corrupt domestic ruling class.  Because of the deforestation she observed, Maathai was inspired to plant trees and started a grassroots scheme that paid women to plant trees.  Maathai persuaded an international organization to pay the women two pence for each tree they planted. 

The so-called “Green Belt” movement that Maathai founded in 1977 expanded in scale to plant whole forests across Kenya with the support of the United Nations Development Program.  To date, Maathai’s Green Belt movement has planted 40 million trees throughout Kenya and has evolved more broadly into a women’s civil society organization.  

Maathai has a history of speaking out publicly to fight her causes.  She first caused trouble with the ruling elite when she protested against President Arap Moi’s plan to develop Uhuru Park, the only park in Nairobi, into apartments, a skyscraper, and a giant statue of himself.  As a result of her efforts, she received death threats and was imprisoned.  But Maathai never gave in, and with growing pressure on Moi from international protests and the support of Al Gore, she was released and the project was abandoned.  She also stopped Moi from cutting down Karura Forest. 

Maathai also campaigned for women’s rights.  She supported women whose sons were imprisoned and tortured for opposing the regime and, along with other protesters, was severely beaten by the police.  Her ability to get Moi to back down on many issues inspired other Kenyans to dissent.  When Moi’s regime ended, Maathai was democratically elected to Parliament. 

 In 2004, Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming both the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the prize.  She is also a UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Congolese rainforest and Co-Chair of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, an organization created in 2008 to sustainably manage the forest.  The Congo Basin Forest gets little attention compared to its bigger brother the Amazon, but it is the world’s second largest rainforest and represents 26% of the world’s tropical rainforest.  It is hugely important in sequestering carbon, sustaining local livelihoods in the ten countries it spans, and hosting diverse wildlife. 

Maathai views the environment and development not as conflicting forces but as one and the same challenge.  Her view is that the world’s poor are the ones most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation.  This is because the rural poor rely the most on the natural resources around them – they produce their own food, their agriculture is dependent on rainfall, they rely on river water for drinking, and they depend on firewood collected from the woods for fuel.  Maathai’s latest book, The Challenge for Africa, explores African identity, democracy, and civil society.  

Source: Developments Issue 46 + The Independent September 28, 2009.

According to the United Nations, one billion people in today’s world go hungry.  How is this possible that so many people remain unfed, given all the technological and agricultural advances that have been made in the past fifty years?   The Green Revolution made it possible for food production to match population growth and, in theory, for no one to go hungry.  

The Green Revolution began in Mexico in the mid-1940s with efforts to increase wheat production through the breeding and development of new high-yield varieties (HYVs) of wheat that are resistant to plants and diseases and yield two to three times more grain.  This program, led by the “father of the Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug,  was later expanded to India and Pakistan in the 1960s and China in the 1980s.  It was widely considered to be successful in preventing further food shortages.   

In addition to the development of HYVs (mostly of wheat and rice), the Green Revolution also involved the financing of the accompanying agrochemicals and capital equipment needed to grow the new varieties, including pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation systems. 

Unfortunately, the success of the Green Revolution has not been replicated in Africa, where hunger remains widespread, drought is a common cause of food shortage, and agricultural productivity growth has actually slowed.  Why is this the case?  There are a number of factors. 

Firstly, most HYV crops require irrigations systems, which remain scarce in Africa; most African farms lack the technology to support HYVs.  Many crops in Africa are still rain watered, making them particularly susceptible to drought.  Moreover, the lack of infrastructure makes the cost of moving fertilizers to farms very high as well as making it difficult to bring the grain to the market once it is harvested.  In addition, the soil quality is poor in many regions. 

In addition to such physical and technological factors, many argue that political factors such as food aid come into play.  The dumping of surplus crop produced in western markets which harbor excessive farm subsidies is said to undermine and undercut third world agricultural markets, making Africa dependent on food imports and aid.   Ironically, despite agriculture being the backbone of most African economies, Africa is today a net food importer.  

But it is worth nothing that famine is not simply about the quantity of food, but the distribution of that food.  In many instances, there is not an actual lack of food in a country, but a lack of the means to acquire that food among certain segments of the population, usually due to the failure of public action, political issues, or other social constructions.  Amartya Sen has argued that the large historic famines were results of socioeconomic dynamics rather than an absolute shortage in food supply.  

Sources: ActionBioscience.org interview with Dr. Norman Borlaug, AfricanGreenRevolution.com, and The New York Times.

Oftentimes the focus of development discussions is on industrialization and manufacturing, which are seen as necessary for growth and modernization to occur.  Agriculture is given a backseat.  This shows itself in donor spending: less than 5% of aid in 2007 was spent on the agriculture sector.  Nor is there much support for agriculture within developing countries themselves; government spending on agriculture in developing countries is only 4% of public expenditure on average, reflecting the “urban bias” of many governments whose political constituencies reside in the largest cities. 

And yet so many of the world’s poor live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.  While there is a worldwide trend toward urbanization, 75% of the world’s poor still live in rural areas.  There are an estimated 500 million small farms in developing countries, collectively supporting 2 billion people.  

In Africa in particular, agriculture is extremely important to the economy  In many African countries, agriculture is the biggest private sector business.  Agriculture accounts for approximately 30% of GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of its exports, and 80% of its employment.  Whereas developed countries often have large scale, capital-intensive, mechanized farms, in Africa labour-intensive smallholder farms account for 95% of agriculture and are an important source of employment.  There are an estimated 80 million smallholder farms in Africa.  

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an agency of the United Nations founded in 1977, seeks to increase investment in smallholder farms in Africa, whether it be through micro financing, agro-processing, or market access.  Currently 45% of IFAD funding goes to Africa.

Source: www.IFAD.org and Developments Issue 46  

We take electric lighting in our daily lives completely for granted.  But in Sub-Saharan Africa, many people don’t have access to any electricity at all.  In fact, 74% of the African population doesn’t have electricity, and that goes up to 90% when we look at the rural population alone.  

People living “off-grid” rely on alternative sources of energy, such as candles, charcoal, kerosene, and biomass.  These fuel-based forms of lighting are expensive for families to purchase, and obtaining fuel for cooking is a daily struggle.  It is estimated that African households and small businesses collectively spend $17 billion on fuel-based energy each year.  Many households spend up to 30% of their disposable income on lighting, leading to so-called “energy poverty.”  Moreover, fuel-based lighting causes indoor pollution, pose a fire hazard, and produces greenhouse gas emissions. 

Efforts are being made to address this problem.  Lighting Africa is a programme set up by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to encourage the global private sector lighting industry, as well as local businesses and entrepreneurs, to develop modern lighting solutions for off-grid customers in Africa.  The goal is that for the same amount of money households currently spend on kerosene, they could instead purchase more efficient lighting technologies such as LED bulbs, flashlights, solar lamps, fluorescent lights, and human-cranking technologies.  Lighting Africa has an annual budget of $12 million. 

Source: www.lightingafrica.org and Developments Issue 46 (2009).