Earlier this week, I participated in Time magazine’s “The Future of Mobility” panel, which focused on the implications of mobile technology for the developing world. As I’ve previously noted, certain advances in mobile technology in places like Kenya could leapfrog those in the United States. Perhaps the best example of this is mobile money, which is taking off in Africa but still struggling to get traction in the U.S. As Kiva CEO and co-founder Matt Flannery remarked during the panel, “Mobile money in Africa is a solution to a problem, whereas in the United States, mobile payments are a solution looking for a problem.” Satisfied with widely accepted credit cards and easily accessible online checking accounts, people in advanced economies have less need to adopt mobile phone-based banking; in Kenya, where access to traditional banking is far more limited, some 40 percent of the adult population now uses mobile money. Read more »

Egypt’s President Morsi is discovering just how expensive was his decidedly mixed response to last week’s assault on the U.S. embassy in Cairo–it took the new leader more than 48 hours to condemn the attacks. Yesterday, U.S. officials announced that talks underway to forgive approximately $1 billion in debt and to facilitate other economic aid to Egypt have been suspended–and will likely not resume until after the U.S. election in November. Read more »

In this edition of Missing Pieces, Charles Landow reviews stories on Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Mongolia, as well as a scholarly paper on health. Enjoy and have a great weekend.

Cash for the Congo: Starting in 2007, the Tuungane program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo “funded classrooms, clinics, and other investments in 1,250 villages,” which had to form elected committees to plan and execute projects in consultation with villagers. More recently, in what the Financial Times calls “an acid test of whether Tuungane had helped to promote effective village institutions,” an evaluation project gave cash to Tuungane and non-Tuungane villages and examined their process for spending it. Tuungane’s impact on improving governance appears minimal. In both groups, almost equal proportions of villages used elections to choose committees to spend the funds. The average amount of money that went missing was “nearly identical in treatment and control areas” as well. But even if Tuungane’s effects on governance were limited, it is heartening that the UK’s Department for International Development, which funded Tuungane, has allowed such a rigorous study of its work. Read more »

There are so many new applications of mobile technology in developing economies that it is hard to keep abreast of them. From time to time, I try to highlight a few that I think are particularly innovative and promising. In July, I wrote briefly about a non-profit, Zidisha, that makes it possible for anyone with an Internet connection and an online payment method to make a loan to an entrepreneur in Kenya or Senegal, among other countries. Would-be lenders can view entrepreneurs’ projects online and make a loan to a project of their choosing; Zidisha then transfers the money directly to the borrower. In Kenya, Zidisha takes the direct payment concept even further, sending a loan over Kenya’s mobile money system through a borrower’s cell phone. Read more »

In the past 24 hours, protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and militants orchestrated a brutal attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. In a video today on CFR.org (below and here), I discuss the protests in Egypt and the deplorable terrorist act in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Though the uproar in both places is ostensibly linked to an incendiary film that disparages Islam, the underlying causes in each place are considerably different. Religious sentiment and tensions fueled the fairly peaceful protests in Egypt, but in Libya a heavily-armed terrorist group supportive of al-Qaeda executed what seemed to be a well-planned attack perhaps timed to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary. The protests against the film were likely an additional subterfuge. Read more »

In this edition of Missing Pieces, Charles Landow highlights work on poverty, global economic trends, and aid, as well as developments in India. Enjoy!

Global Poverty: The Economist explores a debate over “the geography of poverty”—where the world’s poor are, and will be, concentrated. As the piece notes, one scholar writes that some four-fifths of people living on less than $2 per day live not in poor countries but in middle-income ones. This is because countries like China and India have achieved middle-income status while many of their people remain poor. Meanwhile, two other researchers contend that poverty’s main locus in the coming years will be “fragile states,” where birthrates are often high. These accounts can be partially “squared,” the Economist says, because some countries are both middle-income and fragile: the “MIFFS (middle-income fragile or failed states),” which include Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. In any case, the data point to an increasing need for donors to focus on boosting both governance in fragile countries and equity in middle-income ones. Read more »

Yesterday, when I wrote about the blasphemy charges against Rimsha Masih–a young Christian girl in Pakistan who apparently is developmentally disabled–she was in police custody. Today, in a surprise development, the judge in the case allowed her to be released on bail, and in theory, Masih should leave jail at some point soon. Read more »

Tracking blasphemy cases in Pakistan is a good proxy for measuring the ebb and flow of extremism–and it’s not a pretty picture these days. The latest case to roil the waters involves a young girl from Pakistan’s Christian minority who was discovered last month with burned pages of religious texts among her belongings. (Her accusers said the pages came from the Koran, although this story has since come under scrutiny.) A mob gathered, calling for her arrest, and she was taken into police custody and charged with blasphemy, an offense that can carry the death penalty. What makes this situation even more egregious than the usual sentenced-to-death-for insulting-Islam case is that while reports of the girl’s exact age vary, she seems to be around 14 years old and has a developmental disability. Read more »

An Economist article from a few months ago noted that if Bangladesh can sustain its annual growth rates of over six percent, it could “contemplate reaching middle-income levels in barely a decade.” That would be quite a feat for a country that was once synonymous with wrenching poverty. But as the Economist warned, the government must stay focused on meeting the country’s economic challenges. Sadly, political infighting instead seems to be winning the day. The leaders of the two main parties–Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the governing Awami Party and Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) appear to be more interested in destroying each other than in leading. Their personal animosity is legendary but in the run-up to next year’s election, Bangladesh’s politics are poised to get even dirtier. Read more »

• Education and Health in Pakistan: While better educated parents are known to raise healthier children, the role of each parent and the exact reasons for the correlation remain unclear. A study in World Development seeks to clarify the issue. Using a survey of almost 1,200 households in two provinces of Pakistan, the authors find that a mother’s level of schooling significantly affects children’s height and weight. However, only a father’s education impacts immunization. The authors speculate that fathers may guide certain health behaviors, “particularly if they require travel to a health clinic,” while mothers govern “day-to-day decisions” that affect “longer-term measures of health such as height and weight.” But it is not parents’ “education per se” that drives better child health. Instead, the authors find that immunization responds to fathers’ health knowledge (rather than overall schooling). Mothers’ impact on height and weight, meanwhile, seems driven by their health knowledge and “empowerment within the home.” Based on these findings, the authors write that “policies aimed at achieving better health awareness and knowledge” might give Pakistan the biggest development boost. Read more »