“Why are some nations poor and some nations rich?”

This is the basic question development economists try to answer. It’s a question with profound practical implications – if we could suggest strategies that consistently helped nations grow wealth, we could address a huge range of problems in education, public health and state stability.

It’s also a question that both development economists and political commentators are surprisingly bad at answering.

Daniel Cohen, professor of economics at Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Université de Paris, believes than many bad answers to this question stem from a faulty assumption: “Rich countries exploit poor countries.” In his recent “Globalization and Its Enemies“, Cohen argues that this is “radically false”:

It would be better to say that these countries suffer from being abandoned to their fate. The poorest countries are not like the workers at the center of industrial capitalism; their situation is closer to that of individuals lost in the French welfare system today.”

To understand Cohen’s argument, we need to look closely at actual state of globalization. Anyone not living under a rock has been inundated with stories about borderless economies, the rise of outsourcing and and the death of distance. It’s an illusion, Cohen argues: “In wealthy countries, globalization is largely imaginary.”

We’re experiencing the third major wave of globalization. The first began with the Spanish conquistadors, while the second was led by industrialization and “free trade” throughout the British empire. In comparison to this second wave of globalization, the current globalization is “immobile” – in 1913, 10% of the world’s population was made of immigrants; that figure is 3% today. As a result, while we encounter merchandise from around the world, “it is only through television, or during a few vacation weeks for tourists from rich countries, that one encounters other societies.” Capital, Cohen argues, followed the migrations prior to World War One – by some metrics, those flows were more substantial in that second wave of globalization than it is today.

Despite the profound sense that of economic globalization an American gets looking through clothing labels in Walmart, Cohen points to arguments from Jeffrey Frankel that suggest we’re far below the projected levels of globalization we’d see in a truly borderless economy. (The US economy is 25% of the global economy. In a truly borderless world, we’d expect 75% of goods to come from abroad – actually, only 12% of our goods do, which suggest we’re at about 1/6th of this theoretical state.)

But given the track record we’ve seen with the limited amount of globalization we’ve experienced, is this something we want to encourage and celebrate? Don’t the cheap Chinese sneakers we buy at Walmart exploit the factory workers who make them? Cohen doesn’t deny that the current system is profoundly unfair to workers in developing nations, but he complicated the concept of exploitation.

He begins by addressing Arghiri Emmanuel, who in 1969 argued that poor nations were neccesarily exploited by rich nations: “If one hour of labor in Bombay is paid less than an hour in Detroit, it is inevitable that the American worker is exploiting the Indian laborer.” But a comparison of the modern-day textile industry in India and the US complicates this equation. Emmanuel’s argument suggests that American consumers use their wealth to purchase many hours of labor from underpaid workers in India. But it only requires 8% more hours to manufacture cloth in India than in the US. And salaries in India in the textile industry are 1/15th what they are in the US. So why isn’t Indian cloth a small fraction of the price of US cloth?

As it turns out, almost everything else in India costs more – the energy to run the mills, the cost of capital borrowed from banks, the price of cotton. (Cohen acknowledges, but doesn’t explore, the fact that cotton is cheaper only because of massive US agricultural subsidies designed to preserve the US textile industry…)

Cohen has done original research supporting a theory of “levers”, independent factors that combine to provide huge gains in efficiency. Literacy and professional experience make workers far more efficient – this is one lever. Another is machinery – workers using modern looms can be far more productive than those working on older machines or by hand. And “global efficiency” – modern organization of business, IT used to make processes more efficient – is another lever. In a 2003 paper written with Marcelo Soto, Cohen argues that poor countries suffer from a 35% handicap on each of these factors – low-literacy workers in a developing nation are 65% as efficient as highly educated ones in a developed nation, for instance. The result, when you combine these factors: “A worker in a poor country has at his disposal only 65 percent of the total capacity of one level, multiplied by 65 percent and remultiplied by 65 percent, which yields only 27 percent of the resources available in the rich countries, which explains why the ratio of income between rich countries and poor ones is about 4:1.”

If we accept this explanation (I’m not certain I do – I plan to read Cohen and Soto’s paper to see the argument in more detail), we’re forced to answer the question: “Why the inequitable distribution of resources that act as levers?” In other words, when British industrialization spread across the globe, why did the US and Canada industrialize quickly, and India industrialize so little?

Here Cohen leans on analysis from Gregory Clark, who observes that at the turn of the last century, workers at English and American textile mills were operating four looms each, and factories were pushing them to move to six. By contrast, Indian workers managed a single loom. It was not incompetence or lack of education that Cohen believes prevented Indian workers from operating multiple looms – it was racism. In Northern countries, workers demanded better pay and better working conditions in exchange for taking on a greater workload. In the South, workers who demanded better compensation were marginalized, but the majority of the workforce refused to take on the greater load. This, in turn, is a product of the colonizer mentality with which Britain approached India: “To give meaning to his existence, the colonist must diminish the colonized by reminding him of his inferiority in every detail of life.”

An explanation of why “lever” technologies aren’t introduced in developing nations today is less centered on racism and more on fiscal reality:

Why does capitalism not supply workers in poor countries with the machinery that would make them productive? The answer has to do with the fact that it could be efficient to add physical capital to poor countries from a technical point of view, but that this is not neccesarily the case from a financial point of view.

Making grocery stores in Lagos more efficient by computerizing may not make sense – the marginal added cost for consumers would make products unaffordable – and it would have the perverse consequence of removing jobs in a labor-rich economy.

What poor nations want, Cohen argues, is more globalization, not less. Globalization “has not kept its promises. Globalization creates a strange world that nourishes the feeling of exploitation while in fact exploiting only a bit or not at all.” This image is one created through technology and media. It’s now impossible to avoid the imagery of a prosperous global world even within the most impoverished nations. The possibility of prosperity makes it untenable for people in developing nations to accept their current level of underdevelopment.

Here Cohen is inspired by Amartya Sen and his idea of development as freedom – economic development increases the ability of individuals to act and the possibilities they, as individuals, can explore. “The problem of globalization up to now is it has altered people’s expectations more than it has increased their ability to act.”

Cohen’s book is focused more on debunking the frame surrounding the problem rather than offering solutions – it spends less time on policy prescriptions than it does on challenging the fundamental assumptions of anti-globalization critics. But it’s clear that any solution Cohen would endorse involves a recognition of the desirability of interconnection, not an attempt to oppose free markets, capitalism and global integration. His solutions focus on finding ways to counterbalance the goals of free trade with considerations of public health or economic development.

In this sense, he leaves himself open to the criticism John Gray levies in his (otherwise glowing) review in the New York Review of Books: the globalized future Cohen proposes would be environmentally disastrous. This is true, but it’s less clear that globalization is the driver of global warming, rather than overconsumption in developing nations. (Globalization, particularly of the petroleum industry, has clearly made it possible for the US and Europe to overconsume well past the limits of their own local energy supplies.)

The area where I felt Cohen could have gone further is in acknowledging the shifting character of media and its role in communicating the hopes of globalization. His analysis is rooted in existing models of broadcast media. While the cost of producing media goes down, existing players win because they have the concentration of capital neccesary to make Hollywood blockbusters or pay football stars to play televised matches. As a result, a wider range of people can create media, but no one watches it.

This idea is challenged by a number of papers that have emerged since Cohen published his book (in French in 2004.) Chris Anderson and others writing about the “long tail” suggest that there may be a market for a much wider range of media than Cohen imagines. My current hopes around globalization center around making media flows more bidirectional – can we complement the export of American values and aspirations via broadcast media through citizen’s media created by people in the developing world? If globalization is truly immobile, as Cohen argues, can we hack the media to increase the contact of people in the developed world with ideas and perspectives from people in the developing world?

These opportunities to expand Cohen’s work aside, this is one of the most useful books I’ve found in advancing conversations about globalization beyond arguments of whether it’s good or bad. It’s both and neither – and it’s inevitable. By understanding that the issue is uneven access to productive capacity, not the “inherently exploitative” nature of global capitalism, Cohen gives us a hope of focusing our debates on places where we can have economic leverage. And, at roughly 170 pages, it’s got the best ratio of big ideas to pages I’ve encountered in a long time – it’s very much worth a read if you’re interested in debates that range farther than free market inevitability versus Altermonde.

• Wired News: One Cheap Desktop for All
  A chinese firm offers a $150 desktop – very few technical innovations, largely the same machine as the 50×15 PIC…
  (tags: olpc ict4d)
• Essentials, 2006 edition [dive into mark]
  Very useful list of software for folks transitioning from Mac to Ubuntu (which is, Mark claims, an African word for “one who could not install Debian”…)
  (tags: mac geek)
• Fermenting waste fruit to fuel ethanol
  One of the best how-to’s I’ve seen in a while – how to turn fruit waste into ethanol you can use to run a lawnmower. Lovely science lessons in the course of this one… Thanks for the pointer, Emeka.
  (tags: science africa techology todo)

The ongoing war in northern Uganda is one of the worst conflicts one rarely hears about. Jan Egeland, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, describes Northern Uganda as “the world’s terrorism epicentre. Nowhere in the world do we have large areas where between 80 and 90 percent of the population are terrorised into camps by violence.”

This violence is perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group that hasn’t blown up US office towers or bombed Jordanian hotels, but has still “killed more people than Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hizbullah combined.” Their horrific tactics – which include abducting children to rape and enslave – have forced 1.6 million Ugandans from their homes and spawned the phenomenon of “night commuters“, children who walk miles from their homes in villages to sleep in the comparative safety of cities like Gulu.

(The LRA is not the only group terrorizing the children of Northern Uganda. Girls living in camps for internally displaced people report being raped by the Ugandan government soldiers charged with protecting them. The soldiers’ behavior and their failure to control the LRA are two main reasons why Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni received almost no support in recent presidential elections from people in Northern Uganda.)

Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA, is one of the strangest rebel leaders to appear on the global stage. A primary school dropout, Kony became a traditional healer in an Acholi village as a young man. When Museveni seized power in 1986 and began cracking down on former soldiers who’d returned to their homes in Acholiland, Kony emerged as the leader of one of several resistance movements against the Ugandan government. Kony’s movement is notable for its religious fervor – LRA’s stated goal is a Ugandan nation run in accordance with the Ten Commandments… but Kony, a polygamist, may interpret this document in some interesting ways. Since receiving weaponry and support from Khartoum, Kony’s rhetoric has expanded to include adherance to some aspects of Muslim doctrine, prohibiting his followers from eating pork and demanding they observe Ramadan. Oh, and he’s a spirit medium, channeling the spirit of a former Ugandan minister and a Chinese general.

He’s also a wanted international war criminal, indicted by the ICC last year for crimes including murder, rape and sexual enslavement.

Kony’s brutality, eccentricity and reluctance to speak to the media – he (claims he) hasn’t given an interview in his long career – mean that his recent interview with journalist Sam Farvar at his camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo is big news indeed. Kony used his interview to make it clear that Ugandan president Museveni was responsible for the atrocities in Acholi, not him:

“Let me tell you clearly what happened in Uganda. Museveni went into the villages and cut off the ears of the people, telling the people that it was the work of the LRA. I cannot cut the ear of my brother; I cannot kill the eye of my brother.”

Needless to say, very few people are buying this story. The Ugandan government dismissed the story as “ridiculous”, and was echoed by Human Rights Watch, who called Kony’s protests of innocence “amazing”. Betty Bigombe, an African peacemaker celebrated for her work negotiating between the LRA and the Ugandan government, reports witnessing the aftermath of massacres where LRA soldiers led entire villages to a riverbank and executed them. And accounts of survivors of the LRA – like Ochola John – are very difficult to forget. (The above link is to a BBC story, but it’s a very disturbing one and one more sensitive readers might want to skip.)

But Mathew Green, a Reuters journalist who has been writing a book on Kony, has an interesting take on the situation. Kony, Green argues, may not be nearly as crazy as people thinK; “The stereotype obscures the real man whose movement is rooted in a history of political alienation, and whose mysticism masks a raw instinct for survival that has confounded his many adversaries.” His article in the Institute for War and Peace Reporting argues that Kony is best understood as yet another rebel leader, used as a pawn by a powerful government and discarded when Sudan’s concerns shifted from rebels in the south to those in the west. It’s an interesting part of the story of a complex figure, but it’s hard for me to be too interested in the formative years of such a brutal and murderous man.

Why is Kony stepping into the public eye now? In part, it’s because he’s trying to negotiate a peace treaty with Uganda – he’s got a negotiating team in the southern Sudan city of Juba. But his reasons for seeking a treaty are likely less than pure – there’s widespread speculation that the Sudanese government either demanded Kony decamp for the DRC or paid him to do so. His wife (one of his wives?) has been arrested when she tried to leave Uganda for DRC, probably to join Kony. Kony’s decision to break his silence might well be the precursor to hearing a great deal more for him, as a tightening net might force his arrest and prosecution at the ICC. One can hope…

I have to admit – Farvar’s story on Kony makes me a little uneasy. I understand the value of an interview with a critical figure in Africa, and understand that there’s no way Farvar would have gotten the interview if he was able to lead the authorities back to Kony camp… but what are the ethics on giving a platform for someone like Kony to explain his motives and beliefs? And does Farvar have an obligation to assist those people trying to arrest Kony now that he’s met with him and conducted this interview? How does this parallel situations like interviews journalists have conducted with Bin Ladn?

• Ghana Web News � Blog Archive � Only 400 Ghanaians to watch Ghana-Brazil?
  Only 400 Ghanaians able to attend world cup games due to visa restrictions
  (tags: ghana football migration)
• Meskel Square: Ubuntu in Ethiopia: The difficult early years
  Andrew Heavens on one of the key problems with Ubuntu in developing nations – the unsolved winmodem problem…
  (tags: africa foss ethiopia)
• Janet Haven: Burma reportedly blocks gmail and Google search
  Janet on blocking in Burma, and on proactive strategies to fight back against internet filtering
  (tags: freedomofspeech burma accesstoknowledge internet filtering censorship)
• RConversation: Chinese journalists say enough is enough
  Will a crackdown on journalism in China – a prohibition on broadcasting breaking news without authorization – strengthen the influence of blogs and bbs?
  (tags: china freedom censorship freespeech journalism)

“So, which billionaire do you work for?”

This isn’t a question you hear very often in the NGO industry, though it probably should be. If you’re someone in the US who works on large-scale social change, there’s a good chance that your salary is paid by a billionaire – either a live or dead one. This is more true in the US, where tax rates tend to be lower, and social change organizations tend to be funded by personal philanthropy, rather than through taxation and government largess, as they often are in Europe.

Me, I work for two billionares – one live, one dead. The regional editors and translators who work on Global Voices are supported by a gift from Reuters – Rebecca and I have fellowships at Berkman that are supported in part by a gift from the MacArthur Foundation. According to the MacFound website, John D. MacArthur “was one of the three wealthiest men in America at the time of his death.”

When not working on Berkman projects, I consult for Open Society Institute, the foundation established by billionaire financeer George Soros. I serve on the sub-board that oversees OSI’s Information Program, and I periodically consult on other IT-related issues.

Here’s the difference between live and dead philanthropists: no one knows what the dead ones think. Would John D. MacArthur approve of a fraction of his wealth going to support our efforts to call attention to bloggers in developing nations? I have no idea. The program officers of the foundation are, I’m sure, influenced by the wishes and instructions MacArthur gave when he and his wife were alive… but I’m also sure that they’ve had to make thousands of decisions based on general intuition about the goals and priority of the foundation.

We make a lot of decisions at OSI based on the idea of supporting open societies, an idea articulated by Karl Popper and further developed by Soros in the eight books he’s written. Every so often, we discover that we’ve voted to fund a proposal that Mr. Soros doesn’t think advances the idea of Open Society. This usually doesn’t mean the funding is pulled… but it does mean that we hear about it. Working with a live billionaire means that the priorites of a foundation can and will change, which can be disconcerting for the people who spend their lives trying to better people’s lives in accordance with their understand of the principles articulated by the funder.

In the next few years, a lot of people in the NGO sector in the US are going to start working for billionaire Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest man. His foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, employs some very, very smart people (including some friends of mine) and does amazing work in public health and education. With an unprecedented gift of $30 billion by Warren Buffet – the world’s second wealthiest man – to the Gates Foundation, the foundation now has $60 billion in assets.

It’s hard for me to get my head around $60 billion. Discovering that it’s the gross domestic product of Bangladesh – a nation of over 144 million people – doesn’t really help. (Constant USD, not PPP, for the economists out there.) But here’s a way I’ve found useful to think about it:

Foundations, under US law, suffer tax penalties if they don’t distribute at least 5% of their assets per year. This means that the Gates Foundation will need to give more than $3 billion a year to avoid penalties, public condemnation and other bad things. And that’s harder than it looks.

OSI gives about $400 million a year in grants. To oversee those grants – deciding which applications are worth funding, making sure the grantees do the work they promised, reporting the results, coordinating with other funders – OSI employs several hundred people. (I don’t know the exact number – I do know that the meeting I attended two weeks ago, which featured many, but not all, senior staffers and board members had about 300 attendees.)

The Gates Foundation is going to give roughly ten times that much money every year.

Now Gates and OSI give money very differently. Our program at OSI gives lots of very small grants – many under $5,000 – and very few “big” grants – “big”, for us, means “over $100,000″.The Gates Foundation has been making very large grants, especially on issues of public health – $22.6 million for sleeping sickness, $8.6 million for AIDS testing, and so on…

With twice as much money, the foundation will start bumping up against some interesting problems. Many organizations who work on AIDS have observed that organizations in developing nations don’t have the capacity to absorb the amounts of money foundations like Gates want to put to work. In other words, everyone wants to tackle AIDS in Botswana… but giving twice as much money to an organization in Botswana may not mean twice as much work. Organizations don’t have the accounting or computer systems to track the money. Trained nurses and health aids aren’t available for hire. Corruption – by governments and individuals – can become a major problem.

NGOs respond to this problem by engaging in “capacity building” – basically, this is code for making nonprofits more effective. This can require a great deal of handholding… which requires people who work for the foundation who can hold those hands. Yes, Buffett’s gift means that the Gates Foundation will give more large gifts to universities to support basic research on vaccines… but it also likely means that thousands of people, in the US and in developing nations, will work directly or indirectly for the Gates Foundation.

Warren Buffett could have set up one of the world’s largest charitable foundations with the $30 billion he gave the Gates Foundation. The foundations run by his children – which he gave single-digit billions to – are already large and relavent funders around important issues like reproductive choice. That he didn’t start his own foundation reveals two things about Mr. Buffett – he’s a remarkably humble billionaire, and he believes in the value of live billionaires.

The Gates Foundation has already done very impressive work. With Bill Gates retiring from Microsoft and turning his attentions to the foundation, I suspect it will get even better. My suspicion is based on the fact that I think OSI is so effective in no small part because it’s got a live funder, who can change his mind, deciding to focus on certain issues and stop focusing on others. By placing his trust in Gates, Buffett is making the decision that a foundation headed by a very smart software guy can do philanthropy better than one headed just by professional philanthropists.

I think that OSI has done some pretty amazing work in the past two decades, helping independent voices in repressive societies get heard and become politically influential. But the Forbes list of 700+ billionaires is a useful reminder that Soros is far from the only person out there capable of using his funds for social change. Mr. Soros ranks 71st on the list with a net worth of $7.2 billion. What are Sergey Brin and Larry Page going to do, with $12.8 billion each, when running Google’s no longer a challenge? Will Larry Ellison get sick of buying fighter jets with his $16 billion and start focusing on his foundation? Is it possible that Gates and Soros may share a common goal – getting living billionaires interested in the tremendous challenge of supporting social change through philanthropy?

There are a couple of conferences I’d go to every year if I could afford the ticket. (As it is, I go to them when folks are nice enough to ask me to speak or otherwise participate.) One of these is TED – Technology, Entertainment and Design – an amazing annual conference help in Monterrey, CA. I attended this past year and tried to blog the heck out of it.

There were three reasons to blog the conference. One is that Chris Anderson, the curator of the event, invited me specifically with the hope that I’d blog, as well as giving a short talk. A second is that I found most of the talks at TED hugely useful, and I use my blog as my notebook. (I frequently search for notes I know I’ve made on a topic by searching on Google with “site:ethanzuckerman.com” – I’m embarrased that my personal information organization is so poor that Google’s index of my website is the way I organize my notes, but that’s how it is…)

The third reason is that TED is a very exclusive conference, one that very few people get to attend. Tickets cost roughly $4000, plus travel, accomodation and all those other niceties. (Like I said, I couldn’t attend unless the organizers waived the fee for me.) This means that some of the very smart things said at the conference circulate through a limited audience and miss the larger audience of people interested in these issues. I figured that by blogging the talks (alongside master blogger Bruno Giussani), I could help some of these ideas reach a wider audience.

Well, TED has taken a big step towards making the conference more accessible – they’ve begun posting video of some of the talks given at the TED 2006 conference, with plans to post more. They’re available in a wide range of formats, and they’re released under Creative Commons, which allows for the possibility of an Al Gore/Tony Robbins mashup. (Read this post from Bruno to find out why that would be especially funny.)

Let me especially recommend Majora Carter’s talk, which was one of the best activist talks I’ve ever heard – I tried to capture a bit of it in a post, “Green is the New Black“. Whether you watch the video or just listen to the audio, it’s very much worth your time.

(If you get hooked on the TED talks, let me also recommend catching up on the talks from Pop!Tech, one of the other three conferences I block out on my calendar every year. For the past two years, Pop!Tech has been posting audio from their conference, including the talk I gave two years ago…)

Congratulations to my friend June Cohen who has worked so hard to launch this project for TED…

Law 11 – Offside

…A player is not in an offside position if

* he is in his own half of the field of play or
* he is level with the second last opponent or
* he is level with the last two opponents or
* he is Brazilian.
…

From FIFA’s revised “Laws of the Game“, published for the 2006 World Cup.

I’m speculating, of course. I don’t have access to the actual rulebook the World Cup refs are using. Like most of you, I’m interested in the passage where refs are now mandated to issue a minimum of five yellow cards per game. But it was hard to find anyone (except the Brazil fans I was sitting with) who believed that Adriano’s goal should have counted.

Don’t believe me? Fine – listen to the BBC: “Dujkovic was sent to the stands at half-time after Adriano had doubled Brazil’s lead when he was clearly offside.” Dujkovic is (was?) Ghana’s coach, and I suspect he had some choice words at the half, one or more of which led to him watching the second half of the game from somewhere other than his side of the field.

On the one hand, it doesn’t matter – Ghana lost by two legitimate goals, the first of which was a brilliant example of what Brazil does well (one on one play) and what Ghana does poorly (defend after someone has crossed their too-high backline). On the other hand, it meant everything – Ghana threatened several times in the end of the first half and might well have equalized if the earth had spun slightly faster, or the gravitational constant been slightly lower. Had they gone into the half down 1-0, not 2-0, and had a coach for the second half, they might have equalized.

Still, you could just as well say, “If only they’d had Essien.” One of the most moving details of the match, in my opinion, was the report that Brazilian players – who know Essien from his play with Chelsea – were consoling him before the match. The man looked heartbroken, as did Appiah before the match. Sending off Gyan, leaving Ghana to finish the game man-down against Brazil was a reminder of how damaging these card-happy refs have been to the chances of several teams. (Gee, think Portugal is going to have penalty issues the next match they play?)

And Ghana looked awfully good for much of the game, controlling the midfield, taking good shots, giving Dida several scares. But they couldn’t finish – they put too many chances right into the keeper’s hands. And they never figured out that Brazil was faster than they are on the breakaways, leading to far too many moments where Kingston found himself head to head with the best players in the world.

It’s always sad when your team’s knocked out, but this game left me a little bitter. Perhaps it was the smug Brazil fans sitting around me. When Marcelo Balboa – who was calling the game for ESPN – announced that the Ghanaians were playing better than the Brazilians, but that the Brazilians were more talented as individual players, one of the fans behind me said, “What the hell? Brazil is scoring at will!”

Bullshit. Brazil looked scared for good chunks of the first half, until a bad call put the match out of reach. The youngest team in the tournament, Ghana made some serious mistakes – most notably in the first five minutes of the game – but they have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. They played a solid game against the team favored to win the tournament, they showed just how much impact African players are having at the international levels of the game, and they brought a great deal of pride to their nation, and to the people (Ghanaians or otherwise) who love their nation.

Emmanuel Bensah has some great stuff on the Ghana/Brazil match including a video of post-mortem commentary on Ghanaian national TV. Thanks, EKB!

• BBC NEWS | Africa | Ghanaians ecstatic over World Cup win
  “After beating America, Ghana is now a superpower. Now we should get into nuclear enrichment!”
  (tags: africa ghana football)
• The Andijan Uprising, Akramiya and Akram Yuldashev – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
  Another interesting example of video that needs serious contexualizing, ala Witness. Footage from the Andijan uprising in Uzbekistan
  (tags: uzbekistan activism video)

• BBC SPORT | World Cup 2006 Blog | Glorious, glorious Ghana
  BBC’s blogger reveals himself as a hardcore Ghanaphile
  (tags: ghana africa football)
• Wired News: Try Out Bollywood’s Casting Couch
  Want to make it as an actor? if you’re caucasian, one of your best bets might be Bollywood, where foreign actors can do scenes that would be risky and controversial for Indian actors to film
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• ‘Great day for Ghana;’ African nation erupts
  Reactions from Accra on the Ghana victory from the AP
  (tags: ghana football)
• Open the Future: Twelve Things Journalists Need To Know to be Good Futurist/Foresight Reporters
  “The future is usually the present, only moreso” – This, and eleven other smart point from Jamais on understanding futurism
  (tags: futurism worldchanging journalism)

How could someone who’s passionate about connectivity in the developing world be opposed to a fiber-optic cable designed to make bandwidth cheaper in East Africa?

I’ve had to ask myself this question dozens of times in the past couple of years. Fortunately, recent developments on the EASSy (East African Submarine cable System) project have gone a long way to address my reservations about the project and I’m happy to celebrate the recent news that the cable will operate under an Open Access model.

Explaining why open access is important for EASSy requires some background on telecoms in Africa, a topic that’s vastly more interesting than you think, I promise. Hang in there – this stuff is really important:

Historically, sub-Saharan Africa has been connected to the rest of the global Internet via wireless connectivity – large or small satellite dishes that bounce data off geosyncronous satellites to dishes in the US or Europe. The data enters the internet from these off-continent data centers and is transmitted from there to the rest of the world. The one exception to this rule is South Africa, which has had data connections via undersea cables to Europe and the Middle East.

Satellite connectivity has upsides and downsides. On the upside – you can put a dish anywhere in the footprint of a satellite and transmit data – you don’t need to be near the coast to connect to an undersea cable. And you can build your own infrastructure, which is hugely useful in countries where telecommunications is heavily controlled by the government and inadequately developed.

But the downsides are myriad. Satellite connectivity includes a mandatory speed of light delay of roughly half a second per packet, making it difficult to offer real-time services like Voice over IP. (Not that this has stopped countless African entrepreneurs.) Because the internet access terminates on a different continent, it’s likely that two people in the same African city communicating via email are routing their packets through the US, travelling tens of thousands of kilometers out of the way to have a chat across town. (If you’re curious about this, you might check out “Internet Architecture and Institutions“, a teaching document Andrew McLaughlin and I developed years ago to teach people about internet connectivity.) And satellite connectivity, bit for bit, is more expensive than fiberoptic cable connectivity.

Map of undersea cables in use at the end of 2004 – from news.com

Africa took a big step – quite possibly a misstep – forward when the SAT3/WASC/SAFE (South Africa Telecom 3 / West Africa Submarie Cable / South Africa Far East) cable came into operation in 2002. The cable connects eight west African nations to landing points in Spain and Portugal, where it connects to terrestrial cable networks, and to South Africa, where the cable interconnects to the SAFE cable, which terminates in Malaysia.

A stated goal of the SAT-3 cable was the reduction of connectivity costs to nations connected to the cable – costs dropped, but not nearly as sharply as anyone had anticipated. The problem wasn’t a technical one – it was a political and economic one. The consortium of telephone companies that commissioned and built the cable included the dominant telephone companies – usually state-owned monopolies, or recently privatized providers – who determined that access to the cable be limited to consortium members. If I ran a telephone company in Ghana that competed with Ghana Telecom, I had to purchase access to SAT-3 via GT, my competitor… and needless to say, Ghana Telecom did not have a strong incentive to provide me with competitively priced bandwidth or swift service.

Ghana was lucky enough to have a powerful and effective ISP association, GISPA, which helped negotiate more reasonable prices from Ghana Telecom for competitive businesses. Things were more complicated in Nigeria, where upstart Globacom, realizing it couldn’t negotiate with incumbent telco Nitel, and tried to buy a share in the consortium so they could build their own fiber connection to the cable – Nitel blocked this move, and Globacom began looking into building their own cable to London… a phenomenally wasteful and stupid situation, as SAT-3 has tremendous underutilized capacity.

So when plans began to take shape for an East African cable to parallel SAT-3, people involved with African bandwidth issues (all two dozen of us) started making noise about the EASSy business model. Ronald Alden wrote the decisive paper – Just say No to EASSy – arguing that the $200 million project could be a step backwards for Africa as it reinforce the failed cartel model that SAT-3 introduced.

At least two schools of thought developed around EASSy. One suggested that it was important to ensure that universities have a seat at the table to ensure their interests were protected in a cartel situation. This group founded the Ubuntunet Alliance, which seeks high speed broadband connectivity for African universities – Ubuntunet’s plan has been to purchase a stake in the EASSy cable, ensuring affordable broadband for the universities, and increased transparency on the project, as universities would be more likely to share cost and pricing information than private companies.

The other school of thought suggested that pressure be put on international donors not to support the EASSy cable unless any organization could purchase bandwidth from the cable owners. This “open access” approach argued that connectivity was too important for African development to allow a cartel situation to evolve, and attempted to use World Bank and NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) monies to shape the policy.

(These two schools of thought weren’t neccesarily opposed – many people supported open access but thought that Ubuntunet was a wise tactical move…)

According to a recent article by Elias Biryabarema in the Monitor (Kampala), the open access folks have won the day. “Any telecom company or institution” will be able to buy into the cable and access bandwidth, not just companies with “international gateway licenses”, the license granted by a government to companies to engage in international telephone voice traffic.

According to this arrangement, the cable would be owned and operated by the so-called Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)-a company created specifically to manage the network and establish the pricing structure for the bandwidth.

An Intergovernmental Assembly (IGA) is to be formed to regulate the costs that the SPV will be charging user companies.

As always, the devil is in the details – will this IGA price access in a way that small telcos can afford it, or will there be large upfront fees? Will dominant telcos pull out of the agreement for fear that they won’t be able to charge enough money? I’m waiting for Russell Southwood, the dean of Africa telecoms analysts, to weigh in on his Balancing Act newsletter… but in the meantime, I’m happy to cheer this apparent victory in a very important battle that gets basically zero international media coverage.