I won the lottery

Posted by jfrant

Last week I won the lottery. No, I’m not a multi-million dollar Powerball winner. I won the opportunity to see former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak at Columbia University.

Secretary General Kofi Annan Speaks at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs

The discussion ranged from the UN’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide – which Secretary Annan blamed on a lack of international political will following the “Blackhawk Down” incident in Somalia – to the current crisis in Syria.

Annan briefly touched on his resignation as UN special peace envoy to Syria, blaming UN’s failure to broker peace on the international community’s failure to close ranks against the Assad regime (specifically blaming China and Russia’s intransigence). Annan mentioned his successful mission to Kenya as an example of what the international community can accomplish when it speaks with one voice. As chief negotiator in 2008, he successfully brokered a deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga to form a coalition government. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Annan was the best choice in Syria given the context. Simply put, Annan is not a muslim and does not carry the same authority in the Middle East as he does in Africa.

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments section below.

Participating in this event was an amazing opportunity that I doubt I would have had at any other school. That said, I was so drained from my statistics midterm the day before that Annan’s quiet and monotonous voice nearly put me to sleep during his opening remarks. Note to self: drink more coffee.

Canvassing for development

Posted by jfrant

The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.

Skipping Consumer Theory and going straight to Complexity Theory (Am I getting ahead of myself?)

Posted by jfrant

After listening to this lecture by Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development, I think I’ve developed a better understanding of the rational behind many of the initiatives sponsored by Jeffrey Sachs (most notably the Millennium Villages Project).

According to Complexity Theory, Barder argues, traditional economic models fail to anticipate why some countries have been able to benefit from convergent economic growth, while others are stuck in a poverty trap. In other words, interventions in developing countries that focus on the one “missing ingredient which will enable poor countries to grow,” as Barder puts it, are doomed to failure. No one intervention (whether in access capital, modern technology, improved economic efficiency, better institutions or reformed politics) is able to influence the “complex adaptive systems” that make up a society.

The upshot of Complexity Theory for international development (as I understood it) is that development practitioners should not focus on individual interventions or impose their preconceived ideas on how societies develop. Instead, they should look for opportunities to sponsor innovation and encourage adaptation that will contribute to positive feedback loops.

Development can therefore be redefined as “the emergence of self-organizing complexity.”

Wow, that was a mouthful and I’m not sure I did it justice…I only just started studying Consumer Theory in my grad-level economics class. Anyway, you should watch the lecture, it will blow your mind: http://www.cgdev.org/doc/CGDPresentations/complexity/player.html.

Gross National Happiness or Have You Seen a Cow?

Posted by jfrant

Today was the first day of the first week of orientation for my master’s program (MPA-DP) at Columbia. The day concluded with an interesting lecture (the first Development Practitioner Seminar) from Dr. Saamdu Chetri, the director of Bhutan’s Happiness Center. His lecture was on Gross National Happiness (GNH). Every two years the country of Bhutan conducts a survey to determine the level of “happiness” in the country. The idea is based on the fact that GDP is an inadequate indicator to judge the wellbeing of a society. In fact, the traditional concept of “growth,” Dr. Chetri explained, may be incompatible with long-term economic sustainability.

[polldaddy poll=6477912 align=right]At the end of the lecture, we were given the opportunity to ask questions. My question: Since the index is based mostly on answers to subjective questions in an interview setting, how do you ensure that social pressure to be happy (or at least say you’re happy) doesn’t artificially inflate the level of “measured” happiness. That’s not how I phrased it (I wish I’d phrased it better), but that was the basic idea.

Dr. Chetri’s response was that the questions are designed in a way to make it very difficult to intentionally sabotage the results. Instead of just asking if you’re happy, the interviewer would ask a variety of questions on numerous subjects from which they could infer the person’s level of happiness. For instance, the interviewer would ask something like: “Do you know what a cow looks like?” The assumption being that if you don’t know what a cow looks like you are less connected to nature and therefore less happy.

The GNH is based on four pillars of happiness, which are good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation and environmental conservation. Economic development is important to achieving happiness and equity in society, but it should not come at the cost of the other three pillars. For example, while cleaning up an oil spill may create jobs and contribute to GDP, it has a negative impact on overall happiness because oil spills are devastating to the environment.

Central to GNH is the idea of sustainability, which will also be a key component of the Sustainable Development Goals (the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which will sunset in 2015).

P.S. I went on an evening ride in Central Park today. Going fast is scary with so many people around.

Well, this is gonna be interesting

Posted by jfrant

It all became real when, on the shuttle-bus from LGA, we turned a corner and there were the iconic skyscrapers of Manhattan – my new home. After spending a full month reveling in the Colorado wilderness, the densely packed metropolis that is NYC was a very sharp contrast. I’m going to miss the ability to walk out my door and ride to the top of a mountain – passing just a handful of people as I pedal into the thin, clean air.

On my first full day in NYC, I woke up super early (jet-lag be damned) to meet my aunt and uncle for a hike over the Brooklyn Bridge. A cold shower (the hot water was not working) jolted me awake in time to make my way downtown. As the sun rose over shipyards and cantilevered bridges (first photo), I thought that while nothing can come close to Colorado’s mountains, this urban wilderness holds its own charm and the culture shock will pass.

After some unpacking, box-retrieving, more unpacking and a nap, I met up with some of my future classmates at a bar near campus. Our backgrounds were as unique as they could possibly be, but everyone seemed just as nervous and excited and I am about what the next two years will hold.

Today, the jet-lag caught up with me. I got up late and hurried off to sign my six-month lease on my new apartment, which happens to be two blocks from Times Square. My room is tiny but quiet (it’s amazing how much difference two blocks make in NYC) and has an AC unit (thank the Lord). Later, I made my way up to Columbia to get my ID, which – as I found out – I won’t get until orientation. So much for my plan to get set up with a student-discounted membership at the rock climbing gym near my apartment before classes start. In any case, I got to walk around campus. The second photo is of the Low Memorial Library, a place I will undoubtedly be spending a lot of time in the next few years.

That’s all for now.

Only one elective course in my first semester

Posted by jfrant

I’ve tried not too think too much about the intense coursework that I have in store for me, partially out of fear and partially out of a desire to enjoy my few weeks of freedom between work and school. But, with just one week of freedom left before orientation starts, it’s time to start getting my head in the game.

[polldaddy poll=6458550 align=right]Luckily (or not so luckily, depending on how you choose to think about it), I will only have one elective course in my first semester, which will be primarily taken up by math and economics classes (see chart below) that are meant to give me a solid quantitative base.

SIPA recommends that I choose an elective course that falls into one of these categories:

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Cost Benefit Analysis
New Media & Development Communication
Decision Models
Microfinance
Investing in Emerging Markets
Budgeting for Non-profits

I’m leaning toward New Media and Development Communication because it’s the subject area that most compliments my past experience and future goals, but I want to know what you think. Vote in my poll to let me know.