Senior Fellow Charles Kenny's book 'Getting Better' was mentioned in an AllAfrica.com interview with Bill Gates.
Your letter links food scarcity to poor nutrition to higher rates of disease and death - and then notes that climate change could add further pressure on food security by reducing crop yields by as much as 25 percent. And you want to eradicate polio, deliver other life-saving vaccines, attack malaria, stem the tide of HIV - and attract funding for all these things. With so much to be done - and all of it inter-related - how is it possible to avoid discouragement and donor fatigue?
The key is to show the success stories. Certainly the state of the world - and the state of Africa - is far better today than ten years ago, fifty years ago. And there is a direct connection between aid generosity and government policies and those improvements.
One of my favorite books on this is Charles Kenny's "Getting Better" that talks about how improvements in literacy and health actually outdistance what the pure economic figures would say. That's not to discount economic growth - but over time, we've done even better than that one metric would indicate.
Malaria is a great story, with about a 20 percent reduction. HIV drug treatment is a good story. Even the agricultural story – although in the last decade we lost focus on it, and Africa has had nowhere near the benefit that big parts of Asia have had – to the degree that people have focused on agriculture, there are some good things that have happened. So that's the one that I spend the most time on, because at a time when people are looking at what they do with their aid budgets, trying to get agriculture back at a higher level of funding is pretty important. You still have a billion people that haven't moved up their productivity level to have enough to eat, with all the negative consequences that has.
In your letter you discuss innovation - the necessity for it and the need to share it. How do you go about spreading the word about effective interventions, like the drought-resistant seeds I recently saw boosting crop yields in Kenya? How can strategies and mechanisms that work get communicated and replicated most efficiently?
One way you can do it is try to have market mechanisms where farmers hear the reputation of new seeds from each other and allow entry of new seed companies. Kenya has been particularly good on this. AGRA [Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa], through our seeds program, is working with farmers, and a whole bunch of new seed companies have come in. Some of those seeds have developed really good reputations and are being used. A lot of African countries don't allow new seed entrants to come in, so particularly for the non-staple crops – fruits, vegetables, things like that – the kind of innovation, the variety, the choice that should be there is not there.
For other things – like getting mothers to know how to treat newborns and getting them to seek out vaccination services – there we have to be innovative. With women's groups or radio, or other kinds of media approaches: how do you create that demand for innovative solutions, both in health and agriculture? Those are things that we continue to learn. And, of course, some things that work in one country may not work as well in another country.
To follow up on that, at AllAfrica we get a lot of announcements people send us, wanting us to tell the story about their initiatives, whether a better toilet or a cleaner cook stove. How can you combine forces to let market mechanisms work, so that the best kind of intervention can be adopted and scaled up to reach more people?
Well, we fund a lot of toilet-related work, and I have looked at the different stove-related things. Ideally, you would like to have vouchers in the hands of the people who need those things, and then they could look at which products meet their particular needs. Cook stoves is one area where there has been a fair bit of naiveté about what people are used to, in terms of how their food ends up tasting, or what cooking practices people are used to. So there have been a lot of things that haven't been that well adopted, just because they don't tend to meet the needs, or they tend to be out of the price range, even though some – in terms of fuel efficiency or health benefits – look very good on paper. That's been a tough one.
In the area of toilets, frankly most of the new designs really didn't solve the smell problem perfectly. So compared to the gold standard, which is the flush toilet, it has been very difficult. And there are all sorts of maintenance and servicing costs that come in – so, you picked two that are fairly difficult! You know, what you would like is to have the donors or someone who is neutral do the evaluation in terms of what the particular local needs are and then use the voucher program to get those things out there.