Hamptons.

It's 320am and I just came back from Columbia; I arrived this morning at the department at 545am. Yet another 20+ hour work day; since Sunday my days have been like this. Anybody said something about a 36-hour work week? ;). The amazing thing of being here is that at 3am there are still students walking around on campus and the main library is populated. Also, I am currently eating a before-bed-time snack; a freshly-cut, sliced-meat sandwich - something I got in one of the many supermarkets still open. I love this city!

It's not all work, though. Tomorrow, with some fellow PhD students, I'll be heading for a weekend to the Hamptons on Long Island where we hired a small house next to the beach. We have beer, steaks, a football (read: a proper ball to play soccer) and I also took Robert Klitgaard's "Tropical Gangsters" [1] with me. Great weekend ahead!

[1] Robert Klitgaard. 1991. Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience With Development And Decadence In Deepest Africa. New York: Basic Books.

A Biography of the Continent: Africa.

Today I finally finished John Reader's “A Biography of the Continent: Africa” [1]. This 800+ pages book is one of the best histories I’ve read about Africa; starting several hundreds of millions of years ago with the creation of the Atlas and the Cape Fold Belt mountains at the continent’s northern and southern extremities, and ending with the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1994 South African elections. The latter shows how Africa is host to humanity’s extremes: on the one hand the potential to hate and kill with such intensity to kill hundreds of thousands, and on the other hand the potential for peace and reconciliation under Nelson Mandela.

It is maybe because these two extremes are so clearly present in Africa that I am so attracted to the continent. Anyhow, especially John Reader’s very last paragraph is great:

SPEAKING IN MAY 1995, a Catholic theologian in Rwanda, Laurien Ntenzimana, confessed to having been shocked by the genocide in his country, but not astonished. People live behind a mask, he said, which the winds of history occasionally blow aside. The genocide was shocking, but only those who were naive about human nature could be astonished. He told an inquiring reporter: “I have the impression that you have not yet discovered man, either in his grandeur or in his misery; he can always surprise us”.

People live behind a mask, which the winds of history occasionally blow aside. Wow!

[1] John Reader. 2007. A Biography of the Continent: Africa. New York: Vintage Books.

Can you rape in 10 minutes?

Last October I had a post on Captain Moussa Dadis Camara - who seized power in a coup d’état in 2008 in Guinea after the death of longtime dictator Lansana Conté - losing his keys. Today the New Yorker published an article by Jon Lee Anderson that deals with the September 28 (2009) massacre that took place in Conakry - the country's capital - when Camara's forces attacked a large, peaceful rally at the national soccer stadium (here).

Luckily Camara has a good and convincing reason why his forces could not have committed rape. As Anderson notes in the article: "He (Camera) added that the September 28th incident had begun and ended in ten minutes. As for the allegations of rape, he scoffed, "Can a military man with a gun in his hand rape a women in ten minutes?" Shaking his head side to side, he smiled and said, "I don't think so.""

Good point! More seriously, luckily Camara has been out of office since the assassination attempt on him on 3 December 2009 when he was shot by his aide-de-camp, Aboubacar Diakité. While he was airlifted to Morocco for treatment, Brigadier General Sékouba Konaté was placed in charge of Guinea. The latter seems to behave, and elections are planned for June this year.

Misconceptions of DRC conflict.

Jason Stearn has a great post today with five major misconceptions of the DRC conflict:

1. The conflict in the DRC is all about minerals;
2. Coltan, a key ingredient for cell phones, is the main mineral traded in the Congo;
3. The FDLR is composed of Interahamwe and ex-FAR who carried out the 1994 genocide;
4. The CNDP is a Tutsi militia;
5. The UN mission has failed to protect civilians in conflict zones.

Sierra Leone and network data.

Last Thursday - together with colleague and friend Neelanjan Sircar - I visited the IRC HQ and had a meeting with Paul Amendola and Jeannie Annan (IRC's Director of Research and Evaluation). I met Paul two weeks earlier when he told me about an interesting project that he is spearheading for the IRC. In brief, because of the high cost of conducting large surveys to obtain mortality data, the IRC is embarking on a twelve month project in Sierra Leone to test whether these surveys can be replaced by having selected health workers report mortality data via cellphones. By surveying several complete villages at t=1 and again at t=12 the real mortality rates are obtained. This true picture will then be compared with the data obtained via cellphones from the health workers.

The part especially interesting for us is that complete villages will be surveyed. This is a unique opportunity to obtain so-called network data; how people are related to each other and what their position in a society is. Few complete networks (e.g. a complete village) are ever sampled. Moreover, not only will this network data be informative for the IRC, networks are a central topic in our dissertations. Neelanjan focuses on the role of brokers in the political process because of their knowledge of local-level networks. I, on my turn, will focus on the network impact of village cleavages - especially those formed by migration - on public good provision.

I just finished reading an interesting working paper by Rachel Glennerster, Ted Miguel, Alexander Rothenberg on Sierra Leone [*] that relates closely to this project and my dissertation. In brief:

They look at the impact of ethnic diversity on public goods provision and collective action in post-war Sierra Leone, and find that local ethnic diversity is not associated with worse local public goods provision across a variety of regression specifications, local outcomes, and diversity measures. Given the large migration flows due to the 1991-2002 civil war, a big problem is sorting. That is, individuals from a particular ethnic groups or with certain (unobserved) tastes for public goods, could migrate to more or less diverse areas. To address this concern of endogenous local ethnic composition they use an IV strategy that relies on ethnic diversity data from 1963. Next to concluding that ethnic diversity has not a negative impact on public goods, the paper discusses how the historical development of inter-ethnic relations in Sierra Leone, as well as the continued strength of local tribal chiefs could be possible explanations for this finding. Nice paper!

[*] Rachel Glennerster, Ted Miguel, Alexander Rothenberg. 2009. Working Together: Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities. Working paper, November 2009.

Evaluating DRC police reform.

In 2009 - funded by $60m from DFID - the Congolese government started a reform in order to have a "more Accountable Security and Justice Sector that works for the benefit of the people of DRC including a Police Service that provides improved security and the Rule of Law for the population" (see here). After the program's end in 2014 one - of course - wants to know whether the reform was successful, and therefore the program includes an evaluation component.

This evaluation component recently took up contact with CSDS asking whether we could have a look at the evaluation. As a result, last week, after receiving the project and the evaluation documents, together with 3 other PhD Candidates trained in these issues and Macartan, we spent much time thinking through the evaluation. We produced a 12-page document with issues related to, among others: the evaluation's research design, it's sampling method, and the (French) survey questions.

It was a great experience! First, it is interesting to read about other projects. Second, as part of the PhD Program, we took specific courses how to do good evaluations; now we can put this knowledge into practice. Third, by discussing other projects' evaluations we learn a lot for future evaluations that we are likely to undertake for our own dissertations.

Ken Robinson at TED.

In 2006 at a TED conference creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenged the way we're educating our children. I wish I could give presentations like this: