Ryan C Briggs

The African music on my ipod

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:40:52 -0500

Roving bandit recently made a few music recommendations, and Michael Clemens asked for more. I’ve been traveling in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi the better part of the last year and I’ve managed to collect a fair amount of African music from gospel to rap. Much of this will not be new to seasoned listeners, and I’m ignoring a lot of classics, but this is what I’ve been enjoying. I’ll list the artist, country, and a song that I really like:

Brenda Fassie (South Africa) - Vul’indlela
Magic System (Côte d’Ivoire) - Premier Gaou
Miriam Makeba (South Africa) - Pata Pata
Bad’s Diom (Mauritania) - Koune Ak Sa Vibes
Napo De Mi Amor et ses Black Devils (Benin or Togo) - Leki Santchi
Onipa Nua (Ghana) - I Feel Alright
Ebaahi Soundz (Ghana) - Oshitℇ
The Very Best (Malawi) - The Warm Heart of Africa
Letta Mbulu (South Africa) - Welele
Rose Mhando (Tanzania) - Yesu Nakupenda
Roger Damawuzan (Benin or Togo) - Wait for me
Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars (Nigeria) - Yabis

Finally, I heard sawa sawa le, by Flavour, every day in Nairobi and frequently in Ghana. It was easily the song that I heard most in my travels and I became curious about it. The song is actually a dance remix of Nwa Baby, and Nwa Baby is a cover of an earlier highlife song (called sawa sawa le) by Rex Lawson. You can find more info and listen to the earlier versions here.

If you want more music, the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa has a large, otherwise hard to find selection of older music for download. Unfortunately, I don’t know the legal situation surrounding the tapes and I am quite sure that the artists aren’t getting any money out of it. I would also recommend the labels Analog Africa, Soundway, and Syllart productions. Honest Jon’s also has a great selection of African music for sale.

New Design and Public Data

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:37:45 -0500

I’ve decided to usher in 2012 with a blog redesign. I won’t be regularly writing on the blog until I am back in Washington around September, but I’m still really happy with the new design. Aside from looking pretty, I now have the space to post some of the data that I’ve been collecting over the last nine months.

The new data section of the webpage contains election information, government budget documents, and reports on government spending and various aid projects in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. I’ll be adding more documents from each country, as well as documents from Zambia, over the coming months. Despite being technically public and free to access in each country, I found many government documents quite difficult to access. While I’ve greatly enjoyed my field research, my hope is that the next researcher doing this kind of work won’t have to travel just to get some basic information on foreign aid and government spending.

Happy new year!

Power to the People: Village Electrification in Ghana

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:21:00 -0400

I’ve been in Ghana for about 5 weeks researching electrification projects, and I thought it was about time that I talk about it. In the late 1980s and 1990s, electrification projects became a priority for the Ghanaian government and a large amount of donor funding went towards village electrification. My starting point is a study and government wide plan in 1989. To simplify slightly, there were two main components in the government’s electrification strategy. The first were Self-Help Electrification Projects (SHEPs). SHEPs provided villages with electricity if they were already near high voltage lines and if they could locally provide some of the resources for electrification. Usually it worked out so that if the community could erect the wooden poles for power lines and wire a third of the houses, the government would do the rest. There were a number of successive SHEPs from the 1990s to present.

The second component was the National Electrification Project (NEP). This was an ambitious project that aimed to electrify over 400 villages in Ghana, including all district capitals between 1993 and 1998. It was expected to add over 100,000 new connections to the grid and it was building out the infrastructure that enabled many more SHEPs. When it ended in 2001 it had added 89,000 connections, which is pretty impressive. Conflict in the north was the main reason for missing the connection target and deadline.

I’m starting out with a basic question: Who got electricity?

There are two ways to answer this. The first it to examine where the government spent resources for electrification. The second is to look at surveys that track who actually had electricity at certain points in time. Below I have regional results for both approaches. To examine who actually got electricity, I looked at results from Ghana Living Standards Surveys in 1991/92 and 1998/99. Both surveys asked respondents to name the main source of light for their home. First, I have a map that shows the percentage of respondents in 1991 who said that they lit their homes with electricity from the national grid:

In 1991, only about a quarter of all Ghanaians had electricity and the spread of electricity was very unequal. The Ashanti and Greater Accra regions had decent access to electricity, but the east and north of the country lagged far behind. The NDC, who was in power from the start of this period until the 2000 election, was explicit about wanting to close this gap. Let’s see if they succeeded.

The map below shows the answers to the same question in 1998:

By the end of the decade, Volta and Western region—and to a lesser extent the surrounding southern regions—made large gains and closed much of the gap with Ashanti. Accra still has a huge lead in electrification with 82% of respondents using it to light their homes. At the time of the survey, much of the planned electrification in and above Northern region was delayed due to conflict. To envision the full impact of electrification from 1991-2000 you should mentally make the northern regions a little darker.

To make the changes more obvious, the map below shows only the percentage point increases in electrification. Here you can see Volta and especially Western region stand out. Western region went from 22% of respondents using electricity for lighting in 1991 to 49% in 1998. Volta went from 10% to 28%.

Finally, I have regional information on financial allocations under the NEP. I received the financing details from the World Bank. The Bank funded about 45% of the NEP, bilateral donors funded about 25%, and the government of Ghana provided funds for about 10% of the project. I don’t know who funded the remaining portion (it is marked as “other”), but it is likely other smaller bilateral donors. Below I have a graph that compares the allocation of money against the the actual percentage point increase in electricity usage.

The graph is slightly misleading because a dollar of funding for electrification might go further in regions with a smaller population or area. On the other hand, a lot of the resources here went to fixed costs such as clearing land and building power lines, so the population problem may not be so bad. There are a few things to note about the graph.

First, Greater Accra and Ashanti were allocated very little money and saw very small gains. They also, however, had high baseline rates of electrification. Second, Western and Volta saw the largest increases in electrification, but Volta didn’t receive that much funding through the NEP. This is an interesting result, as it shows that Volta must have either had a large number of SHEPs or must have received resources through other channels. Third, a lot of money was spent in the north of the country and, as I said earlier, the GLSS in 98 was completed too early to capture it. The correlation between NEP funding and actual electrification is 0.87 if I don’t include Northern, Upper West, and Upper East regions.

Well, that’s it. I’m not going to make bold (or any) conclusions until I have more district-level data and better controls. People familiar with Ghanaian politics, however, can probably spot some interesting patterns.

Travel Plans

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:13:32 -0400

I will be doing dissertation research outside of the US for about a year starting May, 2011. I will be in Ghana for the summer, then Kenya for part of August and September. After that I will be in Zambia and Malawi. The best place to find out about me is my twitter account, which is updated far more frequently than the blog.

Institutions rule?

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:53:53 -0500

Roving Bandit has two good posts on institutions, but they aren’t doing much to ease my skepticism about the concept. Rather than rehashing an old argument, I am going to take the ~~lazy~~ efficient way out and direct interested readers to a working paper that I wrote and presented last year at the International Studies Association on foreign aid and institutions.

I am now less confident in my way of dealing with the concept of institutions, but I am just as convinced of the conceptual and empirical problems with the term.

Wikileaks – China, the US and Africa

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:59:56 -0500

Deborah Brautigam and I wrote a short article for African Arguments on what the leaked US embassy cables reveal about relationships between the US, China, and various African countries. Check it out.

Growth seems to be a very good way to decrease poverty in...

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:26:00 -0500

Growth seems to be a very good way to decrease poverty in Africa.

(via Owen Barder)

The Lonely Island and Arcade Fire give their take on world...

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:05:12 -0500

The Lonely Island and Arcade Fire give their take on world history.

10 Articles on Aid

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:01:34 -0500

The Browser has collected ten interesting and well written articles on foreign aid (apologies in advance for the Browser’s photo of the African kids). I especially recommend Owen Barder’s article on the three narratives that came out of the MDG summit.

Development Without Freedom

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:03:00 -0400

Human Rights Watch recently published a report on aid in Ethiopia entitled Development Without Freedom. They had researchers visit Ethiopia in 2009 and conduct about 200 interviews to examine how the ruling party was distributing foreign aid.

Their central finding is that “donor-funded services, resources, and training opportunities were being used as threats or rewards for citizens to join the ruling party and cease supporting the opposition, and that donor mechanisms for monitoring or controlling the misuse of aid programs were inadequate.” (p. 26)

The range of funds that were at affected ranges from fertilizer and other agricultural inputs (p. 36) to microcredit (p. 38) to food aid (p. 45).

One common theme running throughout the report is that aid was more politicized the more the service was decentralized. Various factors could influence this, but one is that monitoring is more difficult as responsibility for service delivery shifts further from the center.

Coming from someone who is currently writing a prospectus on the politicization of foreign aid before elections, my single largest problem with the report is that I have a hard time interpreting the report’s data. I find it impossible to believe that every person interviewed felt the way that they describe, and yet I can’t find quotes from interviewees who disagree with the report’s finding. Did they only interview people that they knew were upset? Did they cut out all the “boring stuff” after the fact? How did they create their sample? (At this point, everyone should go read what Texas in Africa has to say about the methodological differences between academics and advocacy organizations).

Their question—Is aid being captured by the ruling party?—is crucial and HRW seems to have found a suspicious pattern in the responses of their interviewees. Given the challenges inherent in conducting this kind of research, that finding alone is worthy of attention. Anyone with an interest in the politicization of aid should at least skim the report.

[update — Kate from wrongingrights also has a good post on the way that human rights lawyers and social scientists think about evidence]

A photo of my Colombian-Mexican friend, who I met in America,...

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:09:06 -0400

A photo of my Colombian-Mexican friend, who I met in America, sitting in a Spanish-Canadian run Moroccan restaurant in Toronto. The photo was shot with a lens made in the USSR in the 1970s, and is connected to my Japanese-made camera with a Chinese-made adapter.

What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:10:00 -0400

Jim Manzi wrote an excellent article on public policy experimentation and the difficulties in learning anything about the social world. He explains the limits of randomized trials much more eloquently than I did.

Additional remarks from Manzi and links to more commentary on his article can be found here.

The most recent episode of This American Life is about reconstruction in Haiti. It features...

Wed, 26 May 2010 17:31:00 -0400

The most recent episode of This American Life is about reconstruction in Haiti. It features excellent stories which touch on nearly all of the major problems with foreign aid and development work. Being This American Life, it does this with good humour and clear language. This should be required reading for undergrad development classes.

You can listen here. (click through the donation request page if it appears)

Also, sorry for not posting recently. I was finishing up the remainder of my coursework.

African Growth Rates, 1996-2005

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:15:00 -0400

From Roving Bandit, who found it on Global Dashboard, who got it from the World Bank (.pdf).

xkcd demonstrates the power of institutions. A larger version...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:33:10 -0500

xkcd demonstrates the power of institutions. A larger version is here.

ISA Presentations

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:35:54 -0500

I’m giving two talks tomorrow at ISA. One is a paper evaluating the concept of institutions as it is used in the literature on foreign aid and development. The panel will be held at 1:45 in the Starboard room of the Hilton (Riverside Building).

The second paper is on using Processing to produce graphics for slides. The paper will be presented at 3:45 in the Norwich room of the Hilton.

The Processing paper draws on some of the graphics and code that I have been posting over the last few months:

The Africa map of NY Times coverage (the code is here)
The line graphs of news coverage of individual African countries, 1981-2008
The Wordle clouds

I hope that people can stop by. If anyone is at ISA and on twitter, send me a message at @ryanbriggs and say hi.

I wrote a little program to query the NY Times API and generate...

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:27:00 -0500

1988-89

1998-99

2008-09

I wrote a little program to query the NY Times API and generate text output that can be easily copied into the advanced section of Wordle to create tag clouds of news coverage. The example above shows the most popular places in the Times, conditional on the description of the article being “US International Relations.” Each picture covers one year. The colour is currently meaningless.

You can download the code here.

The graph above shows ODA (Official development assistance) to...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:03:02 -0500

The graph above shows ODA (Official development assistance) to Haiti and was made by David Roodman. If you are confused about what counts as ODA then be sure to see its wikipedia entry and the .pdf file Is it ODA?

Happy Holidays

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0500

I’m heading home for the holidays, and because my home is in a tiny town in rural Ontario (and therefore doesn’t have access to high speed internet) I probably won’t be blogging much until January.

I hope everyone enjoys a much needed break and a peaceful and happy new year. I’ll see you in 2010.

The eight years before 9/11 had a higher percentage of articles...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:58:00 -0500

The eight years before 9/11 had a higher percentage of articles tagged with both Islam and terrorism than the eight years after. This change is not accounted for by an increase in tags of “jihad,” as that tag (or one similar to it) doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, in the eight before 9/11, 27% of all articles tagged with Islam were also tagged with terrorism (this is what you see if you only look at the blue and green areas). In the eight years after, that number increased to 43%. All of the usual data quality caveats apply.

The data for all of these charts is from the New York Times Article Search API.