Tag: development

  • Liberia’s Paths to Prosperity

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    I first came to Liberia four years ago—just as the Ebola epidemic was starting to spread. The classic image of Liberia’s roads was that of a four-wheel drive vehicle stuck in a sea of mud. Today, the situation has dramatically improved. I spent the last week driving around Bong, Nimba, Lofa, and Grand Bassa Counties inspecting the roads that we have improved through the USAID-funded Feeder Roads Alternative and Maintenance Program (FRAMP). I drove on nearly 400 km of these small roads and probably twice as much on the primary and second network to reach them and 90% of the time I was on good roads! The main roads from Monrovia through Bong County and up to Nimba County and over to Grand Bassa are all paved. The road from Bong County up through Lofa County was nicely rehabilitated (we helped with that). Even the feeder roads that were fixed several years ago under a different program remain in good condition.

    That last point surprised me. When we talk about the work that we do, we talk about how we “rehabilitate” rural roads and how maintenance is critical especially since Liberia can get over three meters of rain a year. Of course if you don’t maintain these gravel roads, they will just wash away again. But I’ve learned a new narrative. These roads that we are improving were just tracks. They never had a proper driving surface or side drains. If there were any cross-drains, they were built out of rough timber and prone to collapse. When we work on the road, we install culverts and bridges so that water does not need to pass over the road. We build a proper road surface with side drains so water stays off the roadway. We compact the road surface so that the gravel (really a mixture of clay and small pebbles) does not wash away with the rain. Although the road condition will deteriorate over time—especially if the improved road ends up with significant traffic. However, it will never again be as poor a road as it was before we started.

    The biggest challenge that we face in maintaining the road is the sudden growth in traffic. Although we designed these roads to be feeder roads—to feed traffic from small villages to the secondary and primary roads—some road segments have become popular shortcuts and now have significant car and truck traffic. Several of our road segments ought now to be upgraded to be secondary roads—given wider carriageways and more gentle curves to allow for faster driving speeds. This is another nice success of our project—helping Liberia to grow.

    The four counties that I visited have about half of the feeder roads in the entire country. I understand that there is still much to be done in the rest of the country and especially in the southern counties. I am proud that we were able to play our part in helping Liberia on its path to prosperity.

  • Does the Harlem Children’s Zone hold the key to revolutionalizing the world?

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    My kids class

    I recently reread Jared Diamond's excellent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is an excellent overview of how a variety of factors gave some geographic regions the natural advantages that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. He beautifully shows that, up until fairly recently, where you were born, rather than your lineage or "race" determines how rich your society would be. However, now that the world is flat and everyone has access to the same guns, germs, and steel; why have the differences continued? Why aren't African kids competing on par with European kids?

    The question became even more intriguing after I read Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He looks at successful people from Mozart to Bill Gates and concludes that these people became so successful by spending the 10,000 hours required to master a skill and then being in the right time and place to take advantage of the mastery. This was the case with Bill Gates who, as a high school student, had nearly unlimited access to a mainframe computer when few computer professors did. It was also the case of Mozart, the son of a composer, who was forced to put in his ten thousand hours while still a young child. 

    The beauty of putting together the thoughts outlined in these two books is that they make the case that anyone in the world could succeed if they put in the time to master the skill. Except it doesn't work that way. With a few rare exceptions, Africa does not produce many "Outliers."

    The best answer that I have found lies in the story behind the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ). As described in the This American Life episode, the HCZ CEO, Geoffrey Canada, was raising his second family in the 1990s are realized that the thinking about childrearing had dramatically changed from his first try at it. The new thinking was that parents had to be involved with their kids from even before the kids was born–eating the right foods, singing to the womb. Once the baby was born, there was a whole new philosophy of discipline and care. He encouraged his social workers to go out into their neighborhoods so see if this new thinking had caught on in Harlem. They found that it had not. Geoffrey then reworked the HCZ strategy to focus on helping the children by creating a "conveyor belt" to take them (and their parents) from baby college to college. The HCZ helps parents to care for their kids and prepare their kids for success. By not waiting until the children are reach the traditional school age, they are able to impact the children when they are easiest to touch.

    The results that the HCZ has achieved are nothing short of amazing. They have transformed the neighborhood from one of underachieving kids to overachieving ones. They are proving that it is possible to transform education. The Obama administration is looking to duplicate the success through "Promise Neighborhoods."

    What if we could take this idea global? What if we could launch baby colleges and develop conveyor belts to take kids to college? Could this be the missing key that would allow children from poor families from all over the world to finally be able to compete in this global economy? Is the biggest mistake that we make in education that we wait too long to begin educating our kids and thereby deny them the chance to achieve mastery?

  • A new, excellent primer on poverty

    Rahul-full;init_[1] A friend of mine, Rahul Deodhar, has just put out an excellent primer on poverty. He explains beautifully the concepts that I touched on in one of my early posts "The New Thinking on Poverty." The basic idea is that people move in and out of poverty based on what Rahul calls "Snakes" (pitfalls and bad habits that pull them down) and ladders (good habits and actions that pull them out). Rahul provides clear illustrations of how people can cycle in and out of poverty and the high cost of being poor. It's a free ebook and well worth the read. You can learn more about Rahul through his website: http://www.rahuldeodhar.com/