The article discusses development in Latin America and argues that the region has achieved significant progress but still has a long way to go. It notes that average growth in Latin America over the last decade was 4% and that this rate of growth would lead to doubling the economy in 18 years. Several countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela are now classified as upper-middle income countries, while most others are middle-income. The article suggests that Latin America has succeeded in reducing extreme poverty but inequality remains high and many people still live in relative poverty. Overall, the region has made progress but development challenges still remain.

1. MILLENNIUM | Is sue 1 | Winter 2014

2. Editor’s Letter
Welcome to
the WIDS
M a g a z i n e !
We are
proud to be publishing
the first edition of our
bi-annual magazine se-ries.
Millennium is the
only published magazine
on campus that solely
focuses on development
issues. Indeed, WIDS is
the only development-fo-cused
Society on cam-pus.
We are therefore
very excited to provide
the Warwick community
with an outlet to read
and write about current
events and trends in the
field of development that
are important to us stu-dents!
Whether you are
reading this magazine as
a member of the Socie-ty
or just an interested
student, remember that
issues of development
are relevant to us all. As
citizens of the world we
should all be concerned
with the social and eco-nomic
progress of de-veloping
countries. As
students at an ambitious
university such as War-wick,
these issues are es-pecially
relevant to you,
as whatever career you
choose to pursue will
no doubt place its work
within a global context.
In this issue we have
embraced this year’s
theme of appreciating
development through
the lens of diversity. We
therefore have articles
that focus on a variety
of countries, and the
magazine is split into
the following geographi-cal
regions: Africa, Asia,
MENA, Latin America as
well as the more devel-oped
parts of the world.
We are also exploring
diversity in terms of the
different sectors that
affect development, so
look out for articles that
focus on medicine, jus-tice,
gender equality,
governance and econom-ic
inequality just to name
a few.
As we’re fast ap-proaching
the deadline
of the eight Millennium
Development Goals, we
have a special section on
how far we’ve come in
terms of achieving these
targets. Hence, alongside
our Summit, we aim to
look to the Post-2015 De-velopment
Agenda and
the future of develop-ment
as a whole, to truly
explore what more needs
to be done.
We would like to
thank all of our writers
for putting in their time
and research to write ar-ticles
on issues that were
important to them. We
had contributions from
people on courses from
History and Literature
to Politics and Econom-ics,
and we feel this has
given Millennium a real-ly
broad relevance and
appeal. Thanks also to
my editing team, Luksha
Wickramarachchi, Daisy
Sibun and Iris Karaman,
as well as our Creative
Director, Hiran Adhia
who single-handedly de-signed
the entire maga-zine,
and the rest of the
Executive Committee for
supporting us in the Mil-lennium’s
production.
We hope you enjoy
the magazine and that it
inspires you to engage
with issues of develop-ment
in the future. Hap-py
reading!
Alexandra Karlsson Editor-in-Chief
MILLENNIUM’S PRODUCTION TEAM
Alexandra Karlsson
Editor-in-Chief
Hiran adhia
Creative Director
Luksha Wickramarachchi
Editor
iris karaman
Editor
daisy sibun
Editor
THE WIDS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 2014/15
Co-coordinators & Presidents
Stephanie Ifayemi
Riko Yamada
Secretary
Jason Tran
Treasurer
Rahima Chairi
Events
Cindy Asokan (Head)
Adeorike Oshinyemi (Deputy)
Design
Hiran Adhia (Head)
Marketing
Zara Yaqoob (Head)
David Henning (External)
Balzs Vincze (Internal)
Media
Luksha Wickramarachchi
(Head)
Alexandra Karlsson
(Magazine)
Daisy Sibun (Deputy)
Operations
Atif Jeelani (Head)
Lubna Al Ariqi (Hospitality)
Bhavin Ashra (Hospitality)
Nahal Darvia (Logisitcs)
Sponsorship
Karan Thakrar (Head)
Kulani McCartan-Demie
(Deputy)
Yulu Wu (Deputy)
Talks
Ibtehal Atta-Elmanan (Head)
Aashna Jaggi (Deputy)
Iris Karaman (Deputy)
Partnerships
Oluwatito Olaniyan (Head)
Yeong Lee (Deputy)
Anushay Neeshat (Deputy)
Noshin Suleman (Deputy)
Fresher’s Representative
Christina Stuart
Postgraduate Representative
Selin Koksal
Jonathan Menary
“ Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but
as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the
future.” Nel son Mandela

3. The Warwick International Development Society is the University of
Warwick’s forum for discussing issues of development. We hold an
annual three-day Summit that is the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom!
The Summit
sees dis-t
i n g u i s h e d
leaders in
the field of develop-ment
speaking on
current issues around
a specific theme.
This year’s theme
is Development
Through the Lens of
Diversity, so we will
be welcoming speak-ers
from a variety of
backgrounds, includ-ing
medicine, archi-tecture,
transparency,
NGOs and the United
Nations.
Our goal is to en-gage
as many stu-dents
as possible in
the world of develop-ment.
As such, the So-ciety
also hosts a Lec-ture
Series that runs
throughout the year
following the sum-mit,
as well as various
exclusive internship
opportunities. More
details will be made
available in the weeks
following the Sum-mit.
We will also be
publishing another
magazine in the sec-ond
term, so look out
for more writing op-portunities
and other
ways to get involved
in our dynamic Soci-ety?
Make sure to con-nect
with us through
our social media on
Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram.
@WIDS_2014
C O N T E N T S
EDITOR’S LETTER 3
WARWICK INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT SUMMIT
- Development Through the Lens of Diversity 4
LATIN AMERICA
- Is the Chilean Education System a Success Story? 7
- Latin America: The Miracle of the Millenium Generation? 8-9
- Alianza del Pacífico vs. Mercosur: which is the best model for development? 10
ASIA
- Building From The Ground Up in Asia 13
- The Fruits of Prosperity are spread unevenly 14
- The Chinese Contradiction 15
- An Unclean Bill of Health in India 16-17
CENTRESPREAD
- Millennium Goals: Less than 500 Days to Go 18-19
- A Time For Change...a new BRICS Development Bank 20-21
AFRICA
- On Rough Seas: Why Somalian Fisherman Turn to Piracy 23
- Why is Africa poor? Looking Back in History 24-25
- My Phone Fuels a War 26
- Biofuel in Best Practce: The Makeni Project, Sierra Leone 27
MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
- Transitional Justice and its Role in Development 29
- The Two State Solution with One State Economy 30
- Why Middle Eastern Women do not need White, Western Feminists 32
DEVELOPED WORLD
- Profile of An African King 34
- Celebrity Feminism: A Fashion for Inaction or Glamourizing Change? 36
PARTNERSHIPS & INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITIES 38
SPONSORS 39
4 5

4. is the CHILEAN education
system a success story?
On paper, Chile has
been one of the great
development suc-cess
stories in Latin
America, appearing on course to
become the continent’s first de-veloped
country.
Statistically, poverty rates
have been slashed dramatically
over the past few decades, GDP
per capita growth has averaged
over 3% a year, infant mortality
rates have plummeted and life ex-pectancy
has soared. The country
has seen itself catapulted into the
World Bank’s league of “high-in-come
countries”. Education sta-tistics
are especially encouraging,
with the gross primary enrolment
rate at virtually 100% and the
gross secondary enrolment rate
close to 90%. Impressively, ab-solute
poverty is close to being
eradicated; according to the most
recent Casen survey just 2.8%
of Chileans now live in absolute
poverty.
This success story is the re-sult
of sensible macroeconomic
policies, the first of which was
the promotion of free trade: Chile
has signed more free trade agree-ments
than any other nation, and
is also a founding member of the
Alianza del Pacífico (Pacific Alli-ance)
trading bloc. The country
has embarked on the privatisation
of many formerly government
owned companies and the liber-alisation
of financial and prod-uct
markets, allowing the private
sector to play a large role in the
economy. The central bank enjoys
complete independence and the
government has been prudent
with regards to spending. Dur-ing
the commodities boom of
the early 2000s for example, the
government used the extra reve-nue
from increasing exports to set
up two sovereign wealth funds,
the Pension Reserve Fund and
the Economic and Social Stability
Fund. It was then able to engage
in counter-cyclical fiscal spending
and call on these reserves during
the recent recession. The Chile-an
experience could suggest that
the policy mix for development is
deceptively simple; allowing free
trade, embarking on privatisation
and liberalisation of markets, con-ducting
prudent fiscal policy and
independent monetary policy will
cause growth to occur and pover-ty
rates to fall.
Yet a crucial point can be
overlooked by studying macroe-conomic
figures alone: Chile is
afflicted with one of the worst
degrees of economic inequality
in the world. The country’s Gini
coefficient, a measure of inequal-ity,
was 0.52 in 2009 (the average
rate in contrast is just over 0.3),
and has remained stubbornly high
over recent decades. In the rank-ing
of HDI by country, Chile falls
a staggering 16 places once ine-quality
is taken into account. One
particularly startling figure which
demonstrates the inequality gap is
that the richest 10% of the Chil-ean
population account for more
than 40% of the country’s wealth.
The poorest 10% in contrast are
responsible for a mere 1.7%. The
divide between rich and poor is
stark. It is clear to see that a small
group at the top have reaped most
of the benefits of Chile’s econom-ic
growth, while the majority of
the population has been left be-hind.
One key factor driving the di-vide
between rich and poor is the
Chilean education system, which
according to UNESCO has caused
“segmentation, exclusion and dis-crimination”.
The system is mar-ket-
orientated and decentralised.
Although the figures of enrolment
rates are impressive, they do not
reflect the poor quality of the ed-ucation
being provided. Although
getting more students into class-rooms
is a worthy achievement it
is also vitally important that they
are taught well. There is a large
gap between the educational at-tainment
of students attending
municipal schools and those who
go to private schools. In the most
recent SIMCE, a test which meas-ures
proficiency in English, 81%
of private school students passed
the test compared to only 7% of
municipal school students. This
huge disparity can be explained
by multiple factors, including the
fact that municipal schools have
larger class sizes than their pri-vate
counterparts. Furthermore
municipal schools are poorly
funded and crucially have worse
teaching standards, as many of
the best teachers tend to flock
to private schools where they are
offered higher wages. Too many
universities also suffer from poor
quality teaching and offer cours-es
with little value in the labour
market.
Another aspect of the Chil-ean
education system which has
perpetuated inequality is its
cost. For primary and secondary
schools a system of co-payment
exists, whereby private schools
can top-up the vouchers they re-ceive
By Ol iver Reynolds
by charging tuition fees to
students. This has the effect of ex-cluding
some students from poor
families from the best schools.
Higher education is also exceed-ingly
expensive; tuition fees rela-tive
to GDP per capita in Chile are
among the highest in the world
according to the OECD, making
it difficult for poor families to
afford to send their children to
university.
The combination of the poor
quality and high cost of education
in Chile stunts social mobility and
shackles the country’s econom-ic
potential. The country has a
small, well-educated and highly
productive elite who study at the
top private schools and universi-ties,
consequently enabling them
to secure well-paid jobs and enjoy
a high quality of life. Conversely,
a larger proportion of the popula-tion,
one that is poorly educated
and have fewer skills, languish in
an economically precarious sit-uation.
Even if Chile eventually
catches up with developed coun-tries
in terms of GDP per capita,
it must achieve a more equitable
distribution of its wealth in order
for its citizens to enjoy the living
standards of a developed country.
Thankfully, there are signs of
change. The number of grants of-fered
by universities has increased
dramatically in the last few years,
allowing more students from poor
backgrounds to access higher
education. Perhaps more impor-tantly,
current president Michelle
Bachelet, has recently announced
a reform package which amounts
to the biggest shakeup of the ed-ucation
system in decades. One
of the key elements of these ed-ucational
reforms is that primary
and secondary education will be
made free for everyone. Although
this is undoubtedly a step in the
right direction and will reduce
the socioeconomic segregation in
the education system, the reform
does little to tackle the problem
of poor quality education. Passing
reforms to make education free
will not improve the standard of
teaching in classrooms. The prob-lem
of inequality can only truly
be solved when Chileans from
right across the socioeconomic
spectrum are all able to enjoy the
same quality of education. If the
government is able to make ad-vances
on this front, then Chile
will finally be able to combat its
deep-seated economic inequal-ities
and become the first devel-oped
country in Latin America.
Credit: Flickr / perropatata
LATIN
AMERICA
“The region of Latin America and the Caribbean has achieved parity
in primary education between boys and girls, and it is the only develop-ing
region in which gender disparity favours girls in both secondary and
tertiary education.”
Credit: Flickr / mmwhortgroup
Latin America | 7

5. 8 |Latin America 9
With the Millennium
Development Goals
deadline approach-ing,
we become
more and more interested in
the results. Who has succeeded?
Which countries managed to in-crease
living standards, develop
and prosper?
China, India and Brazil are
commonly listed as examples with
very impressive economic growth.
If we address these questions not
to countries but to regions, South
America is often mentioned as a
territory with relatively equal lev-els
of decent economic growth
while most attention is paid to
the “failed states” of East Asia and
Sub-Saharan Africa. However, in
this article, the focus will be on
the Latin America, the region that
has managed to make noteworthy
progress but still has a long way
to go.
The average growth rate of
the region during the last decade
was 4%, which gives a period of
18 years needed to more than
double the economy. New urban
areas were built with better living
conditions for families. Countries
like Brazil, Chile, Columbia and
Venezuela are currently classified
as upper-middle countries, while
all other countries with the excep-tion
of Haiti are middle-income.
Referring back to the develop-ment
goals, the first one is to end
extreme poverty. Latin America
seems to succeed in this too. The
World Bank in 2011 announced
that for the first time, more peo-ple
were classified as middle-in-come
in this region rather than
in poverty. This is a commendable
achievement.
However, there is anoth-er
important fact that is not so
broadly discussed. The Econom-ic
Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean (ECLAC) an-nounced
in 2011 that Latin Amer-ica
is the region with highest ine-quality
in the world. For instance,
Carlos Slim Helu, who according
to Forbes was the richest man in
the world for four years, lives in
Mexico; where 52.3% of the popu-lation
live below the poverty line.
UNICEF (2008) published GINI
coefficients of 0.48 for the region
in comparison with the world’s
average of 0.397. What is even
more striking that the GINI In-dex
in Haiti was 0.59, Colombia:
0.58 and Brazil: 0.55, while the
countries with the lowest inequal-ity
in the region were Venezuela:
0.43 and Uruguay: 0.46. All of the
figures are well above the world
average with the majority of their
local populations facing even
higher levels of inequality. There-fore,
the crucial question is how
inclusive is economic growth? Is
there equal development across
all levels: across the countries in
the region, both in rural and ur-ban
areas, and between genders?
First, let us address the un-even
development across coun-tries.
The region is considered
middle-income by the UN. How-ever,
it also groups countries by
poverty levels: very high, high,
middle and low extreme pover-ty.
Unfortunately, Latin America
is represented in every class. In
the ‘very high’ category there is
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicara-gua,
Paraguay and Bolivia, where
30% of the population is trapped
in extreme poverty. In the ‘high’
group, which includes Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Ecuador
and El Salvador, it is 14.5%. That
gives us precisely half of the coun-tries
with very high and high ex-treme
the millennium generation?
poverty in a middle-income
region.
A similar situation may be
observed on a domestic level. Lat-in
America is one of the most ur-banised
regions in the world, with
80% of population living in cities
(in comparison with Europe’s
average of 73%). Both rural and
urban areas experienced poverty
reduction and extreme poverty
numbers dropped. Yet, Brazil has
about 20 million poor people in
rural areas out of about 28 mil-lion
whilst three out of four rural
people in the Andes live under the
poverty line. On a domestic level
the poverty in the villages did de-crease,
but not as much as can be
thought at first sight.
Moreover, even in the cities
the inequality is striking. Over
111 million Latin Americans live
in shanty towns. In most coun-tries,
formal housing is unaf-fordable
for the majority of the
population with this figure at 70%
in Brazil and Mexico. Such vast
inequality also increases crime
rates and violence in urban areas
which imposes a huge extra cost
on to the government, such as
in Colombia, where crime costs
account for around 25% of the
country’s GDP. Therefore, despite
the level of urbanisation the pov-erty
is still there. It seems like it
has just moved from the villages
to the cities.
What about gender equality?
This aspect might seem odd to
even discuss in the region consid-ering
the three female presidents
of Brazil, Argentina and Costa
Rica. Moreover, between 1990 and
2008, the average female partici-pation
rate in Latin America grew
by more than 10% in non-agri-cultural
sector. However, if these
numbers are looked at more care-fully,
the women who join the
work force have lower education
levels and are paid less. Although
in labour-intensive work, wag-es
are equally low for men and
women, for women with higher
education, the wage gap remains
significant. Moreover, despite the
empowerment of women in Latin
America, 34.4% of women do not
have their own income compared
with 13.3% of men. It appears that
gender inequality still persists,
just more covertly.
It is important however to
state that these problems do not
undermine significant progress
made by collective efforts of
governments and international
organisations in the region. For
instance, countries like Mexico,
Brazil, Panama and Chile have im-plemented
so-called conditional
cash transfers. The idea is to give
financial aid to poor families on
the provision that the money will
be used as an investment in the
health and education of their chil-dren.
In the ECLAC report on the
Post-2015 Development Agenda,
the first goal was also to reduce
inequality gaps in the region.
The issue of exclusive economic
growth seems to be addressed on
all levels starting from regional
(equal economic growth across all
countries), domestic (equal living
standards in urban and rural are-as)
and up to the individual (eth-nic
and gender equality).
Hence, it is clear that it takes
time and effort to become a mid-dle-
income region, but this ‘title’
does not eliminate problems; it is
just an opportunity to overcome
new challenges.
Latin america: the miracle of
By Pol ina Skladneva
Credit: Flickr / worldbank + IICD

6. Alianza del Pacífico vs. Mercosur
which is the best model for development?
Latin America as a whole
has experienced impres-sive
development over
the last decade, with pov-erty
rates falling substantially and
growth accelerating. Two of the
continent’s largest trading blocs
pushing this development are
Alianza del Pacífico (Pacific Alli-ance)
and Mercosur.
The Pacific Alliance, current-ly
made up of Chile, Colombia,
Mexico and Peru, was formed as
late as 2011. It has stated its aim
as simply to promote trade and
economic integration among its
members. Mercosur on the other
hand, founded back in 1991, has
declared a much grander aim; it
intends for its members to form
a union that is not just economic
but also political, similar to the
European Union (EU).
The two alliances are radical-ly
different in their approach. The
economies of the Pacific Alliance
are far more outward-looking
and export-orientated. Merchan-dise
exports for all of the bloc’s
members apart from Colombia
are over 45% of GDP, a rate of
exportation that is significantly
higher than that in the countries
of Mercosur. The Pacific Alliance
has moved rapidly to remove
trade barriers between member
countries; over 90% of tariffs have
already been abolished. All of the
bloc’s members have signed trade
agreements with important trad-ing
partners such as the US and
the EU. In addition, three of the
four members of the Pacific Alli-ance
(Chile, Mexico and Peru)
are in talks with other countries
in the Americas and Asia to create
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a
proposed free trade zone which
would be the largest of its kind in
the world. Mercosur on the oth-er
hand has signed only two free
trade agreements in the last ten
years, one with Israel and the oth-er
with the Palestinian Authority.
Talks with the EU to attempt to
sign a free trade agreement have
dragged on for over a decade.
In recent years, far from reduc-ing
tariffs, Mercosur has instead
turned to protectionism. The
maximum common external tariff
to be imposed on goods imported
from outside the union was in-creased
to 35% in 2012.
A clear distinction between
the two blocs is that the Pacif-ic
Alliance economies are far
more liberal than their Mercosur
counterparts. Industry in these
countries is largely privatised and
governments play a much smaller
role in the economy preferring
to allow market forces to dictate
growth. The Mercosur economies
in contrast are heavily regulated
with a high level of economic in-terference
from the government,
something that has only tended to
increase in recent years. A prime
example of this is the Argentini-an
government’s expropriation of
YPF, the Spanish-owned oil com-pany.
In the last few years Vene-zuela
has also nationalised its oil
industry as well as other sectors
of the economy such as telecoms.
The two blocs have enjoyed
varying levels of success in reduc-ing
poverty over the past decade.
Data from Cepal (a branch of the
United Nations) shows that on
average the proportion of people
living below the poverty line in
the Mercosur countries fell from
35.9% to 20.6% between 2005 and
2012. The corresponding fall in
Pacific Alliance countries was from
36.2% to 32.4%. This far more
modest reduction in the poverty
rate is due to the fact that pov-erty
actually rose in Mexico over
the period, negating a large part
of the gains made in Peru, Chile
and Colombia. Mercosur’s recent
success at reducing poverty, as
well as the Pacific Alliance’s rel-ative
lack of it, can be explained
to a large extent by the commodi-ties
boom experienced in the first
decade of the twenty-first centu-ry.
Mercosur countries benefited
hugely from this boom due mainly
to their nature as large export-ers
of commodities; growth rates
remained consistently above 6%
per annum during this period.
High rates of growth filled their
governments’ coffers, providing
money to spend on redistributive
social policies and resulting in the
steep decline of poverty rates (the
Bolsa Familia program in Brazil is
a famous example). Mexico on the
other hand, with closer economic
ties to the United States and less
dependence on primary products,
was unable to benefit as much
from the boom. The country expe-rienced
slower growth as a result,
largely cancelling out the fall in
poverty experienced in the other
three Pacific Alliance countries.
By looking solely at past per-formance
it could be assumed that
Mercosur will continue to outper-form
the Pacific Alliance in years
to come. However, the commodi-ties
boom that caused impressive
By Ol iver Reynolds
rates of growth in Mercosur ap-pears
to have ended with no sign
of returning any time soon. More-over,
the Pacific Alliance countries
possess more business-friendly
environments and stronger links
with fast growing regions like
East Asia. A combination of these
factors has led to hugely differing
growth forecasts for the two blocs
over the coming years.
The predictions for Mercosur
are pessimistic; the IMF foresees
that growth in Argentina, Brazil
and Venezuela will be low or even
negative for the next two years.
Conversely, growth in the Pacific
Alliance countries has recently
stormed ahead with a growth rate
of more than 3.5% forecast for
2015. This pattern of lethargic
growth in Mercosur countries and
the contrasting dynamism of the
Pacific Alliance looks set to con-tinue
for the foreseeable future. If
Mercosur countries are unable to
grow then they will find it increas-ingly
difficult to finance the social
redistribution programs currently
in place. Unemployment is also
likely to rise, causing workers to
lose income. Thus although Mer-cosur
has achieved commendable
progress in reducing poverty and
promoting development in the
last decade, it seems likely that
there will now be a stagnation
in terms of its economic devel-opment.
Comparatively, the Pacific
Alliance countries seem to be
going from strength to strength.
With their export-orientated,
outward-looking economic mod-el
they are well placed to ben-efit
from continued growth in
fast-growing regions such as East
Asia. In addition, the possibility
of signing the Trans-Pacific Part-nership
could bring even more
growth to its member countries.
With higher growth should come
greater employment opportuni-ties
and more money to spend on
social redistribution policies. This
in turn is likely to cause a decline
in poverty and begin to promote
the broader economic develop-ment
of Latin America. Although
Mercosur has undoubtedly proved
more successful than its counter-part
in achieving economic devel-opment
thus far, the future looks
like it well and truly belongs to
the Pacific Alliance.
Credit: Flickr / CimmyT
Credit: Flickr / rockandrollfreak + DFID
2015 MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
ERADICATE extreme
1. poverty AND HUNGER
2.
achieve universal
primary education
Latin America | 10 11

7. building from the
ground up in asia
High rates of devel-opment
are strongly
correlated with high
rates of urbanisation.
In the regions with the most im-pressive
economic growth, such
as large parts of Asia, the num-ber
of people living in cities has
grown dramatically.
Consequently, there has
been an increase in the number
of cities along with a rise in the
respective populations and sizes
of these cities. On the one hand,
it is a positive sign that society is
making progress by developing
new industries (or creating them
from scratch), improving trade
and supporting small business-es.
On the other hand, cities can
cause environmental hazard and
degradation. Rising rates of urban
poverty have also been known to
increase the rate of violence and
crime in such cities. To solve this
problem supporters of sustaina-ble
development believe in the
importance of small town devel-opment.
Firstly, small town devel-opment
will supply people with
work at the places of their resi-dence
so it is likely to solve the
problem of overpopulated cities.
Secondly, population growth in
urban areas has been so fast and
rapid that infrastructure has not
managed to grow and adapt at the
same rate. Inadequate infrastruc-ture
is irrefutably linked with
higher pollution and lower stand-ards
of sanitation. Thirdly, it will
support community development.
In particular it might be benefi-cial
to increase the quality and
accessibility of education, thereby
helping to provide more equal
opportunities. Development will
lead to the increase of living
standards in an area and that in
return will attract better teachers.
The continent that is deal-ing
with this issue the most is
Asia. The specific problems that
towns face depend on the coun-try.
According to World Bank, for
instance, the most urgent issues
in Nepal’s small towns are sanita-tion
and access to a clean water
supply. According to Water Aid
estimations (2010) only 5% of
the population that live outside
cities had access to piped water
and sanitation coverage was only
36%. For China the issue is poor
infrastructure. The country is very
export-orientated so key factories
were built on the eastern coasts
and the majority of the workforce
simply relocated there. This led to
By Pol ina Skladneva
the almost complete isolation of
some small towns as it meant that
the development of a transpor-tation
system within the country
was not deemed a necessity. For
Russia the main problem is un-employment.
Unemployment has
affected a rise in the average age
of small town populations, with
young people being forced to mi-grate
to cities in search of employ-ment.
This trend of urbanisation
falls especially hard on families
leaving seniors with children
without support.
Fortunately, the problem has
already been addressed. The Asian
Development Bank is currently fi-nancing
a project aiming to sup-ply
clean water to distant areas
of Nepal. The project was rated
as effective with over 570,000
people gaining access to piped
water. One-third of all the bene-ficiaries
were women who would
previously spend two hours a day
transporting water during the dry
season. Nepalese communities
supported these changes and are
currently sustaining those water
pipes independently. In China the
World Bank launched a scheme
called The Integrated Economic
Development of Small Towns Pro-ject
at the end of 2012. It aims to
construct and rehabilitate road
networks, water supply and waste
management. The project is cur-rently
in progress and although
it is too early to approximate its
successes, the fact that the gov-ernment
have recognized and
addressed China’s infrastructure
problem gives hope that eventual-ly
it will be overcome. Moreover,
in 2011 the World Bank complet-ed
a successful project in the po-lar
regions of Russia. They helped
people to migrate from distant
villages to the local centres. Re-markably,
parents, husbands,
wives and children were helped
with the move as well.
Development is not only a
challenge in itself; new challeng-es
often arise as a consequence
of developmental efforts. Iden-tifying
and dealing with these
challenges is essential for max-imising
sustainable development.
Fortunately, governments and
international organisations are
appearing increasingly capable in
facing and overcoming them. The
main challenge appears to lie in
departing from orthodox patterns
and sourcing new solutions for
unfamiliar problems.
Credit: Flickr / monkeylikemind + nateluzod
ASIA
“Extreme poverty rates of people living on less than $1.25 per day
halved in Eastern Asia and South-Eastern Asia, but Southern Asia needs
more time. China leads the way in global poverty reduction, although it
is still home to about 13 per cent of the world’s extreme poor.”
Credit: Flickr / lain32
As ia | 13

8. Credit: Flickr / ramnaganat
the fruits of prosperity are spread unevenly
Since Deng Xiaoping lib-eralised
China’s economy
and opened it up to world
trade in 1976, the Chinese
Economic Miracle has made head-lines
around the world. Averaging
a remarkable 10% GDP growth and
6.6% income per capita growth for
over three decades, China’s swift
economic growth has undoubted-ly
been extraordinary. However,
these impressive figures mask a
worrying trend. Development,
not only on an individual but also
increasingly a regional basis, is
starkly unequal.
China’s eastern regions, par-ticularly
along the coast, are the
main beneficiaries of growth. On
the other hand, western China
remains largely poor and undevel-oped.
The Western Regions com-prise
71.4% of China’s land area
but contribute merely 18.6% of
its economic output. In compari-son,
just eight of China’s eastern
cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin,
Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou,
Hangzhou and Qingdao – make
up 20.2% of China’s GDP.
According to The Economist,
wealthy regions in China like
Jiangsu and Zhejiang have econ-omies
comparable to Switzerland
and Austria respectively; mean-while,
south-western Tibet has a
smaller economy than Malta, de-spite
being almost 8000 times its
size. From 1990 to 2000, the GDP
per capita of the Western Regions
declined from 73% of the national
average to 61%, with the province
of Hotan in far western Xinjiang
having a GDP per capita of just
$1134 – below that of Zimba-bwe,
which is widely considered
a failed state.
Clearly, the fruits of eco-nomic
development since 1976
have been distributed very un-evenly
in regional terms. The
reasons for this can be broadly
classified into geographical and
political categories.
From a geographical per-spective,
eastern regions in China
are much more fertile than their
western counterparts. Agriculture
has historically been concentrat-ed
in the temperate Zhejiang and
Jiangsu regions, through which
runs the fertile Yangtze River Del-ta.
As a result, these two regions
have tended to contribute a larger
portion to China’s economy. In
contrast, western China contains
vast stretches of desert wasteland,
like the infamous Taklamakan, as
well as the southwest which is
arid and mountainous: the Qing-hai-
Tibet Plateau lies 4000 metres
above sea level and receives less
than 200 millilitres of rainfall a
year, a fifth of the world average.
Such conditions necessarily ren-der
China’s west and southwest
less economically productive than
the flatter and more fertile east.
From a political perspec-tive,
eastern regions in China
have long been integrated within
the country, while the western
regions have historically been
regarded as peripheral. This is in
part because some of them were
only incorporated into China dur-ing
the Qing Dynasty. Moreover,
their Uighur and Tibetan pop-ulations
are ethnically distinct
from the Han Chinese majority
and resent Han rule, with the Ui-ghurs
in particular being prone to
rebellion. Economists generally
agree that “peace, order and good
government” is vital for economic
development through trade and
investment. Xinjiang has been
the site of multiple genocides
and ethnic cleansing attempts by
both Han and Uighur, and, more
recently, is plagued by sporadic
outbursts of violence. Some Ti-betan
inhabitants have taken to
self-immolation to register their
displeasure at being ruled from
Beijing. In these two regions sta-bility
and order are not easy to
come by. Businesses have a much
lower incentive and willingness to
make long-term investments here.
As a result, economic develop-ment
is slower.
The implications of une-ven
economic development are
deeply worrying. For the ethnic
minorities in the Western Re-gions,
poverty compounded with
feelings of economic marginalisa-tion
by the government fuel sep-aratist
tendencies that threaten
the territorial integrity of China.
This is especially true for the
mostly-Muslim Uighurs, who may
increasingly turn to Islamic fun-damentalism.
An Uighur separatist
group, the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement, is recorded to have
committed over 200 acts of terror-ism
between 1990 and 2001, and
is included in the United States’
Terrorist Exclusion List. Unless
ethnic minorities in the Western
Regions see a prosperous future
for their people inside China rath-er
than outside it, separatism and
terrorism will likely remain prob-lems
for a long time.
Furthermore, China’s east-ern
regions are already overpop-ulated
and polluted. Three of the
world’s ten largest cities, Guang-dong,
Beijing and Shanghai, are
located in eastern China, and all
three experienced a growth in
population of 20% over the past
15 years. Large and densely pop-ulated
areas tend to be prone to
pollution: a Greenpeace report
finds that in some parts of east
China inhabitants suffer from air
quality that is “very unhealthy or
hazardous” for as much as a third
of a year. Estimates by the Chinese
government project that over the
next 15 years a further 300 mil-lion
rural inhabitants would move
into cities. If economic growth
and the jobs it brings continue
to be concentrated in the eastern
cities it will likely significantly de-teriorate
the already-substandard
quality of life and safety of the
urban environment.
Recognising these problems,
the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) has begun to pay closer
attention to the development of
the western half of the country.
By Wang Yihua
The China Western Development
Programme was launched in 2000
to increase economic growth in
western China. Through a combi-nation
of preferential tax policies
for businesses, as well as direct
fiscal interventions, the western
regions saw investments in infra-structure
and public utilities to-talling
over £130 billion between
2000 and 2007. The programme
achieved some signs of success:
GDP per capita achieved an annu-al
13% growth rate and climbed
back to 71% of the national aver-age
this year. However, economic
development in China typically
brings environmental degradation
and rising tensions due to social
dislocation; this will be further
complicated by problems of eth-nic
unrest that aren’t as present
in eastern China. The road to eco-nomic
development in western
China will likely be a winding and
rocky one.
In the long run, the question
of whether the Western Regions
can experience sustained growth
depends on the CCP’s ability to
balance economic development
with not only environmental and
social concerns, but also sensitive
ethnic and religious tensions.
With the Western Development
Programme, the CCP has taken
the first steps onto the right path.
It remains to be seen, however, if
it has the will and ability to con-tinue
on this journey.
THE CHINESE
CONTRADICTION
It is widely accepted that
an important goal of any
state is to achieve economic
growth, with the underlying
assumption that economic growth
enables the state to fulfil one of
its core functions: to maintain
and improve the quality of life of
its citizens. However, the recent
experience of China represents an
interesting case study where eco-nomic
growth and welfare have,
in certain ways, stood in contra-diction
with one another.
In achieving high levels of
growth, China has focused on its
ever-expanding manufacturing
sector, which has led to various
environmental problems, most
notably the creation of hazardous
levels of air pollution. The pur-suit
of growth can in this sense be
considered detrimental to welfare
as it engenders adverse conse-quences,
such as negative health
and social effects, which stand in
direct violation of the wellbeing
of Chinese citizens. This uncovers
an important trade-off between
economic growth and welfare
which is increasingly relevant
given the rise to prominence of
climate change and other environ-mental
and sustainability issues.
From 1990 to 2012, Chinese
GDP grew by over 7%, with its
manufacturing sector accounting
for 59% of this increase. General-ly
speaking, as standards of living
are positively correlated to eco-nomic
growth, this would suggest
an improvement in wellbeing.
Yet, as the Brundtland Commis-sion
defined sustainable growth
as “development that meets the
needs of the present without com-promising
the ability of future
generations to meet their own
needs”, the Chinese pattern may
not fit this trend, as coal accounts
for about 70% of energy consump-tion
– which as a non-renewable
source, is unsustainable.
Furthermore, this exploita-tion
of coal has created hazardous
levels of air pollution, so that
71 out of 74 cities monitored in
China over 2013 did not meet the
state environmental standards.
This meant that a rare alert of “Or-ange”
– the second highest in the
four levels of urgency – was used
in February 2014, triggering pan-ic
buying of air purifiers and face
masks, with many retailers in Bei-jing
reporting that they had sold
out stock during the city’s most
recent bout of smog. In February,
the PM 2.5 pollutant (those small
enough to penetrate deep into
the lungs and enter the blood-stream)
reached 505 micrograms
By Luksha Wickr amar achchi
per cubic meter, which is 20 times
higher than the level recommend-ed
by the World Health Organ-isation.
Thus, Beijing performs
second worst in terms of living
environment among 40 major cit-ies
around the world, and is also,
according to the Annual Report
on World Cities, technically “un-inhabitable
for human beings”.
Hence, it is not surprising
that a survey using the Personal
Well-Being Index (PWI) and the
Job Satisfaction Survey ( JSS) –
which had shown to have good
psychometric properties in pre-vious
psychological research
– found that cities with higher
levels of atmospheric pollution
tends to report lower levels of
personal wellbeing. This result
suggests that the personal wellbe-ing
of China’s urban population
can be enhanced if China were to
pursue a more balanced growth
path which curtailed atmospher-ic
pollution. Therefore, although
there is already a 35 Article Law of
the People’s Republic of China on
the Prevention and Control of At-mospheric
Pollution in place, this
may not be enough to battle the
Chinese pollution. Hence, there
needs to be recognition that the
pursuit of rapid economic growth
may not be the best way forward.
However, Chinese represent-atives
have highlighted on numer-ous
occasions that the criticism
raised by Western countries with
regards to pollution in China is
hypocritical because they have all
gone through their own similar
industrial revolutions in the pre-vious
century. As these countries
also created similar externalities
before reaching their economic
dominance as developed nations,
it seems unfair that China is una-ble
to do the same. Furthermore,
some argue that the unprecedent-ed
economic growth of China
will ultimately make the country
richer, so that they can tackle the
side effects of this growth at a
later stage. However, the growth
of the Chinese middle class can
still be considered a hindrance to
environmental-friendliness, as in-creases
in disposable income has
led to monumental rises in energy
consumption as well as purchas-es
of automobiles, which further
affect the pollution levels. Hence,
it is clear that China sacrificed the
environment in order to achieve
breakneck economic growth, in
such a way that the costs of this
development may outweigh the
benefits.
14 |As ia 15 Credit: Flickr / dshack

9. An unclean bill of health in india
A year ago, my knowledge
of India was cursory: it
was the up and coming
developing nation, the
country where I trace my roots.
Through the Internation-al
Citizen Service (ICS), a UK
youth initiative funded by DfiD, I
worked with Raleigh Internation-al
(one of five respected partner
charities focused on youth-led
sustainable development) for two
and half months of grassroots de-velopment
in a small tribal village
named Soolebavi in Karnataka,
South India. Now, I understand
that India is the land of contra-dictions,
where tourist laden rick-shaws
groan past cattle herders as
rockets fire into space, where the
blight of ancestral caste, patriar-chal
gender violence and vast ur-ban
and rural inequality still mire
the advances in disease preven-tion,
access to primary education
and burgeoning high tech and cul-tural
centres of the second largest
democracy in the world.
Post development theory
argues that development and aid
are problems, not solutions. It
posits that our ideas are Eurocen-tric
and imposed and that they
supposedly increase underde-velopment
by hindering natural
growth. In a post-colonial era it
is important to remember that
the rise of the Western youth’s
interest in volunteering coincided
perfectly with the change enacted
by global neoliberal reform from
the 80’s onwards. With large scale
macroeconomic adjustment, heav-ily
indebted countries became
increasingly reliant on the global
north through private, free mar-ket
loans of loaded petrodollars.
As the IMF and World Bank bailed
out countries with concessional
loans, with strings attached, it
resulted in devalued currencies
and further reduced governmen-tal
intervention and spending in
the education, healthcare and in-frastructure
sectors. Living stand-ards
deteriorated dramatically
throughout the developing world,
with its citizens bearing the brunt
of the impact. Local NGOs and
non-profits leapt at the promise
of donated labour and resources,
foreign volunteers were eager to
‘help’ and start up ‘alternative’
tourist companies were equally
eager to capitalise by bridging
both – resulting in the explosion
of the volun-tourism industry and
development capitalism.
It is easy then to disregard
my experience as just that, a
self-aggrandising holiday of ad-venture
and I certainly adhere
to the stereotype. I would argue,
however, ICS is different, an intel-lectually
stimulating pilot of gov-ernment
funded, youth focused,
sustainable development, with
enough oversight, infrastructure,
resources and independent eval-uation
to ensure it does not fall
into the trap of being there for the
sake of being there. Through my
experience with Raleigh, with its
laser focus on the MDGs, commit-ment
to bespoke projects based
on ground feedback and use of
a diverse mix of six international
and six national country volun-teers,
I aim to provide a unique
perspective on the latest results
of India’s struggle to enact uni-versal
reforms.
Putting aside the obvious
health implications, diseases are
a major barrier to social and eco-nomic
development. According
to the annual evaluation report
from the Ministry of Statistics, In-dia,
the country is moderately on
track in relation to the MDGs as
trend reversal has been achieved
for annual parasite incidence of
malaria, prevalence of TB and HIV
prevalence despite it increasing in
certain states. My experience was
initially not so optimistic. After
the results of a Participatory Rural
Appraisals where we interviewed
individual households we found
little to no knowledge of symp-toms
and disease prevention and
we set about creating practical,
interactive information sessions,
utilising drama, infographics,
symbols and Q&As using the ba-sic
information packs supplied
by Raleigh. These took place at
twilight on straw mats under the
splayed light of a lone light bulb
and torches outside the village
leader’s house while refreshments
– consisting of fruit/rations and
our poor imitation of Indian black
coffee (less sugar!) – were served.
Additionally we introduced
the concept of tippy taps – a sim-ple,
hands free method of wash-ing
one’s hands with soap using
a jerry can/bottle, rope, soap and
rock. I remember vividly the next
day when we woke up to find a
two children had built their own
version. After a brief political
struggle we also demonstrated
to the youth committee how to
fix their unfinished toilets and
held dedicated sessions explain-ing
their health and sanitation
benefits. The in-village sessions
climaxed in two large scale free
health camps, dental and medical,
held outside the village, both of
which I co-organised to revolve
around prevention techniques.
Villagers visited interactive health
stations, designed by volunteers
and subsequently run by the vil-lage
youth committee which we
facilitated, before visiting the
dentists or nurses for a check-up
and/or basic treatment.
Our short term objective
were for attendees to fix loom-ing
issues through treatment and
begin to implement prevention
knowledge. In the long term,
we hoped the community would
develop good practice in their
daily routine and, like bacteria,
pass knowledge both vertical-ly
and horizontally, to children
and peers respectively. Overall,
the effectiveness and impact of
our efforts is mainly anecdotal
with issues legion. The results of
pre and post surveys after health
events show an increase in specif-ic
knowledge about most diseases
and ideas of good and bad food
where cemented. We assumed
the use of practical sessions to
By Hasan Suida
be more effective and the utili-sation
of respected members of
the community and mobilising
the youth to deliver health mes-sages
increased the likelihood of
the future propagation of health
prevention advice. For me, I dis-tinctly
remember a moment while
on a homestay with my favourite
villager, Rangama, and elderly
yet fierce and passionate individ-ual.
After our meal by fire I can
picture her washing it down with
boiled water (repressing a slight
cringe at the taste), taking the
lid off a vat of water, pouring it
into another in order to wash her
hands, replacing the lid, removing
the excess water and proceeding
to brush her teeth away from sight
with a toothbrush provided at the
Dental camp. That night I slept
well under the stars.
Our impact on Soolebavi and
their impact on us as individuals
is impossible to truly measure.
For me, our greatest benefit was
providing the impetus to increase
community integration and foster-ing
a thirst for knowledge beyond
what they already knew. These
concepts aren’t on the post 2015
agenda or the new Rio 20 SDGs,
they aren’t even measurable, but
for me knowledge is power and
social cohesiveness enables you
to act on the information which
you find useful.
Despite its pitfalls, India has
a bright future, its problems are
not unsolvable. In a similar way,
international development can be
done wrong, especially when uti-lising
youth who have no specific
areas of expertise, but for me, in
this case, despite issues – it was
beneficial in different ways than
expected. If we had any sustain-able
impact on my brothers and
sisters cultivating paddy in the
summer sun, it was the cyclical
and powerful widening of per-spectives
that inspires myself and
hopefully them to be more than
they are. Perhaps that is a Euro-centric
view, but I like it.
Credit: Flickr / wethesolution + gofootloose + indianwaterportal
16 As ia | 17

10. MILLENnIUM GOALS
tion, and hardly any progress has
been made to reduce this trend,
except in Southern Asia. India has
seen a reduction from 600 women
dying for every 100,000 births in
1990, to 200 by 2012.
MDG #6 – combating HIV/
Aids, malaria, and other diseas-es
– has been achieved. New HIV
infections declined by 44% from
2001-2012, and 230,000 fewer
children under 15 were infected
with HIV in 2011 than in 2001.
The success of the glob-al
battle against
HIV/Aids is
due to the
d r a -
mat-i
c
i n -
crease
in access
to antiretro-viral
therapy for
HIV-infected people,
which has saved 6.6 million
lives since 1995. As a result of this
treatment, an increasing number
of people are able to live with
HIV. For instance in South Afri-ca
in 1990, only 0.5% of people
aged 15-49 were living with HIV
and Aids. By 2003, that figure hit
17%, and has remained around
this level. Moreover, there has
been a 42% decline in the malaria
mortality rate, due to a substan-tial
expansion of malaria inter-ventions
and funding. However,
there is still progress to be made
as 50 young women are newly in-fected
with HIV every hour, and in
2012, malaria killed an estimated
627,000 people. This can be com-bated
through increased access
to treatment, and in increased
education on preventing trans-mission.
The world has met its targets
of halving the population without
access to safe drinking water and
improving the lives of at least 100
million slum dwellers. However,
there remain other sanitation
and environmental targets to
achieve, leaving MDG #7 un-completed.
For instance, 2.5
billion people do not have ac-cess
to sanitation such as toilets
or latrines, and 1 billion people
still resort to open defecation
despite increasing access to im-proved
sanitation. Moreover,
global emissions of carbon diox-ide
have increased by over 46%
since 1990, and nearly one third
of marine fish stocks have been
overexploited. Thus there remain
steps to be taken in order to fulfil
MDG #7, though the achievement
of the water target is a large step
towards ensuring environmental
sustainability. In Afghanistan, for
example, only about 5% of peo-ple
had access to improved water
sources in 1990; by 2011 this fig-ure
reached over 60%.
The eighth MDG is to cre-ate
a global partnership for
development; this goal is aimed
at developed and developing
countries. The achievement
of this goal is fundamental as
a platform for the other goals,
and it highlights that developed
countries are not doing what they
could, and promised, to do at
the Millennium Declaration. For
instance, although official devel-opment
assistance hit a record
high of $134.8 billion in 2013, aid
has shifted away from the poor-est
countries, where attainment
of the MDGs is the lowest. This
indicates that motives for aid are
often not based on the greatest
need but on political, economic
or strategic concerns. Since 1970
the international target for official
development assistance is 0.7% of
the donor country’s gross nation-al
income. Although this was orig-inally
conceived of as a minimum
commitment only six countries
have ever met the target. Britain
first met the target in 2013, and
the only other countries that have
met it, in order of highest ODA/
GNI, are Norway, Sweden, Luxem-bourg,
and Denmark, with Britain
giving the lowest percentage out
of the five countries.
As the end date for the MDGs
approaches, the UN is giving
people a voice on the post-2015
agenda through a platform called
“World we want 2015”, which en-courages
global engagement with
the future of international devel-opment.
So far over five million
people have voted on what issues
matter most to them on: http://
vote.myworld2015.org/. The new
set of goals that is currently be-ing
developed and decided on
will be called the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), and
17 goals have been announced,
though not finalised. They will in-clude
the MDGs’ themes of ending
poverty and hunger and improv-ing
health, education and gender
equality, as well as specific goals
to reduce inequality, make cities
safe, address climate change and
promote peaceful societies. Cru-cially,
the next set of goals will be
universal, meaning all countries
will be required to consider them
when crafting their national pol-icies.
Officially, the eight MDGs
were applicable to all but they
have been marketed as anti-pov-erty
goals for poor countries that
are funded by more developed
nations. The whole world will
be involved in the attainment of
the SDGs, making it all the more
necessary for everyone to engage
in the global conversation on the
post-2015 development agenda.
At we entered into the
new millennium, every
member state of the
United Nations com-mitted
to the set of eight goals by
signing the Millennium Declara-tion.
These Millennium Develop-ment
Goals (MDG) had an ambi-tious,
yet achievable, deadline for
the end of 2015. Having passed
the 500 days-to-go mark, it is time
to start critically evaluating what
has been achieved and where, and
what the future of the global de-velopment
agenda will be.
Ban Ki Moon described the
MDGs as “The most successful
global anti-poverty push in histo-ry”.
The MDGs have indeed suc-ceeded
in unifying states in the
quest for their achievement, and
creating a culture of purpose in
the fight against extreme poverty
and other developmental goals.
Through the 21 targets and 60
indicators within the eight goals,
the MDGs have focused policy
on broader measures of develop-ment,
yet also made abstract ide-as
quantifiable. There have been
numerous positive achievements,
with four MDGs already achieved.
However, the glass is also half
empty considering four have re-mained
unachieved, and success
varies dramatically across the de-veloping
world.
The first MDG was to halve
extreme poverty and hunger;
this goal was met 5 years before
the 2015 target. In 1990 an esti-mated
47% of people in develop-ing
countries were living on less
than $1.25 a day, and by 2010 this
fell to 22%. Although the target
has been met, it is still unaccept-able
that 1.2 billion people live
in extreme poverty, and more
than 99 million children under
five are still undernourished and
underweight. The rate of progress
is also slowing; for example, in
Bangladesh from 1994 to 2002 the
proportion of undernourished
people fell from 38% to 16.4%,
whereas from 2002 to 2011 it has
only fallen to 16.8%. Moreover,
the early success of this MDG is
partly due to China’s dramatic
progress, rather than a collective
reduction in absolute poverty
across the developing world.
The second goal, achieving
universal primary education, has
not yet been reached, although
enrolment has reached 90% in de-veloping
regions. High dropout
rates remain a major impedi-ment
to MDG #2, as one in four
children in developing regions
who enter primary school are
likely to drop out. Moreover,
half of the 58-million primary
school-aged children that do not
attend school live in conflict-af-fected
areas. Although Asian
countries have been especially
successful at increasing school
attendance (the enrolment rate
in Laos increased from 59.4% in
1992 to 97.4% in 2011), the goal
is unlikely to be met.
The world has achieved
gender equality in primary ed-ucation;
meaning MDG #3 has
officially met its target. Howev-er,
this equality does not continue
through all levels of education.
Most regions have gender-par-ity
index scores of 0.97 to 1.03.
For example, in Southern Asia in
1990, only 74 girls were enrolled
in primary school for every 100
boys, and by 2012, the enrolment
ratios were the same. However,
women still face discrimination in
access to higher education levels,
secure employment, and partic-ipation
in decision-making. The
average share of female members
in parliaments worldwide was just
over 20 per cent in 2013. Global-ly,
women hold on average 40 out
of 100 wage-earning jobs in the
non-agricultural sector; and the
jobs they do hold are less secure
and with fewer social benefits.
The child mortality rate
has almost halved since 1990;
however, we still have not
reached the MDG #4’s target to
reduce child mortality by two
thirds. 17,000 fewer children are
dying each day since 1990, and
measles vaccinations have helped
to prevent nearly 14 million
deaths from 2000 to 2012. In Ni-ger,
for example, nearly a third of
children under five died in 1990,
this ratio had fallen to one in
eight in 2011. However, prevent-able
diseases are the main cause
of under-five deaths, and further
action needs to be taken to tackle
this unnecessary loss of life. De-spite
progress towards the goal,
four out of every five deaths of
children under the age
of five continue
to occur in
sub-Saha-ran
Af-rica
and
South-ern
Asia.
P r o -
gress towards
MDG #5, to improve
maternal health, is falling far
short of its targets. The maternal
mortality ratio has fallen by 45%
from 1990 to 2013, but this is not
close to the target reduction of
75%. Currently only half of wom-en
in developing regions receive
the recommended minimum of
four antenatal care visits. A ma-jor
failure in the commitments to
this goal is the lack of funding for
family planning and reproductive
health care. Moreover, high ado-lescent
birth rates are perpetuat-ed
by poverty and lack of educa-
By Chri stina Stuart
LEss than 500 days to go
Credit: Flickr / usaid_images + minoritenplatz8 + unamid_photo + Un_PHOTO + cgiarclimate + DFID + flixel
18 |Centrespread 19

11. The BRICS – Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa –
have as much to gain politically as
they do economically from the es-tablishment
of their own financial
institution. Whatever the agenda,
it signals a step in the right direc-tion
for the cause of development.
Plans for a New Develop-ment
Bank (NDB) to be created
by the emerging powers were ad-vanced
at the sixth annual BRICS
summit held in the Brazilian city
of Fortaleza on 14-16th July 2014;
not a moment too soon. The
move to establish the financial
might and independence of the
emerging powers’ economies will
endeavour to provide a healthy
challenge to the conventional Eu-ro-
American financial institutions
that already monopolise the glob-al
economy.
The move is ambitious for
a coalition of relatively dispa-rate
countries and it is certainly
likely that the scope of progress
it can achieve in the field of
development may be limited.
Nonetheless, it is about time that
emerging smaller economies are
empowered to leave their own
mark on the global economy and,
ultimately, any united develop-ment
effort should be celebrated.
The initial start-up capital
of $50 billion, an amount that is
hoped will eventually reach $100
billion, will be split between the
five participating countries. Fol-lowing
a decision at the recent
summit, the NBD will be based
in China with its headquarters
located in Shanghai. It was also
announced that the institution
will have an Indian president, a
Russian Board of Governors Chair
and a Brazilian Board of Directors
Chair for the first six years. Hav-ing
such senior positions filled by
a broad array of executives with
such diverse national interests
and styles is sure to confront the
bank with its fair share of diffi-culties.
The important aspect to
focus on, however, is the crucial
attempt that the NDB represents
in providing an alternative future
for the global financial order.
The creation of a NDB is in-tensely
symbolic for the role of
emerging powers on the global
financial arena. The Internation-al
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank have dominated the
financial stage for the past sev-en
decades since their formation
by the allied nations after World
War Two. They were created to
cater to the exponential increase
in globalised trading relation-ships
and to construct a stable
and open global economy in the
aftermath of another internation-al
war. While these institutions
were not founded only by Western
countries, Europe and the United
States have nonetheless held a
sustained and significant influ-ence
over negotiations and deci-sion-
making ever since. The IMF
is traditionally led by a European
whilst the World Bank is led by an
American executive. Of course, it
is undeniable that these two lead-ing
institutions are an impres-sively
influential and expansive
embodiment of the globalisation
process. The fact remains, how-ever,
that as long as a few ‘great’
powers hold the reigns over the
most powerful institutions, eco-nomic
inequalities will.
A new and fresh financial
institution is long overdue – not
least because the devastating
impact of the 2008 financial cri-sis
has crucially undermined the
post-war international financial
order. The 2008 crisis was aggra-vated
by the fact that internation-al
financial institutions (IFIs) had
ensured that developing countries
were almost entirely invested in
the economies of developed coun-tries,
creating a situation where
the world had all its eggs in one
very vulnerable financial basket.
If nothing else, the NDB will mean
a healthier distribution of power
over our globalised economy.
The success of an institu-tion
is often partly determined
by the degree to which its mem-bers
are cohesive and united in
reaching decisions. But this begs
the question – what is it exactly
that unites the BRICS countries?
Quite simply, the countries have
been brought together to form
the bank by a shared feeling of ex-clusion
from the existing financial
system. Labelled the ‘BRIC’ coun-tries
by economist Jim O’Neill
in 2005, before the inclusion of
South Africa in 2010, the acronym
was first coined merely to dis-cuss
emerging economic powers.
What has led these countries to
embrace this label and actively
pursue a collaborative agenda,
however, is that they continue to
be overlooked when it comes to
decision-making within the IMF
and World Bank, despite display-ing
impressive growth rates.
Nonetheless, the cross-conti-nent
coalition remains an unlikely
grouping and it is impossible to
say whether a shared desire to
be recognised on the global fi-nancial
stage will be enough to
coordinate the five members. The
BRICS countries differ widely,
not least because their respective
economies range hugely in size.
And it’s not just geographical and
economic differences that could
cause potential problems, but
political discrepancies too; some
members are democracies while
others are authoritarian regimes.
The Bretton Woods institutions
experience enough difficulties
in reaching executive decisions
whilst being constituted by
like-minded liberal democracies.
The high rate of corruption
in each of the five member coun-tries
also signals a red flag, exac-erbated
by the prospect of com-peting
political agendas. And the
sustained track record of human
rights abuses held by each coun-try
indicates yet another potential
threat to the success of the NDB
– most notably in Russia, India
and China. The leaders of coun-tries
with a history of top-level
discriminatory violence against
minorities like homosexuals and
women should not be lauded,
but that should not stop us from
recognising their progress. The
participating countries may be far
from perfect in terms of corrup-tion
and human rights abuses, but
the NDB vision should be taken
plainly for what it is – a positive
effort towards tackling issues of
development and inequalities.
Nonetheless, there are three fun-damental
things needed to bal-ance
this vision against any inter-nal
threats: sufficient regulation,
leadership and accountability.
Nobel Prize winning econo-mist
Joseph Stiglitz is exception-ally
positive about the future of
the BRICS development bank,
claiming that the existing insti-tutions
have not evolved suffi-ciently
enough and insisting that
the member countries are un-derestimated
in their capabilities
in overcoming their differences.
Stiglitz argues “in spite of all of
the differences, the emerging
markets can work together, in a
way more effectively than some of
the advanced countries can”. The
BRICS countries really do have a
strong role to play in rebalancing
the global economy and the fact
remains that there are simply not
enough resources being provided
by the IMF and the World Bank
that allow them to do so.
Whether we truly believe in
the potential of a New Develop-ment
Bank or just support the
principle of breaking away from
the IFIs that monopolise the
global economy, it is important
that we remain positive about the
creation of a BRICS development
bank. Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa may have a lot
of difficulties ahead of them, but
the encouragement and empow-erment
of emerging economies to
set up development institutions is
no doubt positive. In working to-gether
with a common cause, the
BRICS countries have everything
to prove as a new force: that their
whole may be greater than the
sum of their diverse parts.
A TIME FOR CHANGE...
By Dai sy Sibun
...A NEW BRICS
DEVELOPMENT BANK
Credit: Flickr / worldbank
20 |Centrespread 21

12. on rough seas
why somalian fisherman
It may be on the doorstep of
one of the world’s most vital
trade routes and been home
to some of the most exotic
and affluent Kingdoms and Em-pires
of the past, but the modern
nation of Somalia has been faced
with political turmoil, anarchy
and famine.
Caught up in the Scramble
for Africa, the World Wars and the
Cold War, Somalia’s history has
made a defining impression on
the relentless civil war that has
suffocated the country for the last
23 years. Britain and Italy granted
independence to their protector-ates
and territories on the Afri-can
Horn and these formed the
Republic of Somalia in the early
1960s. In 1969, following the as-sassination
of the President, Siad
Barre staged a coup that led to
a socialist state. The underlying
problem, however, is that in many
ways Somalian cultural norms
fundamentally clashes with the
very concept of the state. Barre
suffered an inevitable backlash
and was overthrown by opposing
clans. Disagreements about who
had the right to govern led to a
power vacuum and, consequently,
a bloody civil war.
The UN Monitoring Report
and analysts such as Martin N
Murphy have highlighted how un-regulated
fishing by foreign ves-sels
after the fall of Barre resulted
in the rise in piracy; a develop-ment
that cost the world economy
around $7bn in 2011. Figures put
resulting losses at around $300
million a year with significant
depletion of the ocean’s tuna
and shrimp. With no effective
government to police its waters
many turned to ‘defensive piracy’,
an act in which local fisherman
defended their grounds against
these illegal trawlers. It wasn’t un-til
2005 that a sharp rise in ‘pred-atory
turn to piracy
piracy’ was noted, in which
commercial vessels were directly
and actively targeted. According
to the Wall Street Journal, pirates
earned around $150 million in
2008. Moreover, pirates seized a
Ukrainian freighter stocked with
weapons that same year, demand-ing
a ransom of $25 million.
Yet, in recent years, the inci-dences
of piracy in Somalia have
dropped drastically. In 2013 the
US Office of Naval Intelligence
highlighted that only nine vessels
were attacked with no successful
hijackings. One reason for this
could be the increased military
presence and rising numbers of
security teams that have protect-ed
maritime traders from these at-tacks.
Roughly $6bn has been paid
in for security equipment, coun-ter-
piracy and military operations.
The measures have proven to be
effective, as figures show that in
2010 $176m was paid in ransoms
while in 2012 this had dropped
to $31.8m. With armed guards,
sound guns, lasers, water canons,
electric fences and boat traps, this
arsenal has been designed to pro-tect
these vessels.
However, it does not provide
a solution to the problem. Pira-cy
is the result of a poverty that
stems from an ineffective govern-ment
unable to govern its terri-tory.
The European Union and
development banks have pledged
around $8 billion to help devel-op
the Horn of Africa recently,
yet the challenges facing Somalia
appear to overwhelm this pledge.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-
Moon reports that currently fam-ine
in Somalia will affect around
3 million people. It is clear that
more must be done to help de-velop
Somalia if it is to truly be-come
a functioning and thriving
nation.
By Rayha an Iqbal
Credit: Flickr / defenceimages
AFRICA
“Between 2000 and 2012, the lives of an estimated three million chil-dren
under age five were saved from malaria due to coordinated inter-ventions
in sub-Saharan Africa. The estimated number of new tubercu-losis
cases fell from 321 per 100,000 people in 2002 to 255 in 2012. The
incidence of new HIV cases in the region fell by more than half between
2001 and 2012.”
Credit: Flickr / gbaku
Africa | 23

13. 24 |Africa 25
why is africa poor?
In 1500, global income in-equalities
already existed
between Africa and the rest
of the world. The average in-come
per capita in Africa was half
of the world average. Although
the continent has experienced
steady growth in the past 5 centu-ries,
which has led to a three-fold
increase in income per capita, this
has been significantly slower than
in other parts of the world. The
average income per capita in Af-rica
is now seven times less than
the world average. Africa’s under-development
is represented in al-most
all indices of development,
such as child mortality, literacy
and life expectancy rates. How
can we make sense of this histori-cally
robust and persistent trend?
Explaining why some re-gions
are richer than others is a
complicated task – the present
socio-economic situation of a re-gion
is the result of an inherently
complex and dynamic interplay of
economic, political, sociological,
cultural, institutional and geo-graphical
forces. In this article,
I introduce three broad “funda-mental
causes” of development:
culture, institutions and geogra-phy.
I take an approach that merg-es
global economic history and
development economics in order
to consider internal and external
reasons for relative underdevel-opment
in Africa. For each funda-mental
cause, I begin by introduc-ing
some factors that can explain
why Africa was the poorest conti-nent
in 1500, then consider the
periods of colonialism and the
slave trade and finish by looking
at their effects on African develop-ment
in the modern era and other
relevant factors that explain the
region’s current situation.
From the 1500s onwards,
economically successful coun-tries
started engaging in global
trade and were starting to devel-op
systems of private property
ownership and rights, which set
the foundations for what would
later become market economies.
This was not the case in African
countries. In addition, low lev-els
of transport infrastructures
meant that few markets could
emerge and develop. Economic
interactions were very limited and
restricted to narrow areas such as
small villages. As a result, people
were self-sufficient: they grew and
collected the amount of food nec-essary
to survive, and nothing or
little more.
Some influential develop-ment
economists like Robinson,
Acemoglu and Dell point to po-litical
and economic institutions
that were implemented in the co-lonial
period in their explanations
for why Africa is currently poorer
than the rest of the world. Some
traits that characterise these in-stitutions
are poorly defined and
poorly protected property rights,
political monopoly and centrali-sation
of power and inadequate
contract enforceability; all of
which contribute to the hamper-ing
down of economic growth and
development. Their perception
is that colonisers used extractive
colonisation strategies on the Afri-can
continent that translated into
these kinds of “extractive institu-tions”;
many elements of which
have remained until today.
Weak and extractive property
rights and contracting institutions
have persisted in many parts of
Africa and financial institutions
are usually basic and inaccessible
to large proportions of the pop-ulation.
Markets remain relatively
underdeveloped and unregulated.
The informal sector, which is al-most
completely unharnessed,
contributes to about 55% of
Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP and
compromises 80% of its labour
force. Lastly, weak public institu-tions
and low levels of public in-vestments
have led to inadequate
and insufficient infrastructure,
low capital accumulation, low ed-ucational
attainment and human
capital. For example, merely 29%
of roads in Africa are paved and
only a quarter of the population
has access to electricity, with
enrolment in secondary school
standing at a mere 34%. All these
contribute to lower productivity
and slower growth.
Bairoch argues that we
should also consider the period
of the slave trade, which extend-ed
from 1400 to 1900, as slavery
“may be seen as one source of
pre-colonial origins for modern
corruption”. Nunn upholds this
argument and finds a robust neg-ative
relationship between the
number of slaves exported from
each African country and subse-quent
economic performance.
Perhaps the most significant
negative impact of colonialism
and the slave trade on the Afri-can
continent is that some of the
structures they have bred have
paved way for recurrent state fail-ure.
In the aftermath of the colo-nial
era, the “development state”
in many African countries took an
By Iri s Kar aman
unfortunate form, which Cooper
calls the “gatekeeper states”. It
refers to regimes that prioritised
tightening political control and
developing personal networks
rather than building well-func-tioning
public institutions, and
acquired most of their revenue
from concessions to foreign com-panies,
visas, foreign exchange
control, foreign aid and custom
duties. This trend was reflected in
the emergence and proliferation
of authoritarian regimes operat-ing
under “patrimonial rule” in
the end of 1960s.
The legacy of extraction and
corruption that arose from the pe-riods
of Colonialism and the slave
trades is visible in much of African
political and corporate leader-ship.
According to the Corrup-tion
Perception Index released by
Transparency International, many
of the world’s most corrupt coun-tries
are located in Africa, with
Somalia and Sudan being prime
examples. According to a study by
Bratton, the image held by most
Africans of their politicians is that
of a corrupt leader pursuing his
own interest at the expense of his
citizens’ and country’s interests.
In addition, many scholars
have argued that “colonial-esque”
benefiters have re-emerged within
the frameworks of global insti-tutions
and global orders which
affect development in Africa. The
global economy and global finan-cial
regulation agencies are key
areas where this kind of institu-tional
inequality is rooted. Take,
for example, the world trading
order, managed by the World
Trade Organisation ( WTO). WTO
agreements has been detrimen-tal
to development in sub-Saha-ran
countries, with the Uruguay
round making the region worse
off by $1.2 billion. In addition,
the TRIPS agreement, which sets
a minimum standard for many
forms of intellectual property
regulation, has reduced access to
essential medicines in the region,
exemplifying the way in which Af-rica
has been one of the “losers of
globalisation”, an important issue
to remember given the significant
current and future effects globali-sation
has had and will have on
development of all regions of the
world.
Another factor that explains
why Africa was poor in 1500 was
the lack of a strong and pragmatic
notion of private property in Af-rican
culture. For instance, if you
worked on a piece of land, it was
accepted to be yours. This meant
that there were no or little land-less
labourers and no private mar-ket
for land. In addition, African
culture tended not to be based on
commercial values of self-interest,
and thus agents were generally
not motivated by the pursuit of
self interest in their behaviour
and choices, which are the moti-vational
forces that guide individ-ual
agent behaviour in a market
economy.
Some of these characteristics
have retained some relevance and
can be used to partly explain the
persisting and increasing gap in
income between Africa and the
rest of the world. Furthermore, vi-olent
conflict is rife on the African
continent. Half of the continent’s
countries are home to an active
conflict or a recently ended one.
The culture of warfare that has
persevered in various areas across
the continent is a result of ethnic,
political and cultural divides in
the various groups that make up
each country. This has been and
continues to be one of the biggest
barriers to development in Africa.
Moreover, the ethnic and cultur-al
divides themselves impede
growth as ethnic fractionalisation
undermines trust, state stability
and the strength of the state.
In another one of his pa-pers,
Nunn links this back to the
slave trades. He argues that the
slave trades have been a factor of
current ethnic fractionalisation
because they have strengthened
and given substance to a popular
mindset based on a sense of inse-curity
through what Lovejoy calls
the “iron-slave cycle”.
The legacy of colonialism has
also had a destructive impact on
cultural factors of development.
Ms Zubair, senior advisor to the
Nigerian president, rightly em-phasised
that colonialism “was
all about take, not about build”
and that this attitude “transferred
itself into a lot of [the African]
mindset”.
The biggest impact of the
slave trade and colonialism was
through population density and
demographics. Indeed, it is es-timated
that if it weren’t for the
slave trade, the African population
in 1850 would have been double
what it was. An interesting trend,
which may seem counter-intuitive
at first, is that many of the world’s
richest regions in terms of natural
resources make up the world’s
poorest regions in economic
terms. Acemoglu pushed forth a
controversial argument to explain
this trend: high levels of natural
resources incentivised colonis-ers
to use extractive colonising
strategies and thus to implement
extractive institutions, which have
persisted to this day. Natural en-dowments,
for example of miner-als,
can in such work to the detri-ment
of growth and development
because they foster expropriation
from external actors.
The demographics explana-tion
for underdevelopment has
maintained its relevance. Africa is
still the continent in which there
is the most migration and, that
could form the basis for enduring
states.
Other demographic and ge-ographical
factors of underdevel-opment
have persisted through-out
history and in the modern
era. Malaria, for example, kills
700 000 Africans a year, of which
the majority are children. Accord-ing
to a research program carried
out by the University of Harvard,
the London School of Economics
and the WHO, the economic cost
of malaria for Africa is 100 billion
dollars a year. Bhattacharyya in
fact attributes most of current
African underdevelopment to the
high malaria incidence that per-vades
most of the continent, both
through its impact on mortality
and on morbidity. He emphasises
that malaria induces households
to increase current consump-tion,
save less for the future and
adversely affects labour produc-tivity.
Another key example is
AIDS, which has had a devastating
impact on development in Africa
over the past few decades.
The demographics explana-tion
for underdevelopment has
maintained its relevance. Africa is
still the continent in which there
is the most migration and, despite
current and former exceptions
like the Ethiopian Empire, there
have been few tightly-knit, stable
settlements with established so-cial
structure that could form the
basis for enduring states.
Assuming a historical per-spective
in our understanding of
the current economic situation
in Africa inevitably emphasises
the legacy of colonialism and the
slave trade, but this is not to go as
far as to say, as Walter Rodney put
it, that “Europe underdeveloped
Africa”. Looking back in history is
useful to the extent that it widens
our knowledge of current causes
and barriers to development, the
underlying motive being that if we
know what is hampering develop-ment
in a region, we are better
equipped to promote the right
measures to fix it. For example,
we learn that current institutions
are extractive and that one way
to enhance development is by
introducing better contracting
and property rights institutions.
Importantly, the current econom-ic
situation of a region should
not be understood as a result
of a long historical process over
which we have no, or little, agen-cy.
As Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala,
the Nigerian Minister of Finance,
puts it: “the world needs to look
towards the growth and develop-ment
of the continent and not to-wards
the statistics of the past”.
LOOKING BACK IN HISTORY
Credit: Flickr / enoughprojecT + Gatesfoundtion + jonwiley

14. In my pocket I carry an
object. Essentially, the
majority of my day-to-day
functioning is dependent in
some way upon this little object.
The object is my wake-up call,
my communication, my source of
time, my diary, my Sat-Nav, my
music player.
If you haven’t guessed yet,
the object I carry in my pocket is
my mobile phone. And as much as
I like to believe that if my phone
was taken away from me I would
comfortably survive, the reality is
that my life would not function in
quite the same way without it.
But what else can I tell you
about my phone? Where was it
made? Who was it made by? What
is it made from? It comes along
with me in my pocket most plac-es
I go, so you would think that
I would be able to tell you plen-ty
about it. Yet in our globalised
world we have become both si-multaneously
connected and de-tached
from one another. We have
been left unaware of the impact
that our day-to-day actions have
upon others in the ‘global village’
in which we live.
The tragic truth behind the
mobile phones that we own is that
they are part of a story of brutal
conflict and forced labour.
In order to function, mobile
phones are dependent on metals
– gold, tungsten, tin and tanta-lum.
These metals are mined in
countries such as the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC). 2014
marked two decades of complex
regional conflict in the DRC, the
most fatal conflict since World War
Two. The United Nations Refugee
Agency estimated that by mid-
2013 the conflict in eastern DRC
had produced over 2.6 million in-ternally
displaced people.
Decades of conflict have re-sulted
in a war economy fuelled
by the demand for the country’s
vast supply of natural resources.
Armed groups such as Democratic
Forces for the Liberation of Rwan-da
and rogue branches of the
Armed Forces of the Democratic
Republic of Congo have gained
control of the mines and make
hundreds of millions of dollars
each year through the trading of
metals. These metals have been
termed ‘conflict minerals’, with
their demand fed by our desire
for mobile phones and other
cheap, disposable electronics.
With the money made, the armed
groups can buy more weapons to
continue inflicting violence upon
civilians.
Much of these materials are
supplied through forced labour.
Forced labour according to the
ILO Forced Labour Convention
is defined as “all work or service
which is exacted from any person
under the menace of any penalty
and for which the said person has
not offered himself voluntarily”.
Forced labourers are recruited
by armed groups through various
methods; some work to pay off
debts (yet many of these work-ers
are trapped and have in fact
paid off their debts many times
over), some are forced into slav-ery
through violence, others are
kidnapped. The ILO estimate that
there are 20.9 million forced la-bourers
worldwide – that’s 3 out
of every 1000 people.
This situation is known as
forced labour in supply chains.
A supply chain is the series of
procedures involved in the man-ufacture
and distribution of a
product. Forced labour can occur
at different stages in the supply
chain from the extraction of raw
materials (as is the case with the
metals used in mobile phones)
to the manufacturing process,
right the way through to when
the item reaches its market. By
the time our mobile phone gets
to us it has passed through a long
and complex chain of designers,
manufacturers, suppliers and
retailers which makes it difficult
to track all those involved in its
production and therefore to know
whether or not it was produced
using forced labour.
So what can be done? Whilst
there are UN Resolutions, inter-national
certification mechanisms
and national initiatives in place
to help monitor and prevent
such human rights abuses, there
is a long way to go before forced
labour is eradicated from supply
chains. Transnational corpora-tions
have a significant amount of
control over their suppliers; they
can influence the way in which
they operate and the prices that
they pay for raw materials. All of
these factors have an impact upon
whether or not forced labour is
likely to be used in the produc-tion
of the product.
As a consumer you can have
more impact on changing trends
of forced labour than you think.
You could consider writing to
your mobile phone provider and
asking them to ensure that they
do not use forced labour in their
supply chains. Or next time your
mobile phone is due for an up-grade,
how about purchasing a
refurbished mobile phone or a
Fairphone, which aims to use con-flict-
free minerals from the DRC
in its devices?
Credit: Flickr / johanl + ILO + themepap
MY PHONE FUELS A WAR
By Rebecca Isa ac
BIOFUEL IN BEST PRACTICE
THE MAKENI PROJECT, SIERRA LEONE
The first commer-cial-
scale production
of African biofuels, in
Sierra Leone no less,
was eclipsed by the on-going Eb-ola
crisis in West Africa. While it
remains to be seen what impact
the outbreak of Ebola will have on
the region – though it’s certain
to be significant and potential-ly
catastrophic – the impact of
export-orientated biofuel pro-duction
is, and has been, fiercely
debated. But the Makeni Project
doesn’t only raise questions about
biofuels, not least because of its
credentials; Makeni is a case study
par excellence in the complexity
of, and competing views on, de-velopment.
Undoubtedly one of the most
heavily scrutinised development
projects in West Africa, the Mak-eni
Project forces us to consider
problems in development from
the bottom (local consultation
and collaborative planning) to the
top (multinational organisational
decision making) and ‘everything
in between’: environmental is-sues,
global and local, food secu-rity,
so-called land-grabbing, cer-tification
and education schemes.
The Makeni Project is an ex-port-
orientated biofuel scheme in
central Sierra Leone run by Addax
Bioenergy, a subsidiary of compa-ny
AOG (based in Malta). Some
10,000 ha of land are currently
used to cultivate sugar, and a
dedicated refinery has been built
nearby that process the sugar to
produce ethanol. It is not only
promoted as a biofuel project,
however: “real development” is a
core pillar of Addax’s ‘sustainable
investment model’ and the com-pany
stresses its desire to become
a “benchmark” for sustainable
investment in Africa. The Project
has been promoted directly and
indirectly by the European Union
and the United Nations; it has cer-tification
from the Roundtable on
Sustainable Biofuels (RSB), and is
the largest agricultural project in
Sierra Leone’s history. It became
the first UNFCCC ‘Clean Develop-ment
Mechanism’ (CDM) in Sierra
Leone in October 2013. Partners
of the project include the Afri-can
Development Bank (AfDB),
UK Emerging Africa Infrastruc-ture
Fund (EAIF) and German
Development Finance Institution
(DEG), among others.
The company adopted what
they claim are the “highest social
and environmental standards”
from the start, including consulta-tions
with local people before de-velopment
began in an extensive
feasibility study involving stake-holder
dialogue and environmen-tal
impact assessment (EIA). The
Project also includes provision for
a farmer development program
(FDP) for local farmers. It may
sound too good to be true – some
have sought to prove that it is –
not least because of current views
on the impacts of biofuels.
The impetus for export-ori-entated
biofuel development came
from on-high; the EU’s Renewable
Energy Directive (RED), in its in-itial
form, stipulated that 10% of
Europe’s transport fuel should
come from renewable sources by
2020. Now notorious, this pro-vision
of the RED began to be
re-negotiated in 2013 along with
the related Fuel Quality Directive
(FQD) in response to the per-ceived
harm biofuels were causing
to forests and to food security in
the developing world. Reports be-gan
emerging at least as far back
as 2007 regarding the damage
biofuels-for-export were causing
in tropical countries. The most
damaging claim, from an envi-ronmental
point of view, was that
biofuels-farmed regions in which
forest-cover was cut to grow corn,
sugarcane or palm-oil may actu-ally
be causing more greenhouse
gas emissions than certain types
of fossil fuels (known as indirect
land-use change, or ILUC); a more
damaging claim still was that bio-fuel
production had caused world
food prices to rise as a result of
agricultural products being di-verted
away from food markets
and into biofuels markets. Such
price increases have been tied to
not only hunger and food insecu-rity,
but also violence. Before any
sugar had been planted, then, the
Project’s environmental and so-cial
credentials could be called in
to question.
In September 2013, only a
few days before the bill amending
the RED was to be voted on in the
European Parliament, UK-based
rights group ActionAid released
a damning report accusing Addax
of failing to meet the targets that
they themselves had set for the
project and exacerbating food in-security.
Entitled “Broken promis-es:
the impacts of Addax Bioener-gy
in Sierra Leone on hunger and
livelihoods”, ActionAid and Sierra
Leone-based NGOs gathered ac-counts
from local people in 10
nearby villages, especially wom-en,
about the impacts of the pro-ject:
90% of respondents claimed
that hunger, prevalent in the area,
By Jonathan Menary
was due to the loss of land caused
by the Project and, despite Add-ax’s
pride in its feasibility studies
and consultations, 78% of re-spondents
said that they had nev-er
seen a land lease agreement.
The report documents many more
problems associated with Addax’s
development. These claims feed
into a growing concern over land
grabs in Africa by private interests
and even nation states.
Addax, it should be noted,
responded soon after with an
equally robust open letter, ques-tioning
ActionAid’s methodology
and findings, and taking particu-lar
issue with accusations that
consultations with local people
had been lacking; ActionAid did
not, at the time of these consul-tations,
choose to scrutinise the
Project. Addax maintains that
their operations have improved
local livelihoods (a scenario
tantamount to ‘my word against
yours’). Other institutions have
independently inspected the Pro-ject
and have reported better con-ditions
than ActionAid.
During the past several years
a large number of people will no
doubt have ‘written-off ’ biofuels
wholesale, and many more will
have come to mistrust develop-ment
projects undertaken by large
businesses (if they didn’t before).
Yet the Makeni Project tests our
understanding of development.
If what ActionAid have claimed
about the Makeni Project can be
substantiated then it leaves many
aspects of (mainly European)
developmental best practice in
doubt.
If, however, we trust that the
numerous development banks and
funds have invested their money
wisely in Makeni, we are still left
questioning both export-orien-tated
development and top-down
development projects; what if the
political apparatus supporting
a scheme – a renewable energy
policy, for instance – is suddenly
taken away? An entire project can
be undercut by political develop-ments
elsewhere, and, in the case
of biofuels, for arguably sound
reasons. ActionAid is fiercely op-posed
to biofuel production from
food crops, and this may explain
why they targeted the Makeni pro-ject,
and whilst biofuels may be
bad, biofuels projects may not be
entirely. No further response has
been made by the organisation
since Addax released their open
letter.
Credit: Flickr / murfomurf
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