Vomit forth!

WARNING!!! One of my favorite high school English teachers told me that the beginning stage of any paper is called the "Vomit Forth!" stage. When you have writer's block, just beginning writing. Let go of your inhibitions and write - anything at all. Scribble down ALL the ideas and arguments that pass through your mind, even if you know they're terrible. The important part is to just write SOMETHING, and eventually you'll happen upon the right argument. In my experience, she is absolutely right. Even my best work has always had to go through this stage.

Let this serve as a warning that this entry is one of THOSE entries.

I reiterate: you've been warned.

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Alas, my dissertation idea has not become more clear or more definite as time has gone on. Instead I just change my mind every 5 minutes. There is just too much that is interesting in the world that I desperately want to investigate!

My recent "ZING!" idea would have had me examining the relationship between NGO prevalence and state capacity/institutional development. This came to me as I reflected on the time I spent in Kenya and Malawi, both countries I view as oversaturated with NGOs (particularly the latter). Many of these NGOs provide public services and essentially replace the state in that regard. I have to wonder, why would any rational state actor be motivated to develop their institutions to better provide such public services as health and education if international NGOs are falling all over themselves to provide those services to their citizenry? Why are some states, such as Malawi and Bangladesh, still so desperately poor after decades of NGO attention? Do they NGOs provide a perverse incentive to the state to further formalize and develop? (Of course, there is also the tried and tired question of, are NGOs reinforcing povery in order to keep themselves in business???) Unfortunately, there is not much empirical evidence out there on this. I instantly run into problems with my methodology -- if I look at a weak state with significant NGO prevalence, I cannot trace the direction of this correlation. Are NGOs there because the state is weak, or is the state weak because the NGOs are there? I feel that if this question were actually answerable, there would be literature out there tackling it. So far I haven't found anything. My spouse and my best friend here at LSE are both extremely excited about this idea and very encouraging, but can't quite point to a solution for the problems that have come up in terms of methodology and data. And I'm certainly in no position to be doing hundreds of regressions and cross-country comparisons in a 10,000 word dissertation. I couldn't even touch the iceberg on this issue, which makes me sad. It's so damn interesting.

I've also been considering looking into the impacts in countries where governments have prohibited informal markets (as in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Malawi). This seems to be a trend in Africa in the past several years, and I cannot really wrap my mind around it. It seems utterly insane for a government to prohibit the livelihoods of 80% of its population, especially when those same governments have such ridiculous requirements for formal business registration. My first assumption is that it makes the lives of the poor that much harder, and black markets that much more clandestine, but maybe that is not the case. Perhaps these governments have softened business registration requirements and the formal market is being strengthened, which would be a good thing -- but I suspect that is not the case. I want to determine the coping mechanisms of the poor under such circumstances.

For one of my classes this week we are examining the role of the private sector in development. So now, of course, I'm interested in Corporate Social Responsibility (and the common opinion on this is that it's a joke -- but I'm interested to see the extent to which this is true), the co-production of development in societies by business + NGOs, and the co-creation of actual business systems by those actors (and the symbiosis developed between profit and non-profit ventures). I've long since thought NGOs were mostly inefficient and ineffective in what they do, and there is still this lingering question in the back of my mind about so-called development which one of my classmates put so well the other day when he exclaimed "If you want to bring someone out of poverty, give them a damn job!" So many think of microfinance as the panacea. We can talk about empowerment, but let's also talk about wage employment and more importantly, CHOICE. Not everyone has the skills to be a self-employed entrepreneur, not everyone wants to, and they shouldn't HAVE to. So in this, where is the role of business? I think it's key, in a lot of respects, yet as I mentioned before the governments of many underdeveloped countries put up insane barriers to new businesses (both local and international). What is their motivation for this, and how can such destructive policies be changed in a non-exploitative fashion? I ask about larger businesses (small to medium enterprises, not necessarily multinationals), because more and more I am entirely unconvinced of the merits of microfinance for many reasons - which I won't go into now, or this will become even more of a tirade.

And then another idea. This morning on the plane (we took a quick last-minute "let's get the hell out of London and go somewhere sunny" trip this weekend) I was talking with my husband about the difficulties of insurance policies in the developing world -- and how very badly the poor need insurance for anything and everything (crop failure, widowhood, livestock, life and health, etc)... and yet insurance companies by their very nature have to deny as many claims as they possibly can. The burden of proof for crop failure is on the client, and at the same time the client could falsely claim crop failure at any time. Insurance is very difficult to do right in such a context, and I am racking my brain for a solution that has not yet come to me. For issues such as health, it's a bit easier with insurance in the form of vouchers -- in Uganda there is a program with malaria vouchers, which allows the poor to buy them when they have the money to use at a later date -- and when they come down with malaria they have protection. But how can insurance be done properly for crop failure and livestock death? This is a huge issue. Any ideas, dear readers?

I'm also interested in the role of adult and informal education, but this is a topic I've researched a lot and have done previous papers on. I kind of want to do something different, yet it is stil one of my biggest passions and perhaps for a dissertation I should focus on exploiting my comparative advantage? ;)


Owww... such topics go round and round in my head and often collide with one another with full force. It's enough to give me a full-on headache, and yet I love it. I have been told by more than one that I am a masochist for doing what I'm doing. But I am so lucky to be here, to be doing what I'm doing, and I would not trade it for another life or line of work for anything in the world.

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And with that, it's time for a beer with the aforementioned friend, Maggie. My friend Dustin recently decided that the answer to any of life's tough questions was "Beer!" I suspect he might be onto something.