Africa

Entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs, and governments exalt mobile technology as a game-changing tool to fight global poverty. But what if our eagerness to connect the world is inadvertently exacerbating the global economic divide?

Editor’s Note: Contributors to this post will be part of a panel on the topic taking place on Thursday, February 9th in Washington, D.C. Sign up for the event here. This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and the Global Public Square.

The Global Assets Project has written extensively about the virtues of international aid agencies and national governments transferring money directly to poor households. As such, we are thrilled to see a US-based NGO, GiveDirectly, taking this idea "to the streets" and enabling people to directly donate money to poor households in Kenya via their mobile phones. Similar to other cash-transfer programs, GiveDirectly’s model is incredibly efficient, with around 90 cents of every dollar ending up in the hands of beneficiaries, and enables recipients to decide for themselves how to go about meeting their needs.

By the beginning of the Obama Administration, democracy promotion had become a rather tarnished idea, and understandably so. Like Islam or Christianity, much blood has been shed beneath its banner. It may be true that democracies don’t go to war with one another, but they certainly go to war, and their wars kill people just as dead as the wars undertaken by illiberal regimes. Anyone on the political left can tell the story: During the Cold War, the United States fought endless proxy wars and engaged in a great deal of overt and covert mischief, all in the name of democracy.

This post originally appeared on the SPINNAKER Network.

On November 18^th in Nairobi, Kenya, the Global Assets Project in partnership with FSD Kenya held a half-day industry workshop to share initial findings from the SPINNAKER Network’s recent landscape study on savings products in the country. Jamie Zimmerman presented on the study’s initial findings to Kenya’s policy makers, practitioners, and financial institution representatives, and facilitated various discussions on salient issues related to 1) access to financial services 2) client uptake of savings products and 3) regulatory hurdles facing institutions seeking to offer savings products to the poor.

A decade ago, as a bookish schoolgirl in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag, Samira Ibrahim Mohamed was fascinated by Egyptology and yearned to see the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo one day.

But when she finally set foot on the grounds of the landmark pink stone building, on March 9, the museum had been turned into a makeshift torture center. Ms. Mohamed, who had just been arrested by the army during a protest on nearby Tahrir Square, was given electric shocks that she said made her body twitch spasmodically for days afterward.

It’s not often that you’re hanging on every word of an audit, but the Department for International Development’s (DFID’s) Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, “Transferring Cash and Assets to the Poor” is quite the page-turner. As meticulously as one could imagine, the UK’s National Audit Office scrutinizes every aspect of DFID’s approach, execution, and follow-up in giving resources directly to people in poverty, which, it hastens to point out, is opposed to “widely prevalent development models.”

What’s amazing is that, under such intense scrutiny, cash transfer programs come out looking less like a fad and more like a mainstay in international development efforts.

Imagine a country with the longest coastline in Africa, bordering some of the busiest sea lanes in the world. Imagine this country has very wealthy neighbours just across the water, and a history of commercial links to faraway places as an old Silk Road trading post. If geography is destiny, then this country is fortunate indeed.

This is getting all too predictable. President Obama announced that all American troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year, in compliance not only with his election pledge but also with the terms of a U.S.-Iraq treaty.

The future face of American warfare is very likely on display now in Africa. Libya, the coast off Somalia, and now the borderlands of Uganda—it's a fair bet that these theaters of conflict, far more than Iraq or Afghanistan, foretell the shape of our military adventures. What this suggests is a return to the "advise and assist" missions of the Cold War, with international terrorists (or, on occasion, particularly hideous thugs) replacing international Communism as the predominant threat.