Norman Macrae ... journalist and visionary

Dear Colleagues

Norman Macrae died last June at the age of 89. He worked at the Economist for about 40 years, 23 years in the post of Deputy Editor. This is a wonderful description of his contribution to journalism via the Economist ... a must read. http://www.economist.com/node/16374404?story_id=16374404

Peter Burgess

Study study study ... wasting our money!

Dear Colleagues

I have just read this report titled "Private Delivery Care in Developing Countries: Trends and Determinants" written by Amanda Pomeroy(1), Marge Koblinsky(1) and Soumya Alva(2)
http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pdf/WP76/WP76.pdf ... 1 is John Snow Inc. ... 2 is CF Macro. As far as I can see, this study was funded by USAID.

I learned about this report from a list serve that has a dialog about health in Africa ... in the following e-mail:

November, 2010, Washington, DC-- JSI's /Amanda Pomeroy and Marge Koblinksy have authored a DHS working paper entitled, Private Delivery Care in Developing Countries: Trends and Determinants. This article used Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 16 countries to examine a) trends in growth of delivery care provided by private facilities, and b) determinants of private sector use within the health care system.

For a subset of eight countries, the authors examined determinants of a mother's choice to deliver in a health facility and then, among women delivering in a facility, their decision to use a private provider. Determinants of use were grouped by socioeconomic characteristics, economic and physical access and by actual/perceived need.

Results showed a significant trend toward privatization of delivery care over the 13 years covered in the study, but there was considerable variation in the characteristics driving this increased use across countries. The results warn against making generalizations on the effects of privatization on maternal health use.

Bluntly put ... I am not impressed ... worse I am really very disappointed. The work is almost totally something that we do not need. We need solutions not studies, especially studies that do not have much in them to move the health situation forward. The academic community and consulting community may be happy, but no change of any substance on the ground! I responded to the list serve as follows:

Dear Colleagues

I would like to see a dialog about solutions to the problems of health around the world. In my view this DHS working paper does not contribute very much to a dialog about solutions since it is 90% about "state" rather than "progress" ... and the concept of "performance" is almost totally missing.

Reports like this have been funded by various agencies in the international development community for 40 odd years ... and at the end of this time there are hundreds of reports and essentially no solutions to the core problems.

I was at a conference in New York last week at the New School where some high level people in development assistance talked about the progress that has been made. I tried to ask a question about progress achieved compared to what should have been achieved but did not get much of an answer. The problem is that the dialog is based on a whole lot of study that is subject to enormous potential for statistical interpretation ... and very little of the data has the reliability that one should be getting.

My perspective is that a very different medical care model is needed that recognizes that developing countries have little money but a lot of people ... many of whom have some training ... many of whom could do a lot with a modest amount of training ... etc. In other words there needs to be the best possible use of human capital rather than merely doing things based on welfare money that flows from donors. We also have to look at the dysfunction of the business economy in the development context ... and the resource flows that are making profit
for some while leaving most in continuing poverty.

All of this becomes clear when data a looked at carefully and evaluated with an "accountant's" mindset!

I am appalled at how much development assistance has done so little over a very long time! There is a better way.

Peter Burgess
____________
Peter Burgess
Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society

It is painful to see scarce funds being used over and over again to do things that have almost no impact on the work needed to improve the health of real people in poor places!

Peter Burgess

There has to be a paradigm change ... we have the metrics to support it!

Dear Colleagues

A new book "Rebooting the American Dream" by Thom Hartmann has recently been published. I have only read some excerpts and they are quite thought provoking. The following caught my attention:

"... when Ronald Reagan came into office, as the result of 190 years of Hamilton’s plan, the United States was the world’s largest importer of raw materials; the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods; and the world’s largest creditor.

After 30 years of Reaganomics, we’ve completely flipped this upside down: we’ve become the world’s largest exporter of raw materials, the world’s largest importer of finished goods, and the world’s largest debtor. We now export raw materials to China, and buy from it manufactured goods. And we borrow from China to do it.

Part of the reason why this got my attention is that there was a time when the British economy was very powerful ... importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods.

In True Value Metrics there can be a good quality of life ... but there cannot be a money wealth redistribution along the lines of what has been happening for the past several decades ... which some eminent economists and business journalists have described as a period of some of the greatest sustained economic growth ever. The money metrics might have given this impression, but the reality is that it was being done on top of what eventually turned out to be a bubble of historic scale!

Peter Burgess

The big risk of polluting groundwater should not be discounted!

Dear Colleagues

RISK ... something nobody wants to talk about.

I just came across this piece ... text below:
http://environment.change.org/blog/view/halliburton_to_epa_just_trust_us_and_go_away?me=nl

Oil is a big part of the modern profit economy ... water is something most people in rich countries take for granted. The dangerous problem is that there may well be a link between the "frack" process for extracting natural gas and the pollution of groundwater.

This RISK is serious. My approach to risk is not purely mathematical, discounting the danger of an event by a probability ... but considering the danger of the event itself. What would be the impact of groundwater for New York City becoming tainted with toxins ... one can hardly imagine!

I certainly do not want to trust Halliburton with this risk.

Peter Burgess

Halliburton to EPA: Just Trust Us and Go Away
by Jess Leber November 09, 2010 10:49 AM (PT)

Oh, Halliburton. How your arrogance astounds me.

Two months ago, U.S. EPA wrote nine major natural gas drilling companies a letter. It politely asked the recipients to voluntarily tell agency officials the secret brew of chemicals they use to "frack" gas from the shale deposits. EPA wasn't even planning to make the ingredient list public, a policy the industry is fighting tooth-and-nail in Congress.

Instead, it just wanted the information to help with a crucial first-ever federal study of the health and safety risks of hydraulic fracturing, a drilling technique that has already ruined water and air quality in towns across the country and has proceeded unregulated thanks to the Dick Cheney-pushed "Halliburton loophole" passed in 2005. In case anyone's memory fails them, Cheney himself is a former Halliburton executive.

Today, EPA announced that 8 of the 9 companies complied with the request. You can take a wild guess which one refused.

EPA now issued a subpoena to Halliburton to compel the information from them, since it has a tight legal deadline to provide the initial results by the end of 2012, and that will be sort of hard to meet without knowing the chemicals they are studying.

Halliburton's antics do not stop at the federal level.

As the anti-fracking advocacy group EarthWorks points out, its lobbyists have fanned out to weaken or halt public disclosure laws in major fracking states. Against the wishes of the industry, Wyoming recently passed a law to require the first disclosures of drilling toxics. And a proposal now being considered in Pennsylvania has now been successfully weakened at Halliburton's specific behest.

Halliburton argues the chemicals are trade secrets. But when those chemicals risk contaminating public water supplies and producing huge volumes of toxic wastewater that the public must deal with—trade secret or not, we all have the right to know.

As Earthworks writes in a clever headline, "Halliburton to PA govt: "trust us." PA govt to Halliburton: "ok." PA citizens: "What!?!"

Don't let Halliburton get away with this any longer. We don't want to trust them. We want to know.

Tell Halliburton to disclose its fracking chemicals by signing this petition.

For global progress ... what is really important?

Dear Colleagues

How important are monetary and fiscal policies? How important are Governments and the Central Banks? How important are Capital Markets and the Banking Sector?

I spend a certain amount of time listening to Bloomberg radio, and you would think that these things are really important ... but I would argue that in reality they are not really very important at all.

What is important is the underlying capacity of society to be productive and to be surplus producing. This is a function of what scientists and engineers are able to do to make activity efficient ... to get more output for less input.

It is also a function of people making the investment to deploy high production processes. This is where banking and the capital markets come in ... they are able to facilitate investment. This is where policy can help ... but only modestly. The real driver is entrepreneurial technical innovation way more than it is purely political or financial!

As the system of True Value Metrics is articulated it becomes increasingly clear that sustainable progress is going to be achieved when billions of people are making decisions that move their communities forward with more and more surplus production ... a win-win model. This is a contrast to the zero sum system that has prevailed in the "rich" economies where wealth accumulation has been too much at the expense of some sector of society ... either locally or in the global economy.

Win-win is a better way forward ... but it will only work when the metrics are showing both the money profit dimension and the value dimension

Peter Burgess

Concern USA ... excellent fund raising ... good stories ... no value accounting!

Dear Colleagues

I really do not know why the big and efficient fund raisers for social progress activities do not embrace a value based accountability system like True Value Metrics. These organizations tell heart rending stories about the problems ... then they tell impressive stories about what they are doing ... but they do it in a way that makes it almost impossible to make any judgement about how well they are doing ... and whether their work is doing much good.

The following is an example from Concern USA ... they send me (and perhaps millions of other people) periodic e-mails for fund raising ... but nothing seems to be accessible about what they have done with the money last week, last month, last year and in fact for the last several decades! This is the fund raising email text:

This Week's Challenge: Winning Back the Water in Ethiopia
Field Challenge Friday Team to me

Winning Back the Water in Ethiopia
Posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010
By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern NY

IMAGE Abebech Tito, from the village of Fango Bijo, Ethiopia

There’s a saying in southwestern Ethiopia and not surprisingly—in an area ravaged by drought for three months of the year—it relates to water. Loosely translated it goes: it’s impossible to win back your water after the bucket has tipped over.

Abebech Tito, a mother of five, told me this through the school fence near her children’s classroom as she considered how her life might have been different had she not dropped out of school at Grade 8. She delivered the proverb with a smile and a shrug. “It was my own foolishness,” she added.

Her village is located in the Rift Valley in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia, where recurrent drought and the prevalence of malaria is notoriously high.

When I followed the link to learn more ... the first step to being a donor, I reached the following text:

/////////////////
This week, Joan Bolger, Concern Worldwide US Communications Officer, writes about her visit to the remote village of Fango Bijo in Ethiopia where she spoke to Abebech Tito, a mother who had dropped out of school at Grade 8 and was determined to choose a different path for her children.

Two of Abebech's boys now attend the Concern-supported “non-formal” school that aims to offer the poorest rural kids “alternative basic education.” Many of these children live in very isolated areas where there are few, if any, government schools—they have to walk long distances every day, on their own, to reach them.

Joan challenges you to learn about the barriers that prevent children in rural Ethiopia from having access to basic education – and to share this blog with your friends.

Now I like education as a "development investment" and I am very much aware how little money needs to be involved in running a "non-formal" school that can be a very good investment. I am also very much aware that the way the modern relief and development community does its monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is horrendously expensive are not very useful. For the money that was spent in having Joan Bolger visit this location and write this story, perhaps 100 children could have had a year of "non-formal" education.

In True Value Metrics, part of the core information is to relate the amount of education capacity in the community in the past ... with the amount of education capacity in the community now ... and to estimate how much resources were used to get from state A to state B. A second element is to assess how much additional human capacity has emerged as a result of the education ... how much better educated are people becoming. A third element is to understand whether or not the education has any value in making the community a better place ... in making the family more able to earn more and move modestly forward to a more prosperous (less poor) situation.

When True Value Metrics is done in the community by local people it costs very little ... and when it is studied by visitors ... or communicated to donors, it gets to be very interesting. Top down is very expensive ... bottom up enables a lot of value for a modest cost.

Peter Burgess

Transparency and Accountability ... Kris Dev in India

Dear Colleagues

I have collaborated with Kris Dev in India for almost a decade. His work in mobilizing IT to improve governance is impressive ... and he keeps on going.

To: Peter Burgess
Seminar on Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration
From: Kris Dev
Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 2:02 PM

Hi,

When most countries are witnessing a plethora of alleged high level corruption cases in public administration running to millions of dollars the presentation made at the National Seminar on Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration can be seen at: The NDTV-HINDU coverage can be seen at the below link from 2.58 min to 4.27 min.http://www.youtube.com/user/ndtvhindu#p/u/13/4PiTICt-SZo

Kris Dev, e-Gov Consultant, Chennai
_________________________
Gopala Krishnan Devanathan,
President & CEO,
Life Line to Business / Life Line to Citizen,
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
email: krisdev@gmail.com
http://krisdev.wordpress.com/about/
URL: http://ll2b.blogspot.com
Ph: + 91 98 408 52132 / 1 (206) 274 1635
Twitter: @krisdev

- Winner of Innovations Award 2009 for IT Innovation;
- Manthan Awardee 2006 for Rural Grass-Root Initiative in Establishing Unique Biometric Identity for e-Inclusion & Livelihood Creation;
- Selected for World Bank Innovation Fair 2010.

These are also interesting notes

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. … Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"A quick evaluation of the progress we have achieved in the last 20 years shows that in the area of poverty alleviation, we have not done enough. History will judge us harshly, unless we seize the opportunity to do more." - Archbishop Njongo Ndungane, President and Founder, African Monitor.

"When the Power of Love overcomes the Love of Power the World will know peace." Jimi Hendrix.

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." - William James

"There is nothing more sacred to a free people than the right to govern themselves and take matters into their own hands when their elected officials have failed them. When the very government which the people have created to secure their liberty and domestic tranquility imposes restraints on their freedom, the people have a duty to try to break the shackles themselves." - Ward Connerly, Chairman of the American Civil Rights Coalition.

"We are powerful before the powerless; and powerless before the powerful"; how sadly true! why not reverse it?!

Practice is better than precept.

At the present time there is the 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Thailand. It is good that there is now more talk about the problem of corruption than 20 years ago ... but it is sad there is so much corruption to talk about. In fact, what is disconcerting is that corruption is part of the mainstream modern economic system with a lot of influential people and organizations implicated in it. Worse ... the rule of law often contributes to corruption by making it difficult to stop it ... even though it is clear that something untoward is going on!

The implementation of True Value Metrics is a part of a paradigm shift in transparency and accountability that will help ... maybe significantly!

Peter Burgess