Which Came First: the Economy or the Education?

Most of the people reading this blog, including its author, probably think education is pretty important in battling poverty. It’s the first thing many people list when talking about solutions to poverty. I recently had the chance to have lunch with Vandy grad Kofi Dadzi, who made some compelling arguments about education, big aid NGOs, and how you make a country grow.

Kofi is an incredibly sharp and fascinating guy. A computer science graduate and former Dell employee, he and a friend co-founded the Ghanaian tech company Rancard Solutions that links international media companies to telecom companies in Ghana. They create the platform that allows things like those annoying ESPN text message updates that my friend Justin gets every time Derek Jeter so much as yawns. It’s a pretty impressive company he’s built. Eventually we got talking about how to solve poverty. Education is like the flour in the cake, right? – it’s the main ingredient. The more educated a person is, the more empowered (us poverty people love that word) he or she is. However, Kofi echoed a view I’ve heard before when he said, “Education doesn’t matter unless you have the economy that can absorb the newly educated workforce.” What he’s basically saying is pretty important: if we’re talking about priorities, let’s forget about education and just get this economy humming.

Once there are jobs opportunities, people will demand education. In Zimbabwe right now, I wouldn’t say educating oneself is pointless, but when you don’t know what policies will be different each day when you get out of bed, how compelled will you be to invest in the future, to demand education? And even if you think someone would be motivated to get educated to leave the country for jobs, well, that furthers the point.

So how do you get a country to grow? Kofi thinks NGOs for the most part have been prohibiting Ghana from developing its own capacity. All of NGOs’ nice little “micro” ideas – a word donors round the world love to hear – just aren’t going to get a country’s economic engines going. He thinks bigger. What Ghana needs are big industries, or pro-business reform like the liberalization of Ghana’s banking sector that saw the number of banks increase from 7 to 143. The proliferation of banks and inflow of capital required banks to lend (at more competitive rates) to survive, in turn spurring business activity. In a relatively natural progression of growth, these domestic businesses grow, saturate the local market, and then look outside the country for more opportunities. This brings that outside money back home, like Kofi’s company is now trying to do in Nigeria. Helping companies enter foreign markets – like the Ghanaian government didn’t do for him in Nigeria – is another way to foster business growth. With all this business growth and new job opportunities, people want to get educated. And fostering business growth, I argued, is what some NGOs (like TechnoServe) are helping to do. NGOs aren’t pointless. I think it was a point taken.

Let’s go back to this assumption that growth comes before education. Is this really how it is? From 1960 to 1999, economist William Easterly notes in The Elusive Quest for Growth, there was an educational explosion from 1960 to 1990. Primary education reached 100% in half the world’s countries by 1990, compared to only 28% of the countries in 1960. Meanwhile, secondary education quadrupled from 13% to 45% over the same years. Studies conducted have found no association between education growth and economic growth per capita. The graph pictured bears this out pretty clearly. But there is a relationship between initial schooling and subsequent economic growth, perhaps because if you know growth is going to be robust in the future, the skilled wage will be growing faster, and so people have incentives to invest in education. Easterly notes, “The magnitude of the relationship between initial schooling and subsequent growth is more consistent with the story of growth causing schooling rather than schooling growth.” Plus, if a country is poor because of lack of skills, the few skilled workers should be earning a lot. But then why are all the educated Indians going to the US (this trend is not as solid as before)? Wages for the skilled are much higher in the US than India. It doesn’t pay to be a big fish in a little pond.

Education is good, but only under the right circumstances. There needs to be job opportunities. The way Kofi explains it, getting this going sounds more top-down. My Ghanaian colleague at TechnoServe agrees. But what about bottom-up/grassroots approaches? In the next post I’ll talk about an approach I think hits them both.

Creative Solutions for the Poor (an engineer wouldn't hurt)

Along with current Vanderbilt student Ari Herrick and two of her friends, I traveled seven hours in a series of tro-tros that took us to the bustling fishing village of Akwidaa, located a few hours west of Cape Coast (the notorious heart of the trans-Atlantic slave trade). On our last tro, I met a man Stephen Apwidaa, who was a primary teacher in Akwidaa and soon became known to me and my friends as “Stephen the Teacher” (my friends in the back of the tro met “Charles the Goldminer”). Stephen and I chatted it up, and he invited me to his home. He passed the this-guy-doesn’t-just-want-to-be-friend-for-money test, and so I said maybe I’d wander over tomorrow.

We stayed at the idyllically set Green Turtle Lodge at the cost of $4.50 a night and a butchering of our ankles by mosquitoes that had us itching late into next week. We had a great time, but after laying on the beach for a whopping total of 20 minutes and wearing out myself bodysurfing, I got curious and tired of being a “tourist”, so partner in crime Ari and I moseyed on over to Akwidaa. We inquired for Stephen the Teacher, and it didn’t take long before 12-year-old Joseph led us to him, with children swarming and holding our hands to guide us.

Stephen took us to a chop bar, where we enjoyed Fantas and talked abouthis family and the village. A father of four, his oldest son had just completed high school, and though he wanted to send him to a university to pursue his son’s interest in land economy, finances didn’t allow it. His son would stay home to work until next year, when Stephen would look at the possibilities.

We talked about several topics, including jobs. It seemed like fishing was still intact, but coconut sales from the palm trees were starting to drop off and as a result that form of livlihood. He pointed to some nearby brown palm trees, according to him affected by water pollution from oil – possibly the recent oil spill near his community. “They will not produce again,” he explained.

At the same time, they have no electricity. He pointed out the door to a nearby steak in the ground which demarcated the future installation of a light pole, but the government had not yet acted. Even if the power grid were to be extended to them, it’s a wonder how consistent it would be and how many people would benefit. Ari and her friends live just two hours outside of Accra and say power outages are common.

The most compelling problem was that of rubbish (don’t worry, I’m not coming back a Brit). They piled a lot of their garbage on the rocks very close to the water (see pic), and when the tide came in with bad weather, it would wash a lot of the garbage inland to the beaches of their estuary that bisects the town into New and Old. Why they couldn’t pile it somewhere else got lost in translation – maybe it was because no one wants to live next to a landfill. As a result, they were burning the trash or burying it in the beach, and the garbage that was washing up was having to be raked up by government workers (see pic).

So, taking all this together, there are job, energy, and waste problems. This may be just optimistic thinking or actually an opportunity for bottom-of-the-pyramid engineering (or both), but wouldn’t it be amazing if the trash, or at least some of it, could be converted into energy? It could help light the town. And trash might then become, in an odd way, potential revenue. It could employ collectors or pay people small fees for bringing it to the conversion center, where employees could convert it. This is almost certainly wishful thinking, but just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done at all. And at the very least, thinking creatively about solutions for the poor gets the ball rolling. For proof, see here.

Would You Pay to Save?

That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Banks are supposed to pay you. But a lot of people here in Ghana (the poor), are paying in a system that’s called susu. The origin of the word is debatable, but it refers to rotating savings. The way it works is that a Susu collector comes around the village and collects a daily or weekly installment, usually a very small sum, from his agreed-upon customers that have formed a group. At the end of the month (or whatever cycle they are doing), the Susu collector keeps one installment’s worth as his wage. Each time the group members make a payment, someone in the group receives the full sum. So if there were 30 people in the group making payments of 2 Ghanian cedis (1 cedi = $1.4), each time the entire group makes a payment someone would get 58 GHC. The susu would earn 60 cedis in the month.

It might seem counter-intuitive to pay to save, but the kicker here is that for those who receive the first payments, it’s basically an interest-free loan – they only had to put in a few cedis to get the 58. But for the later ones, it’s like forced saving with slowly decreasing interest rates (I'm not yet sure how they decide the order and how it is made fair the next cycle). This creates an opportunity for people to access savings schemes and credit in deep rural areas that wouldn’t otherwise have it. Seven out of the 13 banks in Ghana's north region have no banks. Susu collectors generally take the pooled savings and put it into a rural bank – with the money pooled together he (typically they’re men) can access banking products for the group that no individual member could. The Susu collectors usually have anywhere from 200-500 customers, according to Kwaku Akwetey, the General Secretary of the Ghana Co-op Susu Collectors Association (GCSCA), who I recently met for discussions about using susus in an upcoming project for TechnoServe.

So what’s the difference between microcredit and susu? From my understanding, and it’s still very basic, is that the susu system is focused more on savings – having a secure place to save – with the benefit of having access to cheaper credit. Microcredit in the Bangladesh form, on the other hand, focuses more on lending, and operates on the principle of peer pressure that access to credit is only open if everyone is making a payment on their loan. The peer pressure component is present in the susu system, but rather peer pressure that compels you to save. For Ghanians, the microcredit loans done by the rural banks are at annual interest rates of about 30%, and are given to the entire group. Susu collectors do offer loans outside of the typical rotating savings payments (at similar interest rates), but they go to the individual.

Of course, this type of informal banking can be rife with fraud. The Susu collector might not deposit the correct amount collected, for example, or one of the first people to receive the payment could just stop making installments, causing the rest of the members to lose part of their savings. I assume this works better in villages where everyone knows everyone. I recently visited a village (which I'll talk about later) and my friend and villager Stephen explained that crime is never an issue. Because of the fraud, there's an effort being made to formalize it, which is what GCSCA is all about.

This is another prime example of how the poor have to pay extra for the same products we take for granted. Sachet marketing - the strategy of selling small amounts of things like Head 'N Shoulders shampoo - is huge in every country I've been to. And pay-as-you-go cell phone schemes are comparatively expensive - in less than three weeks in a country 67 times poorer than the US, I've already dumped $15 into phone credit compared to my monthly US bill of $15, and I don't even know many people here!

Ghana: The Scent of Asia and Musk of Obama

My first thought when I arrived in Ghana was, "This place smells like Asia." I can't really explain why. Maybe it's the tree-covered sidewalks with open drainage ditches that reminds me of China. Maybe it's all the wonderful street food and the culture of eating out that makes a quick bite on the road a cheap and tasty option. Maybe it's the insane Accra traffic that's resulted in traffic jams unseen to me since Bangladesh (I thought Africans don't own cars?!).

Accra (pop. ~4 million) is the bustling economic and political capital of the country nestled in the armpit of Africa. In the World Bank's latest "Doing Business" report that looks at the ease of doing business, Ghana ranked behind only Kenya, Tunisia, Botswana, South Africa, and Mauritius within Africa. Possibly as evidence, there are six cell phone companies competing here, easily the most I've seen in Africa, and even Asia. Driving around you can see construction sites of towers and office buildings going up that bring me back to India and China. The locals, as the country director of the NGO I'm volunteering with explained, carry a "sense of arrogance". But it's a good arrogance, something you don't see too often in Africa. They don't want pity. I've been trying to collect flags in each country I travel. Mozambique was a pretty hard find, as was Zimbabwe, but you'd have to be legless to not trip over a "Black Star" flag here. They are proud to be Ghanian.

And if Africa is the land of Obamarama, then Ghana is ground zero of this stars and stripes lovefest. Typically, in a tro-tro (the local minibus transport I take around), hanging on the rear view mirror is a Black Star flag and an American flag air freshener. Or, there will be an American flag on the dash with a big Obama face over the background of stripes, exactly like this one. It doesn't stop there, of course - lines of products have been released. I was pretty amazed when I drove past this the other day. The love for Obama stems primarily from his visit to the country just over a year ago, and the President's African roots.

Then there's the friendliness of the people. From my travels there seems to be two things that are almost universally the same across countries (at least poor countries). The first is that when locals are trying to sum up a country, they talk about how the X people are "very social". This isn't really unique to a country. The second thing is that X people are very friendly. I haven't been to a country yet where I didn't think the people were friendly. But here is where Ghana stands out - like in Bangladesh, random Ghanaians have actually sent me messages on CouchSurfing asking me to visit them. This has happened in no other country than Bangladesh for me.

So what am I actually doing here? I'm spending about a month and a half with TechnoServe helping them with a proposal for a project that will potentially work with rural farmers in norther Ghana. While I'm not at liberty to say much more than that, I can say it has been really challenging and extremely interesting to learn about different approaches to agriculture and eradicating rural poverty. And, in the meantime I'm learning about different aspects and approaches of poverty and poverty alleviation unrelated to my work, and of course sampling some of the best that Obama has to offer.

The Haves and Have Nots of the World Cup

Two nights in the wonderful 5-star Lagos, Nigeria airport terminal and a week in South Africa later, I'm now in Ghana. Horrible visa complications prevented me from ever boarding in Lagos, and I endured a two-day Tom Hanks-like festival during which I was patted down enough times by security for it to be considered a mild form of sexual harassment. By the end of it I knew not only which crackers were the best bang for the buck or where to find free internet, but also how to sculpt my McDonald's-French-fries-greasy hair into different works of art.

To make a long story short, they kicked me back to South Africa, almost unwillingly. At one point there were threats to send me back home. I went immediately toPretoria to get things sorted out, and was able to stay two nights with an Afrikaans couple. The first night there was a braai (like a BBQ) at their neighbor's, an extremely nice native South African

couple who were best friends to my white hosts. This was indicative of the composition of the rest of the guests. Considering that even in the US de facto segregation is alive and well, it was inspiring to see this in a country which has emerged from apartheid less than 20 years ago. Of course, with this diverse group of individuals, I had some extremely stimulating conversations about race, politics, and poverty.

With a few days to kill until my flight, I tried to make the best of bad situation and grabbed my vuvuzela and headed to Durban for the Spain/Germany game. The beach-front city was exploding with energy, and I can't honestly say I focused too much on poverty over those two days. The game experience was amazin

g, even if the play wasn't too inspiring. One interesting thing is that vuvuzelas aren't as annoying in person as on TV - there's no constant buzz. Instead, there are single blows and coordinated chants - all jumbled up it just sounds like a buzz on TV.

On my last day I headed back toJourg to catch my flight, and with time to kill I went to Soweto to check on my friends. I had no one's phone number, so I just popped into the Motsoaledi neighborhood. At first it seemed a hero's welcome. Everyone still knew me. Even people I couldn't remember. They asked, "Are you looking for Siphiwe?" But it wasn't that positive. Not much had changed for Siphiwe. World Cup hadn't brought as much tourism to him as planned. He had stopped going to church but said he would soon, now that the Cup was finished. I popped in to see Sandy - the welcome was warm, but I didn't stay for long. While I was there she talked, between taking pinches of snuff, about how the World Cup really hadn't helped her shebeen much at all. Then I went to see to Nessie's bar and, of course,

found Patricia and everyone else. I don't think they ever expected to see me back. Again, I saw that nothing much had changed, except Junior quitting his restaurant job and becoming unemployed because he thought it was too much work for too little pay.

In just a matter of days I saw the best and brightest of South Africa on display for all the foreigners like myself, while just next door in Motsoaledi things are going nowhere fast. What will be the legacy of this World Cup? Will it bring more attention to the plight that the majority of South Africans find themselves in, even whites? Will the government use revenue and goodwill of the world earned from a Cup well-run to improve access to opportunities for people like Siphiwe? Or will it be just another big glamorous sporting event for "haves" like myself? I shudder to think of the likelihood of each.

The Taking of Summerhill: A Story of Race, Injustice, and Corruption

“’Look, if you’re going to take the farm, and that’s inevitably what’s going to happen, you can have the second farm.’ And they [the Zimbabwean government] said, ‘Well that’s not enough.’ So, they said, ‘We’ll take some of your main farm,’ which was Summerhill.”

In an office in Harare, I listened to Myles Hall explain how the Zimbabwean government had first taken his second farm and then the first piece of the Summerhill farm that I visited a few days later.

This was only the beginning. Eventually they took more. Myles explains this in the clip below his encounter with Kindness Paradza.

The ironic thing is that Kindness' surname, Paradza, means "to break up/destroy". Myles just laughs about the whole situation. From there Myles and his family moved into his parents' home on the last remaining piece of Summerhill. Nomhle Mliswa had been trying to get the last of his farm. During the course of over a month in 2007, Myles' workers stood their ground to security guards and their large dogs - partly out of loyalty and partly because they hadn't been paid for that month - to protect the farm. They guarded in 12-hour shifts at the gate. As the niece of Zanu-PF henchman Didymus Mutasa, Mliswa finally made it happen.

Said Myles, “And while I was in town one day she moved into my house and I never got back in again. That was on the 20^th of September, 2007.” But even then his workers didn't leave. Now on the outside of the gate, they stayed to make sure no equipment was stolen.

For close to a month I traveled the country talking to farmers and workers, and this is only a sliver of what I found. I could write an entire separate blog on the stories of injustice and brutality toward (and sometimes killings of) farmers, their workers, and especially farm animals. And it's still going on. Once, when trying to travel to a farm in Chipinge, my host told me we couldn't go because there were fresh attacks. Only later did I see this news report. Farmers and their workers have an amazing memory of how the events unfolded for themselves, and a disturbingly sharp recollection of exact dates, kind of like how you remember exactly what you were doing on 9/11.

But this isn't just about the white farmers, many of whom have seen their entire life savings dry up in the government's inflationary blunders and lost their livelihoods. It's also about the millions of people they employed directly and indirectly. John Mbewe, after losing his job at Myles' farm, came to community farmer Dave Fortecue (a friend of Myles) with no options. "It was July 28th," he recalls. "When I started working with Dave, there was a big problem for me...I was left with only two buckets of maize," and "I use two buckets of maize per month with my family.” Once down to his last month of food, John is now succeeding with Dave's help. But it's not that way for all the former workers. Shaddai Kumiti, who herds what's left of Myles' cattle, explains in the video.

And what is happening with this land now? Not much. Many of the farmers who took over, with their political or big business jobs, live in Harare. Farmers and their workers derisively call them "cell phone farmers". Shaddai and Clever Kudenga talk about what's been going on at Nomhle Mliswa's farm and Paradza's farm. (note: when they talk about Nomsa, they're referring to Nomhle)

It's a sad state government officials have driven Zimbabwe into. What was labeled on paper as taking back the land for the common black natives has instead turned out to be an all-you-can-grab land buffet for government officials and their kin. With new policies and corruption happening all the time, no one can really plan for the future. And when you can't plan, it's hard, or maybe more accurately - silly - to invest, which is the main way to get a country to grow. With the incredible brain drain happening (I recently sat on a flight next to an Egyptian ear and throat doctor, who is now the only one in all of southern Zimbabwe), it's tempting to think that if things don't turn around soon it could be all but over for Zim. But, as one farmer explained to me, "It's never too late."

Mountains and Oceans after a Year’s Travel

I recently gave up a chance to hike Kilimanjaro. I have the money and I was only a bus ride away. Tight timing and friends in Ghana were the deciding factors, but I could have still probably worked it out. What I’ve come to accept – as if to steal a hackneyed adage from “Into the Wild” – is that happiness is only real when shared. For me, enjoyment comes best when an experience is shared with someone. Kilimanjaro will wait.

But, traveling alone does have one huge benefit – it allows you to learn for yourself. For me, it has allowed me to – as I explained before – better understand myself and, as naïve as this sounds, the meaning of this whole life thing. I don’t claim to completely understand either, but I know I’m closer than when I started.

I suppose that it’s somewhat odd that I’m talking about life on the one-year anniversary of launching off first class to Bangladesh, since my project is on poverty and development. Take a look at my proposal and you’ll find nothing about fluffy things like self-realization or the meaning of life. That’s not to say I’m not fulfilling my goals set forth in my proposal – I’ve done amazing things and have learned more about development and the challenges to overcoming poverty than I imagined. But I think when the wonderful people at Vanderbilt set up this fellowship, they probably had an idea that there would be this added benefit.

During the past year I’ve experienced extraordinary highs (none drug-related, just to be clear) – an early run through the crisp mist of rural China; meeting some of the leaders in social business arena; sleeping in one of the oldest slums in South Africa; getting one final rickshaw ride from Anis; poking around Zimbabwe to get information about the brutality toward farmers and their workers, without getting the government’s wrath myself.

And I’ve experienced extreme lows – lonely, depressing nights in the hotel room; occasional feelings that I’m not achieving my objectives; getting robbed $2,000 shortly before tripping and injuring myself on a run (stupid potholes Zimbabwe government never fixes…); two plus days in the non-air conditioned Lagos, Nigeria airport where by the end of it, my hair was so greasy I could sculpt it; wondering if without deadlines, I really have lost all my discipline.

One of the most depressing things has also been one of the most important – something I can’t get out of my head. Everywhere I go I see people going through the motions: 9-5 job working for someone, make enough money to pay the bills, have a few kids, relax on the weekend, repeat ad nauseum for years, then retire and die, usually pretty close to where they were born. Nothing very extraordinary, so it seems. I see it in every country I go to. Two things come out of this for me. First, I’m not trying to be condescending. Extraordinary, I think, is a self-defined word in the sense that I'm talking about it. Rather, I’m concerned that a life which falls below my personal expectations could happen to me. An average life scares me, and it seems like it can happen so easily.

The second thing is that logically, there seems like there has to be something more than this routine the majority of us are boxed into. I’ve spent a lot of time with Christian farmers, and so you know how their perspective goes (our time here on earth is a testing ground). I hope and plan to spend some substantial time thinking, talking, and reading about this issue.

As I move into the second year of my fellowship – no, I don’t know when I’m coming home – I already have things I want to explore upon my return, many new friends to reunite with in the States and abroad, and plenty more experiences on deck for the rest of Africa and South America.