FortySouth

A curious observation from performance data released yesterday by the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) of the 2008 edition of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE):

Notice the massive drop in males obtaining the grade A in the exam – a drop from 806 in 2007 to 489 in 2008. For kicks you could throw in the 770 from 2006 to establish a plummeting trend. Well, this offset is balanced out by a stacking of the C- to E brackets.

What caused the drop?

There’s no empirical data to support this yet, but I suspect there were two contributory factors: the post-election violence and incidences of school’s unrest over the last year.

Unfortunately the statistical data provided does not detail the performance breakdown by province as well, which would have provided more insight on the probable effect of Post-Election Violence (PEV), which seemed to have affected some provinces (read: Central, Rift Valley, Nyanza) more than others.

What else could have caused such a drop anyway?

Following the International Criminal Court’s issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, a number of major aid agencies in the region have been sent packing by the Government.

The agencies include:

• Medecines sans Frontieres (MSF)
• Oxfam International
• International Rescue Committee

Dr. Christophe Fournier, the International President of MSF warned of the fragility of the relief situation in the region in a statement from the organization:

“The order to expel MSF from Darfur is a dramatic turn of events that will have unprecedented consequences for the people of the region. Much of the population of Darfur is totally dependent on international humanitarian aid..

The sudden halt of our medical programs, including vital surgical, nutrition, and basic healthcare programs, in large areas of Darfur will have an immediate and devastating impact on the population.”

I imagine that this scenario had been simulated by the ICC in the rendering of their decision. This development vastly complicates the situation – the African Union has vowed not to enforce the arrest warrant after a meeting on Thursday to discuss ICC’s ruling, meaning that President al-Bashir will continue to roam a free man for who knows how long; on the other hand, thousands upon thousands of Sudanese in the Darfur region face starvation and widespread disease due to lack of proper medical attention.

So question is, who now plays the next hand? The AU won’t budge, the US is not a signatory to the Rome Treaty and the ICC has no police force of its own!

What now, is the response to the deteriorating situation in Darfur?

Dambisa Moyo (bio) is an economist from Zambia who argues in her new book, Dead Aid, that African nations need to stop receiving aid from their developmental partners to spur economic growth and entrepreneurship.

This critique of foreign aid to African nations is neither new nor without merit – more recently Andrew Mwenda at TED Africa spoke audaciously against more aid as being the panacea to Africa’s economic problems.

Is all aid and charity “bad”? I don’t think so because there are many humanitarian programs that can be effectively run on a larger scale by NGO’s with external funding than most Governments have the capacity or resources for – resettlement, rebuilding, food supply. Indeed as she notes in her diary on the Financial Times of a recent visit to Rwanda:

Following Kagame’s lead, Rwanda is already obsessed with turning the “no-aid” development theory into a reality. This is not to say that the country does not use aid, nor that all of the country’s aid programmes have been wholly ineffective (some argue that the country has managed to eradicate malaria using aid programmes).

If not more aid, then what can be done to encourage economic growth and wealth creation (via NYT)?

If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations?
Microfinance. Give people jobs.

But what if you just want to donate, say, $25?
Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.

I think that in the absence of political will, the effort to wean African nations from their gross dependence on foreign aid to govern is significantly hampered. Foreign aid comprises perhaps 70%, if not more, of many African nation’s annual budgets. It goes without saying that such over dependence of foreign assistance stifles local entrepreneurship.

Admittedly, this is not a problem that will go away overnight – going from 70% dependency to, say 40%, will probably take years. What is important is that the process begins and that movement is in that direction.

The end of the fiscal year is nigh and the Budget season is upon us. The composition of this years budgets will indeed be indicative of the trend for the next couple of years.