Brookings: Topics - Developing Countries

International Actions to Support Green Growth Innovation Goals

Nathan Hultman, Jason Eis and Katherine Sierra — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:11:00 -0400

Achieving global goals for poverty reduction, economic growth and environmental health will require widespread innovation and implementation of new and appropriate “green growth” technologies. Establishing a sufficiently large suite of innovative technology options, suitable to diverse economies, and at the urgent pace required will involve unprecedented innovation activity not only from developed regions, but also from new clusters and enterprises in emerging economies and least developed countries. By linking national governments, the private sector and the international community, international cooperation can contribute substantively in five green innovation priority areas:

Cultivating innovation capacity and ecosystems in least developed countries (LDCs);
Facilitating and strengthening existing entrepreneurial cultures;
Significantly scaling up research and development (R&D) activities through competitive grants;
Encouraging financing for large-scale demonstration and deployment of complex but transformative new technologies; and
De-risking entrepreneurial investments and stimulating intellectual property (IP) sharing.

In this brief we describe several ways that international cooperation can play a critical role in facilitating this transformative process and outline six existing institutional structures that have been invoked as possible examples for scaling up to foster green innovation more broadly. Finally, we suggest several policy recommendations that are feasible in the near term.

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Image Source: © Bogdan Cristel / Reuters

Eliminate Poverty - Sustainable Development

George Ingram — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:18:00 -0400

The High-Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda and its secretariat are to be commended and thanked for its report, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development. The paper is both visionary and realistic, places roles and responsibilities on government, civil society and the private sector, and should appeal to the responsible business person and the practical civic activist – a balance created by the thoughtfulness and comprehensiveness of the framework set forth in the report.

In picking up this report, don’t expect to comprehend it through reading only the executive summary or just focusing on the 12 suggested goals. The report sets out a single, comprehensive framework that needs to be read in its entirety.

From an American perspective, the overall frame reflects our approach to development. For several decades we argued whether development is best promoted through economic growth or human development. This nonsensical debate was finally put to rest with the 2004 legislation creating the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), whose statutory mandate is to pursue poverty alleviation and broad based economic growth – the same as the overarching approach recommended by the High Level Panel.

The report clearly articulates why a single, integrated sustainable development agenda is appropriate:

Without ending poverty, we cannot build prosperity.
Without building prosperity, we cannot tackle environmental challenges.
Without environmental sustainability, we cannot end poverty.

The report makes a careful transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to a new set of global goals. It gives full credit to the power and success of the MDGs and recognizes that 2015 does not close the chapter on them. It further recognizes that the world has dramatically changed since the MDGs were adopted and that they did not at the time nor today represent the full scope of development. So, the new framework continues the important goals of the MDGs and suggests additional ones that more fully incorporate the complexity of development by integrating the range of economic, social, environmental and governance aspects of development.

A close read of the report is required not just because it is the entire framework that must be understood, but also because it is the details that bring it to life and reveal the deep integration of the goals. Further, a quick skim leaves the impression that key ideas are missing – equity, democracy and free enterprise. But a full read reveals that these concepts are incorporated into the framework without using words that are apple pie to Americans, but loaded code words in certain societies.

Equity is not in the suggested goals or indicators, but throughout the framework is the notion of leave no one behind and that every relevant income and social group is to be reached before a goal is considered achieved. More explicitly and importantly, there is appropriate attention to the role of women and girls and the need to end discrimination and violence against them.

The word democracy does not appear, but the elements of democracy do – active civic participation, accountable government, transparency, independent media, freedom of speech and open political choice. These concepts should make democratic governments and organizations applaud the framework and autocratic governments question their own conduct.

The word free enterprise does not appear, but responsibility is put on governments to respect the rule of law and property rights, and to create the economic and regulatory environment in which enterprise can prosper.

The agenda presented in the report goes beyond assistance to other government policies and responsibilities, in both developed and developing countries, in areas such as trade, taxation, job creation, resolution of conflicts, management of natural resources and illicit capital flows. It is universal in that it applies to all countries and to all elements of society.

The report states that all parties are responsible for monitoring progress in these areas and are accountable for achieving the goals and indicators. In that regard, it appropriately recognizes the critical role of good data and calls for a data revolution to improve the quality of statistics and information, which should be available to all citizens.

It also goes further than prior reports and recommendations, which in recent years have recognized the role of government, civil society and the private sector, to also recognize the critical role of subnational government. It is the lower-level government institutions that often are responsible for the action that counts, such as administering rules and regulations, protecting the environment, creating jobs, educating children, etc.

While the report does set forth 12 illustrative goals, more importantly it identifies the criteria for selecting goals. The criteria for appropriate goals are: strong impact; compelling message; easy to understand; measureable; widely applicable; grounded in the voice of the people; and consensus-based. There will be considerable debate over the next two years as to the right goals and benchmarks, but these criteria seem to be a good place to start in assessing them.

Finally, a central theme of the report is the role of a new global partnership to bring together all elements of society to work together in pursuit of the new set of global goals and targets.

While the vision of eliminating poverty by 2030 will sound unrealistic to many, when you look at the financial resources available – the potential for developing countries to broaden the tax base, the opportunity of all countries to collaborate to reduce tax evasion, the untold rents in the resource extracting industries that are lost to constructive use, successful social support programs and the good jobs created by corporations that have integrated shared value into their business practices – it becomes clear that what is missing is the political will and the right policies and programs.

Hopefully the framework presented by the High Level Panel will create a frame for discussion and collaboration on a new set of global goals and targets that will help create the political will to end poverty in our time. But don’t take it from me, read the report in its entirety to see its great value.

Authors

George Ingram

Image Source: © Mohammed Salem / Reuters

Mukhisa Kituyi to Head the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

Mwangi S. Kimenyi — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:26:00 -0400

The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has appointed Dr. Mukhisa Kituyi to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). An UNCTAD press release on May 16, 2013 stated that Dr. Kituyi will serve a four-year term beginning September 1, 2013. Dr. Kituyi has held several senior positions including Kenya’s minister of trade from 2003-2008. He is currently a nonresident fellow in the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) at the Brookings Institution and was a resident scholar in 2011. Dr. Kituyi is well versed in the global trading system and, in the past, was considered a potential candidate to head organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and UNCTAD, but instead opted to join politics. A dynamic politician and intellectual, Dr. Kituyi is an excellent choice to head UNCTAD.

For AGI, the appointment of Dr. Kituyi is significant not only because he is one of our fellows but also because AGI has been emphasizing the need to increase informed African voices in global governance. We believe that African interests are not effectively represented in major global institutions, and this deficiency has contributed to the broader marginalization of the continent in global affairs. Dr. Kituyi should be an effective voice in representing Africa and other developing countries. And, as I know him, I believe this is one informed voice that the international community is unlikely to ignore.

But it will not be a smooth ride for the new secretary-general; a host of challenges await him in Geneva. First, more than in most global organizations, UNCTAD requires effective management and intellectual leadership. An internal report published last year—the Joint Inspection Unit Report—showed that UNCTAD has been suffering from a lack of effective governance. It is important that Dr. Kituyi focus on raising the bar in terms of professionalism at UNCTAD. This task will require looking into the recruitment and promotion of employees strictly based on merit. Dr. Kituyi will need to carefully evaluate personnel issues and provide the necessary motivation to ensure that the organization delivers on its mandate. Most importantly, he will have to steer the organization towards more transparency, rewarding performance instead of simple loyalty to senior management. The new secretary-general will also need to offer the intellectual leadership necessary to guide the institution through a time of major global economic change and a shifting of economic power to the South. He must therefore lead intellectually in offering alternative ideas to those emerging from traditional development institutions.

An even a more daunting challenge that the new secretary-general will face is to ensure that UNCTAD remains relevant and credible. Over the past few years, questions have been raised as to what should be the institution’s focus. Some have gone to the extent of insisting that UNCTAD should not be involved in macroeconomic and financial areas. But as its name suggests, UNCTAD was created to deal with issues relating to trade and development with a particular emphasis in developing countries. There is no doubt, therefore, that macroeconomics and finance squarely fit in the institution’s mandate. Indeed, UNCTAD used to be the forum where these issues would be negotiated in order to ensure some balance in the global economy. However, since the creation of the WTO, UNCTAD has experienced a progressive erosion of its voice. It will be the responsibility of Dr. Kituyi to reverse this trend so that UNCTAD can play its rightful role in the global economic policy scene. The new secretary-general must also position UNCTAD to better address the imbalance and unfairness in the multilateral trading rules that have shaped globalization. In UNCTAD, it is often the case that developing countries feel bullied by their developed country partners. It will be imperative for Dr. Kituyi to identify the best way to navigate issues that have come to divide developed and developing regions.

The secretary-general must also position UNCTAD so as to assist developing countries in seizing the opportunities presented by the global economy. With all the changes taking place in the world, UNCTAD has to focus on how developing countries can reap the benefits and minimize the negative effects arising from trade and globalization. This focus requires that UNCTAD take on the hard topics that are of particular interest to developing countries, including investment policy, trade in services and commodities—which it has always done—but it should also come out clearly on what path developing countries should follow. Likewise, we are likely to see an acceleration of regional trade arrangements. Most challenging are agreements involving Northern and Southern partners who cannot be considered equal partners when they negotiate. The jurisprudence on the rules governing such agreements is not commonly agreed upon. Hence, there is a need for UNCTAD to demonstrate, based on evidence, how to ensure that balanced development is achievable, especially in respect to North-South agreements.

With an incoming director general at the WTO and Dr. Kituyi at UNCTAD, the global environment offers an opportunity for the two institutions that drive trade and development to establish the missing dialogue. For this to happen, UNCTAD needs to be credible when articulating its voice in this changing global economy. This is the greatest challenge that Dr. Kituyi faces.

Authors

Mwangi S. Kimenyi

Image Source: © Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

Oil, Gas and Minerals for the Public Good: The Revenue Watch 2013 Resource Governance Index

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 15, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Watch live streaming video from livefrombrookings at livestream.com

Trillions of dollars in resources lie buried in the backyards of many of the world’s poorest citizens. Oil, gas and minerals can, if managed effectively and accountably, stimulate economic development. Too often, however, secrecy, corruption and weak institutions obstruct this path. To advance the understanding of this challenge, the Revenue Watch Institute has produced the Resource Governance Index, a collection of research, rankings and analysis that measures the quality of governance in the oil, gas and mining sector of 58 countries. Together, these nations produce 85 percent of the world’s oil, 90 percent of its diamonds and 80 percent of its copper, generating trillions of dollars annually. The future of these countries, both developed and developing, depends on how well they manage their resources.

On May 15, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on these concerns. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Daniel Kaufmann, president of Revenue Watch, presented the index findings, followed by a panel discussion on resource governance with Carlos Pascual, special envoy and coordinator for International Affairs, Bureau of Energy Resources, U.S. State Department, and Brookings Senior Fellow George Ingram with the Global Economy and Development program. Brookings Visiting Fellow Tamar Manuelyan Atinc moderated the discussion.

Audio

Oil, Gas and Minerals for the Public Good: The Revenue Watch 2013 Resource Governance Index

Mapping the African Growth Landscape

Mwangi S. Kimenyi — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:29:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In this piece, Mwangi Kimenyi discusses Africa's integration following the session "Mapping the African Growth Landscape," held at this year's the World Economic Forum on Africa.

The session on Mapping the African Growth Landscape focused on the sectors that hold the greatest potential for economic growth in Africa. The session started with each of the participants voting for three sectors that they considered as having highest potential for growth. The sectors selected by most of the participants were: information communication technology and telecommunications; energy and engineering; entrepreneurship; education; manufacturing; and agriculture. The selection of these sectors was influenced not only by their potential to contribute to the growth of the economies, but also to creating jobs, especially for the youth.

Working in groups, participants identified opportunities and strategies for exploiting the economic growth potentials that the various sectors offer. Although many of the opportunities and strategies identified were specific to particular sectors, there were also some common themes. For example, innovation was identified as a source of potential growth in all sectors. This includes advances in the ICT sector, innovations in the delivery of education to ensure quality instruction or innovative approaches, developing entrepreneurship through entrepreneurship hubs and incubators or even innovations to improve governance using ICT. Innovation was also considered key to expanding the manufacturing sector and in agriculture, such as the introduction of genetically modified seeds. Participants were of the opinion that Africans must embrace innovations to fully exploit the growth opportunities of various sectors.

Participants focused on actions to exploit the growth potential afforded by the various sectors. The ICT sector was identified as having great potential for growth through expansion of mobile penetration with applications in health and industry. The sector was identified as presenting immense opportunity through the compilation of information on the population, which would assist in policies for the delivery of health services and in tax collection. Participants observed that the energy sector presents many opportunities for growth, but there is need to develop a forward-looking energy master plan for Africa, not just for individual countries. Many opportunities also exist for a diverse mix of energy sources including solar, hydro and thermal.

Read the full commentary and watch the related video »

Authors

Mwangi S. Kimenyi

Publication: World Economic Forum

Image Source: © Reuters Staff / Reuters

The Impact of School Feeding Programs in Senegal

Jessica Elaine Smith and Brandon Routman — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:36:00 -0400

Access to universal primary school education has been a key policy priority for many nations trying to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, learning outcomes of students in sub-Saharan African, particularly those in rural areas, remain disappointing. Of the continent’s approximately 128 million school aged children, only half will attend school and learn basic skills (see the Africa Learning Barometer). Researchers from the Consortium for Social Economic Research are examining efforts in Senegal to improve the quality of education. On March 28th, the organization’s director, Abdoulaye Diagne, gave a seminar to the Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative on a recent study on the impact of school feeding programs on the cognitive acquisitions in rural primary schools in Senegal.

Hunger, malnutrition, and chronic fatigue are huge hurdles to learning in sub-Saharan Africa. One proposed intervention is the implementation of school feeding programs, or cantines as they are called in Senegal. Diagne’s research seeks to determine whether cantines in Senegal have a significant impact on learning outcomes in the areas of reasoning, memory, comprehension and knowledge. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of governance (in this case the presence of a parent teacher association) on student achievement.

The research sample spanned 120 schools that had no prior cantine programs in four Senegalese provinces that featured a high incidence of poverty. In half of these schools (the treatment group) feeding programs were administered and the other half (the control) received no feeding programs. Over the course of one academic year, students were given cognitive tests in two subjects, French and math.

The results showed that the feeding program contributed to the cognitive development of the students and produced positive outcomes that were more pronounced in math than in French. The school feeding program did not have a significant impact on grade repetition or the dropout rate. Also noteworthy was the finding that the program contributed to an increase in the nutritional well-being of both students and children who co-habitat with the students, such as siblings, but who do not attend school themselves. Diagne also found heterogeneous impacts of the treatment on different groups of students. For instance, the treatment had a greater impact on boys compared to girls, and was especially beneficial to students who had delayed entry into school and were over 10 years old.

Diagne concluded his presentation by noting that the cantine program in Senegal was effective in raising learning and nutritional outcomes among students. However, the cost of school feedings was a concern expressed by schools during the study. Diagne suggests that if the school feeding programs were administered in conjunction with other health-based programs such as de-worming, the results might have been even more notable. In light of Diagne’s study, programs such as cantines could be considered as a critical intervention that helps holistically address the learning needs of the poorest, most marginalized children.

Dr. Abdoulaye Diagne is the director of the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s partner think tank the Consortium for Social Economic Research or CRES. He visited Brookings for the meetings surrounding the visits of President Macky Sall and the presidents from Cape Verde, Malawi and Sierra Leone. For more information about his study, please contact Dr. Diagne at adiagne@cres-sn.org.

Authors

Jessica Elaine Smith
Brandon Routman

Image Source: © Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

Six Major Decision Points for Uhuru Administration

Eric Aligula and Anne W. Kamau — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:18:00 -0400

On March 4, 2013 Kenya successfully concluded elections under the new Constitution, ushering in new leadership in a devolved form of government.

President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto are faced with the surmountable but difficult task of revamping economic growth and implementing the new supreme law while seeking to deliver on promises made to Kenyans during their campaign.

The new government is faced with a tight resource environment within which to manoeuvre, hence the need to carefully identify priorities that will facilitate the quantum leap of the economy in the next five years, including measures to achieve an appropriate balance between private and public sector investments in the economy. Kenya’s economic performance in the last five years has been on the upswing from its low 2008 performance, but still faces some challenges. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, the economy grew at 5.8 percent, 4.4 percent and 4.5 percent per annum, respectively.

It is projected to grow at an annual rate of 5.1 per cent, 6.0 percent and 7.1 percent in 2013, 2014 and 2015. However, these growth rates remain below the psychological 10 per cent per annum target which is also under the national development blueprint Vision 2030.

As a matter of fact, this administration has promised a double-digit growth rate. Government resources are stretched with a rising wage bill estimated at Sh458 billion, which is about 12 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Read the full article on Business Daily »

Authors

Eric Aligula
Anne W. Kamau

Publication: Business Daily

Image Source: © Marko Djurica / Reuters

Emerging Nations and the Evolving Global Economy

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:30:00 -0400

Event Information

May 2, 2013
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

On May 2, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted Kaushik Basu for the ninth annual Sakıp Sabancı Lecture. In his address, Basu discussed the persisting global economic crisis and the policy challenges facing emerging countries.

Kaushik Basu is senior vice president (Development Economics) and chief economist of the World Bank. He was until recently the chief economic adviser to the Government of India. Basu’s contributions to economics span development economics, welfare economics, industrial organization and game theory. He has published widely, including 160 papers in refereed journals and scholarly volumes; numerous articles for magazines and newspapers; and several books, including Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics (Princeton University Press and Penguin, 2010).

Brookings President Strobe Talbott and Güler Sabancı, chair of the board of trustees of Sabancı University, provided introductory remarks. Following Basu’s address, students at Sabancı University and a wider overseas audience participated in the event via videoconference, moderated in Washington by Kemal Kirişci, TUSIAD senior fellow and director of the Brookings Turkey Project at Brookings and in Istanbul by Sabanci University Professor İzak Atiyas.

The Sakıp Sabancı Lecture is given annually by a leading international expert or statesman and explores issues important to Turkey and its relations to the U.S. and the world. The event honors the memory of Sakip Sabanci, one of Turkey’s foremost business leaders, a visionary supporter of democratic and economic reforms, and a leading advocate of Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union.

The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030 (Report)

Laurence Chandy, Natasha Ledlie and Veronika Penciakova — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: An interactive feature, highlighting the key findings from this report, can be found here.

Over a billion people worldwide live on less than $1.25 a day. But that number is falling. This has given credence to the idea that extreme poverty can be eliminated in a generation. A new study by Brookings researchers examines the prospects for ending extreme poverty by 2030 and the factors that will determine progress toward this goal. Below are some of the key findings:

1. We are at a unique point in history where there are more people in the world living right around the $1.25 mark than at any other income level. This implies that equitable growth in the developing world will result in more movement of people across the poverty line than across any other level.

2. Sustaining the trend rate of global poverty reduction requires that each year a new set of individuals is primed to cross the international poverty line. This will become increasingly difficult as some of the poorest of the poor struggle to make enough progress to approach the $1.25 threshold over the next twenty years.

3. The period from 1990 to 2030 resembles a relay race in which responsibility for leading the charge on global poverty reduction passes between China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. China has driven progress over the last twenty years, but with its poverty rate now down in the single digits, the baton is being passed to India. India has the capacity to deliver sustained progress on global poverty reduction over the next decade based on modest assumptions of equitable growth. Once India’s poverty is largely exhausted, it will be up to sub-Saharan Africa to run the final relay leg and bring the baton home. This poses a significant challenge as most of Africa’s poor people start a long way behind the poverty line.

4. As global poverty approaches zero, it becomes increasingly concentrated in countries where the record of and prospects for poverty reduction are weakest. Today, a third of the world’s poor live in fragile states but this share could rise to half in 2018 and nearly two-thirds in 2030.

5. The World Bank has recently set a goal to reduce extreme poverty around the world to under 3 percent by 2030. It is unlikely that this goal can be achieved by stronger than expected growth across the developing world, or greater income equality within each developing country, alone. Both factors are needed simultaneously.

Download the full report »

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Authors

Laurence Chandy
Natasha Ledlie
Veronika Penciakova

Is Africa Rising or Not? A Discussion of Economic Opportunities and Development Challenges in Africa

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:30:00 -0400

Event Information

April 25, 2013
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM EDT

Senate Visitor Center
U.S. Capitol
Washington, DC 20510

On Thursday, April 25, the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings (AGI) and the Congressional African Staff Association (CASA) hosted a briefing for congressional staffers on whether Africa’s recent growth reflects the economic opportunity that many suggest, or if the region’s inequality and other challenges will stand in the way of the continent’s potential being realized. Panelists included Brookings Senior Fellow John Page and Joseph Kweku Assan, assistant professor of political economy of sustainable development at Brandeis University. Andrew Westbury, associate director of the Africa Growth Initiative, moderated the discussion.

This event is part of the Africa Policy Dialogue on the Hill, a monthly congressional briefing hosted by AGI and CASA on topical issues relevant to Africa’s growth and security.

TRANSCRIPT

MR. WESTBURY: Okay. I guess I will act as -- I’ll do the introductions and also try to moderate the discussion, but I don’t think I’ll have a lot to worry about here with this unruly crowd we have.

So, my name is Andrew Westbury, I think I’ve met all of you before, and I’m the assistant director of the Africa Growth Initiative, and it’s pleasure to welcome you to the April edition of the Africa Policy Dialogue on the Hill.

Some of you are repeat customers and have been to these events before, but on a monthly basis we try to hold a breakfast briefing in collaboration with our colleagues at the Congressional African Staff Association, one of them, Greg Simpkins, who should be joining us shortly, and the goal is to create a forum for informed discussion about African economic issues for the United States Congress on Capitol Hill.

Read the full transcript »

Event Materials

042513BROOKINGSAGI

The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030 (Interactive)

Laurence Chandy, Natasha Ledlie and Veronika Penciakova — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:21:00 -0400

Downloads

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Authors

Laurence Chandy
Natasha Ledlie
Veronika Penciakova

Getting to Scale : How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People

Laurence Chandy, Akio Hosono, Homi Kharas and Johannes F. Linn, eds. — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2013 240pp.

The global development community is teeming with different ideas and interventions to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people. Whether these succeed in having a transformative impact depends not just on their individual brilliance but on whether they can be brought to a scale where they reach millions of poor people.

Getting to Scale explores what it takes to expand the reach of development solutions beyond an individual village or pilot program, but to poor people everywhere. Each of the essays in this book documents one or more contemporary case studies, which together provide a body of evidence on how scale can be pursued. It suggests that the challenge of scaling up can be divided into two: financing interventions at scale, and managing delivery to large numbers of beneficiaries. Neither governments, donors, charities, nor corporations are usually capable of overcoming these twin challenges alone, indicating that partnerships are key to success.

Scaling up is mission critical if extreme poverty is to be vanquished in our lifetime. Getting to Scale provides an invaluable resource for development practitioners, analysts, and students on a topic that remains largely unexplored and poorly understood.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Laurence Chandy

Akio Hosono

Akio Hosono is the director of the Research Institute of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency.

Homi Kharas

Johannes F. Linn

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Ordering Information:

{9ABF977A-E4A6-41C8-B030-0FD655E07DBF}, 978-0-8157-2419-3, $29.95 Order
{B98DCBB0-3580-4D55-ABD4-AB91E00585E6}, 978-0-8157-2420-9, $29.95 Order

Welcome to Education + Development

Rebecca Winthrop — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:42:00 -0400

Welcome to Education + Development, a new blog by the Center for Universal Education. Our blog will cover issues on global education, learning and international development, with a particular focus on the post-2015 development agenda process. Over the next two years, we will regularly blog on the process toward creating the new development agenda that will replace the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire in 2015. In addition, we will track the progress toward achieving MDG 2 – to provide high quality education for all boys and girls.

Our blog will also examine issues at the heart of the global education and development debate, provide updates on the Learning Metrics Task Force, and analyze the latest research, policy initiatives and developments impacting global education, including:

• Addressing inequality and improving equity in education financing
• Reaching marginalized communities
• Providing access as well as quality learning opportunities for all children
• Promoting youth skills and livelihoods
• Weighing education provision through the strategic use of public and private funding
• Engaging corporate philanthropy in global education

Our hope is that the Education + Development blog will serve as forum for Brookings scholars and guest contributors to have a dynamic dialogue on the critical issues impacting education in developing countries and also serve as an online space to collectively share information and new ideas.

We have included several previous blog posts on the progress thus far in the post-2015 discussions, which serve as a foundation for continued debate and engagement from all members of our community.

We look forward to sharing new blog posts with you and welcome your thoughts and input.

Warm regards,

Rebecca Winthrop
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Universal Education
@rebeccawinthrop

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop

Democracy and Poverty: A Lesson from Mongolia

Nyamosor Tuya — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Later this month, Mongolia will host the 7^th ministerial conference of the Community of Democracies (CD), an intergovernmental forum of democracies formed in 2000 at the initiative of Bronislaw Geremek of Poland and Madeleine Albright of the United States. Several civil society events will accompany it.

The CD was launched at a conference in Warsaw in 2000, and its goals were announced in the Warsaw Declaration: strengthening democratic values and institutions, protecting human rights, and promoting civil society. The effort was to be undertaken both at the national level, by supporting one another in these endeavors, and at the global level through collaboration on democracy-related issues in international and regional institutions. The Warsaw Declaration also emphasized the interdependence between peace, development, human rights and democracy.

After 2000, however, despite a sustained schedule of meetings and statements, the CD never really took off. Democracy’s progress worldwide had slowed in subsequent years, as noted in a number of surveys, including one by Freedom House. Celebrating its 10^th anniversary in Krakow in 2010, the CD acknowledged this state of affairs and through its Act of Recommitment to the Warsaw Declaration pledged to intensify its efforts to transform itself “into a unique forum for the world's democracies to promote and strengthen democracy on a global basis.” To meet this objective, the CD began to retool itself by creating a permanent secretariat, launching a partnership initiative that focuses on assistance to specific countries and, on top of civil society, bringing young people, businesses, and parliamentarians into its dialogue on democracy.

The April 2013 conference in Ulaanbaatar will be an occasion for the CD to further reinvigorate its agenda. Mongolia, which currently holds the CD presidency, offers a number of lessons to offer that could contribute to the organization’s recommitment to its objectives, especially emphasis on the interdependence between poverty, development and democracy. This emphasis is important both as an immediate goal for the host country and as a larger goal for the CD as a whole.

The case of Mongolia on poverty and democracy is instructive. The country started transitioning to democracy over twenty years ago and, for almost as long, the rate of poverty has stood at 30 percent and above. In the 1990s, much of it could be attributed to the disruptions caused by changes in its political and economic system. Harsh weather has been an intermittent factor, too. But no significant progress has been registered in later years, when the economy has grown at an annual average of 9 percent in the past decade. The latest available figure (2011) shows that poverty still stands at 29.8 percent, despite the double-digit economic growth in the past two years. The gap between poor and rich has continued to grow, and infrastructure has languished in a chronically decrepit state. Corruption, on the other hand, has continued to increase. Between 1999 and 2011, while the economy was growing, the country’s corruption ranking has managed to drop from a place where it was comfortably ahead of some of its fellow post-communist countries in Europe to a dismal 120th place out of some 180 countries surveyed by Transparency International. The implications for democracy were grave: most reforms stalled, vote buying became a serious concern, and public trust in the institutions of democracy was shaken. In a survey conducted in June 2012, over 80 percent of respondents believed that government policies were “always” or “often” failing to solve their concerns, chief among them unemployment and poverty.

The lesson to be drawn from this experience is that, early on in the transition process, new democracies should put economic liberty and transparency on a par with other democratic values such as regular elections, rule of law, human rights, freedom of association and freedom of speech. Otherwise, a callous and corrupt government, sometimes voted in through dubiously “free and fair” elections, can use the trappings and rhetoric of democracy as a façade while behind the scenes they engage in rent-seeking practices that can lead to a systemic entrenchment of corruption. In such a system political power is used for economic gain and economic gain is used for buying political influence. Few or no dividends go to the general populace. This results in persistent poverty among a large percentage of the population coupled with poor social services. Public enthusiasm or support for democracy wanes, democracy is eroded, therefore human rights are violated, and eventually democracy breaks down. Such scenarios are an early and real threat to democracy because the impoverished populace does not have the necessary tools―such as education or access to information―to fight back and, in most cases, is simply unfamiliar with the concept of demanding government accountability and responsiveness.

Early on, the CD emphasized this problem by stating in Warsaw that eradication of poverty is an “essential contributing factor to the promotion and preservation of democratic development” (2000). This emphasis should now be renewed. To do so, recommitment to the concept of interdependence between democracy and poverty found in the Santiago Commitment (2005) is essential. The Commitment stressed that democracy cannot be sustained without persistent efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and, vice versa, that the strengthening of democratic governance was “an essential component” of the efforts to alleviate poverty. Rooting out corruption that “corrodes democracy,” as stated in Warsaw, is a central element of these efforts, and this stance was reaffirmed in the Krakow Plan for Democracy (2010). Poverty is as much a threat to a democracy as poor institutions in that it deprives people of their political voice preventing them from holding their governments accountable and responsive, and eroding public trust in the emerging institutions of democracy. The CD’s Bamako Consensus (2007) addressed the issue of public trust: “persistent inequality and poverty can lead to low public trust in political institutions and vulnerability to undemocratic practices both of which are threats to democracy.” Poverty is also an assault on human dignity which is why the Bamako Consensus also emphasized that democracy, development and human rights were mutually reinforcing.

This body of reasoning serves as a good foundation for the CD to contribute to the ongoing global debate on the post-2015 development agenda. This debate presents the CD with an opportunity to pursue its position that eradication of poverty and the consolidation of democracy are interdependent. The thematic session on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that is planned for the CD’s meetings in Ulaanbaatar could therefore be seized as an occasion to launch substantive discussions on collaboration, in the coming years, with international organizations and civil society on ways to incorporate democratic governance in the post-2015 development agenda, or mainstream anti-corruption efforts into it, and ensure that this agenda adopts a human rights-based approach, addresses inequality and promotes social inclusion. Discussions could revolve around the issues raised in papers and notes by UN bodies and agencies and other actors, especially civil society, that call for encompassing human rights, democracy and good governance in an inclusive development agenda focused on poverty eradication. The ideas expressed at the global consultation on governance and the post-2015 framework could also be taken up.

The experience of Mongolia could also be looked at. Mongolia is one of two countries that have voluntarily added a ninth goal to its MDGs: Strengthen Human Rights and Foster Democratic Governance. While a welcome initiative, Mongolia’s MDG 9 has not been a successful undertaking either in terms of its design and implementation; one of its targets, “zero tolerance for corruption,” has been, for too long, an embarrassing slogan given the deteriorating realities on the ground. The initiative did not target such central principles of democratic governance as government accountability, transparency and participation. Neither has the mutually reinforcing nature of the goals to reduce poverty, promote gender equality and improve governance been duly highlighted in the national MDGs framework. Mongolia’s case strongly suggests that the design of governance goals and the methodology of assessing and monitoring their progress should be given careful consideration. The country’s experience also suggests that it is important for national leaders in new democracies to fully embrace and own the goals and targets of poverty reduction and democratic governance -- and to lead. And they should be held accountable for the failures in the implementation.

The impending Community of Democracy discussions in Ulaanbaatar will provide Mongolian leaders both in government and in civil society with an opportunity to reflect on the current status of the country’s MDGs on poverty reduction and democratic governance and commit to their acceleration. It should be noted that the latest poverty figure shows a decrease―29 percent in 2011 versus 39 percent in 2010―but it is yet to be determined if this is attributable to government’s untargeted cash handouts of the past three years, or whether it points to a trend. Whichever the case, sustaining economic growth and expanding the opportunities offered by it, especially by reducing youth unemployment, will be essential if the country is to meet its goal of reducing poverty to 18 percent by 2015. The discussion will also help the thinking on the best ways to incorporate the “unfinished business,” or any unmet MDGs, into the country’s post-MDGs goals in a way that is mindful of the importance of the wider governance context for any success in the key areas of poverty, gender equality and environment.

After years of stalled reform that threatened to jeopardize the country’s democratic gains, it appears that the Mongolian government is now more willing to tackle its outstanding governance issues. It has laid out its plans to reform the civil service, judiciary and police, the institutions most frequently cited in past surveys as the most corrupt; wider policy deliberation and citizen feedback and participation are encouraged, including through the use of new technologies; democracy education is being debated; efforts to address corruption have been stepped up and a more robust national strategy to combat it is in the works. A recent survey showed a slight increase in the level of confidence that people place in the ability of the country’s anti-corruption agency to tackle the issue. In a promising sign, in a single year, the country moved up 26 places in its ranking of the Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (the effect of changes in methodology and lesser number of countries surveyed is unclear). The government has also expressed its intent to join the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral transparency initiative involving governments and civil society. Its OGP Action Plan is scheduled to be presented later this month.

The government’s commitment to accountability and transparency will be put to the test by its handling of the case of a former finance minister, whose failure to disclose his offshore company and a secret Swiss bank account, holding $1 million at one time, was brought to light last week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

If sustained, reform should improve government effectiveness and create an enabling governance environment for focusing on poverty eradication which should remain the government’s first priority. In the years ahead, the country’s significant extractive wealth will also have to be managed in an exemplary way so that its benefits go to the entire population in an equitable way. The CD’s position that eradication of poverty is essential for a healthy democracy should serve as a guiding principle for the Mongolian government for it to regain public trust and produce outcomes that ensure prosperity, justice and security for the people.

Since the next CD ministerial will take place in 2015, only a couple of months removed from the global gathering on development, the Ulaanbaatar CD ministerial is an opportunity for democracies to start working together to include the democratic principles of accountability, transparency and participation into the post-2015 poverty eradication agenda. A reaffirmation of the CD’s belief in the mutually reinforcing nature of democracy and development can also help re-shape the debate in Mongolia in a way that integrates eradication of poverty, equity and social justice into the broader project of democracy.

Authors

Nyamosor Tuya

Beyond the Climate Impasse: How the Major Economies Forum Can Lead the Way

Timmons Roberts — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:50:00 -0400

During George W. Bush’s administration, the government was under pressure to act on climate change, but saw the U.N. as a dead end for negotiations. Instead of the cumbersome talks with almost 200 countries at the table, the Bush administration favored “minilateral” or “plurilateral” solutions with small groups of countries.

Now in 2013, with a new president in the White House who was feted by the Nobel committee for renewing multilateralism, the idea of smaller plurilateral solutions seems to have kept its currency. After two arduous decades of negotiations since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit when the first climate framework treaty was penned, it’s time to reconsider whether these smaller groups can break the endless stalemate.

Although the negotiations have grown tremendously complex, the core difficulty is who has to act to reduce their emissions, how much and when. An “apple pie” phrase in the 1992 treaty is that countries should act according to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” It’s a pretty agreeable statement: everyone’s responsible for this global crisis, but some countries created much more of the problem so they should act, and especially those countries with the most funds. Developing countries see this as obligating the wealthy nations who have dumped the most carbon pollution into the atmosphere to act first and most aggressively to cut their emissions. Some key wealthy countries have resisted acknowledging “historical responsibility,” since doing so might mean damage to their economic competitiveness, or maybe even imply legal liability.

But the clock has been ticking these 20 years, and time is running out. We need a viable coalition for efficiently and adequately addressing emissions reductions, consisting of a group small enough to avoid the unworkability of full universal multilateralism and, at the same time, large enough to significantly address the issue. This could be the week for such a step, as the Obama administration hosts representatives from a group of countries assembled precisely for breaking this impasse.

George W. Bush began a group called the “Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change” back in 2007, and upon arriving in the White House, President Obama renamed the group the “Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate.” The new “MEF” was officially launched in March 2009 “to facilitate a candid dialogue among major developed and developing economies [and] help generate the political leadership necessary to achieve a successful outcome at the annual U.N. climate negotiations.”

The group has met 14 times since then, and will next meet this week from April 11-12, 2013 in Washington. Its members include Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU-27, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the U.S. If you add them all up, over four-fifths of all contributions to fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions in the world are represented. A reasonable deal within this group would be nearly five times more effective than the current commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which only covers 15 percent of global emissions.

In a recently published Brookings’ paper, Marco Grasso of the University of Milan-Bicocca and I propose a compromise by which the MEF could break the climate negotiations impasse. Markedly, our approach requires all key players to compromise on some demands in order for their own to be met. The goals are fairness and feasibility.

First, we suggest the use of ‘consumption-based accounting,’ which counts emissions where products are consumed, not produced. This would be fairer and beneficial for China, the leading current emitter and third highest emitter historically. China is the ‘workshop of the world’ and essentially the place to which other countries have outsourced their highly polluting stages of manufacturing. Because of its diverse economy, which includes significant resource extraction and primary processing of those resources, this kind of accounting also doesn’t hurt the U.S. significantly.

Second, we create a ‘carbon budget,’ based on the total amount of emissions that can still be released while keeping us below a 25 percent chance of the world warming above 2 ˚C on average. That’s the level at which the climate change is expected to worsen to the point of unpredictable and unacceptable impacts. Also central to the compromise, to apportion the carbon budget we propose a ‘short horizon polluter pays principle,’ which calculates responsibility for climate change from past fossil fuel emissions, but only from 1990 to 2010. India, China and other developing nations have demanded that the wealthy countries be obligated to act based on their long histories of emitting and their capability to pay, and our short horizon polluter pays principle and use of national income as an indictor of capability address their concern. However, limiting the responsibility for past fossil fuel emissions to a 20 year horizon is a compromise for the U.S., EU and other wealthy countries with far longer emissions histories. While developed nations must acknowledge some responsibility, this proposed compromise only requires that they do so from the point that climate change emerged as a concern and global negotiations on the issue were underway.

This minilateral compromise within the Major Economies Forum may be the only way to avoid the disasters that lie ahead. In this deal, all actors must bend to some demands of the other key players in order for their own to be met, as with any true compromise. The MEF can lead us down a new road by exploring this approach.

Authors

Timmons Roberts

Quiet Progress for Education in Pakistan

Rebecca Winthrop, Elena Matsui and Baela Raza Jamil — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0400

The issue of education in Pakistan rocketed to front page news after the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old girl who was targeted by Taliban assassins last October. Unfortunately, violence and attacks against education persist. At the end of March, Shahnaz Nazli, a 41-year-old teacher, was killed on her way to work at a girls’ school near the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal district. Five teachers were killed in January near the town of Swabi in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Acts of violence like these undermine an already weak education system where an estimated 30 to 40 percent of school-aged children are out of school. These enormous challenges are compounded by political uncertainties given the upcoming elections and denouement of the war in Afghanistan.

However, in the shadow of these difficult circumstances, progress is quietly being made in thousands of schools located in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. A recent report, The Good News From Pakistan, shows positive results emerging from a program that instituted a number of reforms to the education sector in over 60,000 government schools. Based on global evidence of what works in school system reform, the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap targets access, equity and quality, and uses an innovative monitoring tool that can be used to support and encourage policy dialogue. Over the past two years there have been increases in student enrollment, teacher presence and the availability of functioning facilities in the regions where the program has been implemented.

Student learning levels in Punjab have also improved. An independent, citizen-led household-based study, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), assessed over 60,000 children from all 36 districts in Punjab and profiled almost 2,000 public and private schools in the region. It reveals significant gains in learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy. Grade 4 English language learning levels have improved 12 percent since 2011; Arithmetic levels in Grades 4 and 5 have increased 10 percent. Perhaps even more remarkable, the study indicates that gaps between public and private education are closing. Whereas private schools have historically performed better in terms of teacher attendance rates and learning outcomes, now public and private school attendance rates for children (86 percent) and teachers (87 percent) are on par. Public school facilities are also improving. There are more functioning toilets and available drinking water in government schools, which has further reduced discrepancies in relation to private schools.

Something is definitely working. A critical component of the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap includes strengthening district administration by involving, incentivizing and holding officials accountable for progress or failure, as well as acknowledging them publicly. In addition, a culture of evidence-based tracking and accountability is growing throughout the Punjab districts. In particular, monthly monitoring and ranking based on a number of key indicators around governance and quality has helped to bolster the attendance rates in public schools.

The engagement of policymakers as well as citizens is essential to the success of any large scale public sector education reform. While the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap is involving high-level officials and community leaders, Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Pakistan is doing its part to include citizens in the dialogue. Every year, 9,000 volunteers from across Pakistan work to collect ASER data that is then shared with the government, civil society organizations, media, bilateral and multilateral agencies and other stakeholders working in the education sector. This process supports the Right to Education (RTE) campaign that has collected almost 2 million signatures from in-school and out-of-school children in an effort to pressure the Pakistani government to implement free and compulsory education for all children aged five to sixteen. United Nations special envoy for Global Education and former prime minster, Gordon Brown, presented 1 million signatures from the RTE campaign to the president of Pakistan on Malala Day, November 10^th, 2012, which lead to the ratification of the first RTE bill in Pakistan. Following the death of Shahnaz Nazli, Malala started a new petition in honor of the slain teacher, which continues to put pressure on the Pakistani government to end the killings and violence that deny children their right to an education–especially for girls.

These advances are important for the people of Pakistan and the 5.1 million children out of school throughout the country. But these efforts also offer lessons for the international community. The Punjab Education Reform Roadmap as well as the work of ASER Pakistan and courageous individuals like Malala and Shahnaz Nazli show that even in the face of daunting challenges and an uncertain future, ambitious goal setting, collaboration and the effective use of evidence can deliver impressive results in a relatively short amount of time. Governments and partners working to improve education systems everywhere should take note.

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop
Elena Matsui
Baela Raza Jamil

Brookings: Topics - Developing Countries

International Actions to Support Green Growth Innovation Goals

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Eliminate Poverty - Sustainable Development

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Mukhisa Kituyi to Head the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

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Oil, Gas and Minerals for the Public Good: The Revenue Watch 2013 Resource Governance Index

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Mapping the African Growth Landscape

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The Impact of School Feeding Programs in Senegal

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Six Major Decision Points for Uhuru Administration

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Emerging Nations and the Evolving Global Economy

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The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030 (Report)

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Is Africa Rising or Not? A Discussion of Economic Opportunities and Development Challenges in Africa

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The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030 (Interactive)

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Getting to Scale : How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Laurence Chandy

Akio Hosono

Homi Kharas

Johannes F. Linn

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Welcome to Education + Development

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Democracy and Poverty: A Lesson from Mongolia

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Beyond the Climate Impasse: How the Major Economies Forum Can Lead the Way

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Quiet Progress for Education in Pakistan

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