The Monfort Plan is a modest proposal that describes the new architecture of capitalism. Jonathan Swift wrote his Modest Proposal in 1729, in which he identified three classes of readers: the superficial, the ignorant and the learned. According to Swift “the superficial reader will be strangely provoked to laughter”, whereas “the ignorant reader will find himself disposed to stare”. For years the diagnose of extreme poverty targeted Swift’s truly learned readers and forgot the superficial and the ignorant.

In a recent article on This is Africa, Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs wondered if the world leaders would be “brave enough to invent new programmes and institutions that have the legitimacy and commitment to pull the world through this crisis to a fairer and more sustainable future”. A new architecture is the only path to the world of 2050, a world of cornucopia (food abundance) and eutopia (universal welfare). A new architecture is the only approach to building up new programs and institutions that have Sachs’ legitimacy.

Extreme poverty continues to perpetuate because we have failed to eliminate its causes. Extreme poverty is originated and perpetuated because developed countries have failed to reform in six areas that represent the Axis of Feeble, an Axis that has to be defeated in an intellectual war with Weapons of Mass Persuasion. The six components of the Axis of Feeble are agriculture, trade and labor rights, small arms trade, extractive industries, financial architecture and brain drain.

Past wars defeated the Axis Powers and current wars aim at defeating the Axis of Evil. Past and current wars had to identify and defy the enemy and the opposition forces to be defeated. The Axis of Feeble is maintained and perpetuated by the Pirates of Heartless Capitalism and the Bretton Woods Elites, who will use their propaganda tools to oppose a paradigm shift.

In the first part of his autobiography, the American diplomat George F. Kennan pointed out that “We of this generation did not create the civilization of which we are part and, only too obviously, it is not we who are destined to complete it. We are not the owners of the planet we inhabit; we are only its custodians”. The Axis of Feeble will not be defeated unless all custodians become passengers of a Journey of no return, and not simple spectators.

My forthcoming book may be appealing to the truly learned readers. We must all become passengers of the Journey of our lifetime. The Monfort Plan is designed having in mind every audience. It proposes new content with the ability to entertain every audience. It is through entertainment that the average citizen in Europe and North America can be educated in issues that are vital for the future of our planet and the humankind. It is through education that the average citizen can raise his or her level of awareness. Only if we, as a society, raise our level of awareness, will we welcome reform in the six components of the Axis of Feeble.

For decades we lived with an architecture that played its role, an architecture that has become a caricature of what it once was, a vintage architecture not designed for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

We live the best world we have ever inhabited. We are approaching our tipping point as a global society. We must become men and women of stature. I identified the One Hundred Expert Dreamers that will become the best team of experts that has ever been put together to serve the global public interest. With their combined wisdom and intellectual strength the Expert Dreamers will defeat the Axis of Feeble and the Pirates of Heartless Capitalism.

We are not the dwellers of the blue planet, only its custodians. We must recuperate the courage of the visionaries of the 1940s and 1950s who created an architecture that changed the world for good. The Expert Dreamers are the disciples of Marshall and Truman, of Clayton and Kennan, of Monnet and Schuman. The orthodox thinkers and the current political leaders condemned the imagination and creativity in the policy-making process to perpetuate in the cage of the orthodox. We must start living a life in full color. We must again love and dream. The Sleeping Beauty must wake up and embrace the forgotten continent. The American friends will fall in love, one more time, with the Sleeping Beauty.

It is time. It is our time. Let’s move ahead.

Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort is Author of The Monfort Plan (Wiley Finance, April 2010). More information can be found at http://themonfortplan.com

By David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers and Michael Woolcock

Earlier this week the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ won an extraordinary eight Academy Awards, including for best film and best director. Set in the teeming slums of Mumbai, India, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ provides a moving account of a poor orphaned teenager’s quest for recognition and dignity, overcoming numerous obstacles en route to winning the grand prize on a lucrative game show, and in the process the heart of his true love. It’s a well-made and uplifting film; we applaud its success, and extend our sincere congratulations to all those involved in its production. But to the extent the film draws its moral force and emotional energy from its context, what can ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ teach us about slums? More generally, what are the strengths and limitations of cinematography as a medium for conveying complex realities about the causes and experience of mass poverty?

As with most successful films, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ works to the extent it is able to tell a captivating story, in this case drawing on timeless themes of love and yearning, of taking great risks, and enduring injustice and overcoming discrimination, in order to realize one’s heart’s desire. For the central protagonist Jamal Malik, however, the stakes are raised even higher, given his lowly circumstances and lack of education, which make it not only highly unlikely that he will ever have the means or opportunity to extract himself from the squalor of the slum, but more importantly, that he is powerless to prevent his beloved Latika from being taken away, first by a slum pimp, and then by a crime lord. After years of searching fruitlessly for her, she is tantalisingly taken away from him again just as they are about to be reunited. Not knowing how to get back in touch with her, he tries out for the Indian equivalent of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’, which he knows she will be watching. In an improbable—but ‘bizarrely plausible’—manner, Jamal overcomes the odds and wins the show, thereby reconnecting with Latika.

In the end, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is of course just a film, and makes no claim to be a work of social science or a ‘representative’ account of the causes and consequences of living in a slum. But for most western cinema-goers, however, such films—like ‘City of Joy’ and ‘City of God’ before it—are a rare chance to see a portrayal of the circumstances encountered by tens of millions of poor people in developing countries every day. To this extent, even if such films are primarily concerned with entertainment and profit-making in less than a two-hour timeframe—and mainly follow a neat, conventional and arguably quite conservative narrative arc of struggle and ultimate redemption that inherently appeals to emotion (as opposed to ‘empirical evidence’) and often works via crude individualistic juxtapositions (good guys vs. bad) —they arguably nevertheless offer some insight into the lives of others living elsewhere, which can only be a good thing. The question, then, is whether they can be said to convey an accurate picture of slum life.

In this regard, although we are far from being film experts, we have collectively spent many years studying slum life up close in Latin America, South Asia, and—to a lesser extent—the Caribbean. In our view, films such as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’—perhaps more so than any other medium—give outsiders a rare sense of the vibrant energy, frenetic pace and ‘ordered chaos’ of life among the poor in urban settlements. Carefully done, such films can provide instructive insights on the precarious state of many slum dwellers’ lives (i.e., the constant threat of conflict, illness, the confiscation of precious assets), of the immense influence wielded by the powerful, of the paradoxical role played by the police (simultaneously part of the problem and solution), and yet also the full range of emotions that the inhabitants of slums endure like any human being—from abundant joy and hope to relentless grief and enduring sadness. If these features seem contradictory, then that is just another feature of slum life. Good novels, such as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, stress precisely these issues, but rely on the power of imagination to concoct scenes that are far removed from most readers’ own direct experience; a good film—even when its screenplay is adapted from a novel, as is the case of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, based on Vikas Swarup’s Q & A—can convey that reality like none other.

Cinema-goers should not think, however, that films such as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ provide a full account of why poor people are poor (‘it is fated’) or a basis on which to respond to it (‘get motivated, take a chance’). Unlike the questions on game-shows such as ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, the answers to questions pertaining to grinding urban poverty can’t sensibly be reduced to multiple choice options. The existence of slums is not merely the product of individual actions writ large, but large structural forces of industrialization, inequality, politics and migration writ small. How, why and the extent to which these forces play out in different regions, countries, and states is properly the subject of detailed historical and social scientific analysis. There is no single ‘answer’ as to what can be done to enhance the welfare of slum dwellers, but neither is social science mute or indifferent. Guaranteed work programmes, identity registration schemes, securing property rights, citizen report cards to enhance service delivery, micro-credit systems, innovative criminal justice facilities and the involvement of the poor in urban design are all responses that have made a constructive difference in the lives of slum dwellers, in part because they are more often than not context-specific responses to a deeply complex problem.

The success of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is a signature accomplishment for the British film industry, and should be recognized and celebrated as such. But it should also be encouraged and applauded as a form of artistic representation that raises peoples’ general awareness of how millions of poor people live. Such awareness is not only important in its own right but also because it is part of the process by which broad political constituencies for change are forged. The issue is thus not whether ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ has represented urban poverty ‘better’ than social scientific or policy-oriented analysis, but rather how different kinds of knowledge convey different kinds of issues for different kinds of audiences. A judicious integration of popular and formal representation can be the basis of both enlightening entertainment and solid public policy.

By Richard Heeks

If you had to choose three words to sum up the future of ICT4D, they might well be “mobiles, mobiles, mobiles”. And the way to that future is being more clearly indicated as the promise of mobiles-for-development research comes to fruition; reflected, for example, in the recent 1st “m4d” international research conference.

But such research is starting to throw up some perplexing – even worrying – findings about mobiles. At its bluntest, such research suggests mobiles are doing more economic harm than good, and sometimes making poor people poorer. Let’s have a look:-

a) Kurt DeMaagd’s “Pervasive versus Productive” paper analyses country-level data on mobiles and national productivity as measured by GDP. He finds that, short-term, there is a negative association between investment in mobiles and GDP in developing countries, possibly because “mobiles represent a diversion of resources away from other productive uses”.

b) Kathleen Diga’s “Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction” dissertation (Ch.5) shows at the micro-level that some rural Ugandan households are sacrificing expenditure on purchased food (e.g. sugar, milk, flour) so they can pay for mobile airtime. This includes households that “admit to some days of hunger in order to maintain the mobile phone”. They are also diverting savings into mobile phone purchase and saving for airtime by foregoing attendance at social functions.

c) Hosea Mpogole, Hidaya Usanga and Matti Tedre’s “Mobile Phones and Poverty Allevation” paper at the m4d conference researches mobile use in rural Tanzania. “48% of respondents reported that they sometimes substitute important needs (e.g. education, buying food, and clothes) for mobile phone ownership/usage”. Modal monthly costs of mobile phone maintenance and use were US$10-20: around 30% of respondents’ monthly income. And, in a digital variant on the workload of water-carrying in rural Africa, many respondents were undertaking 3-7 kilometer walks 2-3 times per week in order to recharge their mobile batteries.

Very interesting research. To which one might offer four responses.

First, I find all three pieces of research to be credible. However, one should always mine into research methods: what exactly is being measured; exactly what questions are being asked, and what answers might respondents think they are being asked to give; what is the sample size; what assumptions are built into calculations; is the difference between correlation and causation recognised?

Second, we have research evidence of mobiles increasing incomes of the poor such as the studies on Keralan fishermen or Heather Horst and Daniel Miller’s work on mobiles in Jamaica or (from a mobiles-as-tools-of-production not tools-of-consumption perspective) studies of “umbrella people” and GrameenPhone operators. We also have evidence of mobiles saving costs for the poor e.g. work on the informal sector in Nigeria.

Third, there is a bigger picture that this research recognises. DeMaagd notes that, longer-term, mobile-associated GDP downticks seem to be replaced by upticks as “learning and integration with business processes” take place. Diga echoes this macro-level explanation at the micro-level: households see short-term sacrifices as investments that will provide longer-term security and opportunity.

Fourthly, we need to explain a surprising finding in Mpogole et al’s work. Less than 15% of mobile phone owners interviewed stated that the benefits of owning a mobile phone justified the costs. Um . . . so if you believe that guys, why on earth do you own a mobile?

Diga’s research offers some insight but we can get much more from Harsha de Silva, Ayesha Zainudeen and Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara’s paper (earlier version as: “Teleuse on a Shoestring“) that looked at mobile use in poor communities in five Asian countries.

The most negative explanation is that mobiles represent one more step in the ingestion of the poor by the consumer society. They are sacrificing food for (potentially economically-valueless) status and an identity of modernity, youth, urbanicity, etc that they believe mobile ownership brings.

Mobile owners may also be associating questions about financial benefits with direct, enterprise-based income generation via mobile: something that only a few achieve as yet. They may thus set aside from their cost-benefit calculations the so-far key financial impact: savings from substitution of journey costs.

And finally, most research tells us that the poor are using mobiles for social more than business purposes. This, again, they may set aside from their cost-benefit calculations. Yet a) the social benefits, such as knowledge that help can be at hand in an emergency, are often highly rated when asked about directly; and b) there is no easy separation in reality of the social and the economic: social networks are often utilised by the poor to maintain or generate financial flows such as remittances or help during a crisis.

I think my overall conclusion (apart from the obvious: more research needed) would be two-fold:

- Setting aside the possibility of irrationality, the significant amounts being spent by the poor on mobiles indicate that phones have a significant value to the poor. But that value is some rather complex mix of the financial, the economic, the psychological, the social and the symbolic.

- For some poor consumers, the financial benefits of mobiles outweigh the costs. For some poor consumers they do not. But we have long known (e.g. via the livelihoods framework) that “poverty” is not just about money and, hence, that poverty interventions and tools can usefully target more than just financial benefits.

What we see here, then, is not an argument to try to slam on the mobile brakes. At most, we have an argument to invest more in sharing or building innovative uses of mobiles that are more directly connected to income generation.

Bangladesh is one of the countries that will be worst affected by climate change. Rising sea and coastal water levels and more frequent storms threaten this low-lying country. Adapting Bangladesh to climate change is urgent – especially to prevent the reversal of recent progress in poverty reduction there.

An excellent set of pictures on the theme of climate change in Bangladesh can be seen at the BBC here.

BWPI will be undertaking with BRAC a new research programme on climate change and its implications for poverty in Bangladesh. Watch this space over the coming months. In the meantime check out the BWPI and CPRC working paper series for more on Bangladesh.

BWPI Chair and Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz has a new documentary just out. ‘Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz’ is a hard-hitting look at globalization. Joe takes two journeys. His own journey began in Gary, Indiana. The documentary returns to his hometown to see what shaped his thinking. It then heads across the world, taking in Botswana, Ecuador, India and China. It weaves together the social and economic effects of globalization, recommending ways to manage it for the good of all.

If you are in New York you can catch it at the Lincoln center this Wednesday (3 December).

In the meantime, check out Joe’s interview with Alex Jones on YouTube on his book The Three Trillion Dollar War: the True Cost of the Iraq War, with Linda Bilmes. And Joe on the sub prime crisis on CNBC.

That’s the way Larry Elliott in The Guardian sums up the donors lack of urgency in meeting the MDGs. Commenting on the just released UNESCO Education for All report, he writes:

“… donor countries can talk the talk but not walk the walk. According to the Unesco study, the aid required for even the most basic primary education provision in poor countries is US$11 bn (£7.2bn) a year. In 2006, spending amounted to around $4bn, leaving a funding gap of $7bn. To put that figure into context, it is around 10% of what Britain spent this autumn recapitalising the banking system”.

Maybe they will walk the walk at the UN Financing for Development summit now underway in Doha. But I wouldn’t hold your breath. “When financial systems fail, the consequences are highly visible and governments act,” concluded UNESCO’s Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura. He added “When education systems fail the consequences are less visible, but no less real”.

I would add that education is the only investment you can be sure of getting at least some return on – provided it’s of good quality and children complete a minimum of 4 years primary education. Well-educated people earn more in the labour market, and find it easier to absorb new technologies and methods when they run micro-enterprises and farms. Education is a means to break the inter-generational transmission of chronic poverty (see this CPRC study for Bangladesh).

And even if it didn’t raise income much – which might be the case in economies that are growing only slowly – it certainly improves health status, especially of children, when mothers are educated. Educated mothers are 50% more likely to immunize their children than mothers with no schooling (go here). Gender inequality in education has high costs for both the family and society (see this IFPRI study).

So the chronic underfunding of education reminds me of that old quotation: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

World economic turmoil sets the scene for the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Doha (29 November to 2 December), the most important conference on this topic since the UN’s conference in Monterrey back in 2002. Go here for UN updates.

The last quarter of 2008 has seen a lot of talk-talk on development finance. The long-awaited High Level Forum on aid effectiveness was held in Accra in September as well as the UN’s high level event on the MDGs in New York. Calling an event ‘high-level’ lets the international community claim that progress has been made – just by getting senior people together in one place.

What will Doha bring? Can it make headway against the very strong currents now running through the global financial system? Will rich country donors be able to afford aid? On this and other issues see my WIDER Angle article with George Mavrotas – Development Finance: New Opportunities for Doha. We explore the topic further in our new UNU-WIDER book Development Finance in the Global Economy: The Road Ahead (Palgrave).

In my recent post on Sorious Samura’s programme for Panorama on BBC One – an expose of aid to Africa, in particular to Sierra Leone and Uganda – I said we would come back on whether Uganda is experiencing a negative impact from the aid flows.

Remember the issue is whether foreign aid to Uganda is deterring export production via a “Dutch Disease” effect. If so, then aid is having perverse effects, hindering rather than helping economic growth.

How does this work?

Short explanation: A capital inflow like foreign aid raises domestic demand. This pushes up domestic prices and, if the exchange rate is not fixed by the government, the currency tends to appreciate as well (a shilling buys more dollars). Hence: exporting is less profitable and imports are cheaper (putting pressure on domestic producers of import-substitutes – for example domestic food crops suffer competition from cheaper food imports). Result: economic growth falls.

(Long explanation: The money is spent on two types of goods and services. First, non-tradables, that is items whose prices are mainly determined by domestic supply and demand. The price of a haircut in Kampala for example. Haircuts aren’t internationally traded. Second, tradables. These are goods and services whose prices are driven by international markets. The price of Uganda’s coffee, for example (Uganda is a ‘price-taker’ in commodity markets: some countries are big enough exporters to affect world prices – Saudi Arabia and oil, for example). A demand expansion caused by a capital inflow tends to push up the prices of non-tradables more than tradables, because the former are less-responsive (more inelastic, as economists say) in supply. The ratio of non-tradable prices relative to tradables prices rises, making it more profitable to produce the former. If the exchange rate is flexible – i.e. the central bank doesn’t fix it as a matter of policy – then it tends to appreciate as well. This adds to the appreciation of the real exchange rate that is caused by the rise in domestic prices as non-tradables prices outpace tradables prices. Result: people give up producing tradables such as coffee and move into the non-tradables sector, and growth falls).

Aid is not the only capital inflow that might cause this. The term Dutch Disease was first coined (and is most often used) to describe the impact of a natural resource windfall (natural gas in the case of 1970s Netherlands). Nigeria and other oil exporters suffered catastrophically from Dutch Disease in the 1970s when oil prices boomed (resulting in a severe contraction in Nigeria’s agriculture, a highly tradable sector).

However, much depends on what aid (or oil revenue) is used for. If it finances infrastructure construction, and if this is the right kind of infrastructure, then aid will have a supply-expanding effect. This could be of sufficient scale to offset any Dutch Disease effect (or the latter might be evident for a while until the infrastructure is built and then productivity effect kicks in: see Chris Adam and David Bevan).

So much for the theory. What about Uganda? The country has certainly had a large injection of aid, which has a big budgetary impact (see Martin Brownbridge and Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile). An IMF study, by Mwanza Nkusu argues that Dutch Disease does not necessarily occur – especially when the economy has unused capacity (which is typical of countries like Uganda recovering from civil war). So the academic jury is still out.

What does recent data tell us? Economic growth was just under 10 per cent over 2007-08 according to a recent IMF staff mission to Uganda. Exports grew by 50 per cent over the same period. The Fund expects both to fall – the result of the global financial crisis that is weakening commodity prices (go here). Uganda is dealing with high inflation (core inflation is 14.5 per cent) – but this is more the result of the run-up (until recently) in global energy and food prices. The shilling has depreciated, not appreciated, recently. So, no indication of aid having Dutch Disease effects: the shilling is down, not up, and exports are up, not down.

But certainly the economy faces a tricky adjustment as it responds to the global economic shock of the last 6 months (true of all low-income, primary-commodity dependent, economies).

Whatever the other effects of aid on Uganda (whether it is being well spent, whether it targets the poor effectively etc.) there does not seem to be a Dutch Disease effect – at least recently. Perhaps more worrying is the potential Dutch Disease effect of the oil revenues that come on stream next year. If Uganda can manage oil well then it will be the first country in Africa to do so. Now that would be an achievement.

Tony Addison is Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester.

You can rely on Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-89, to go against the conventional wisdom (see his views on climate change here and here, for example). He’s certainly not a member of the “we’re all Keynesians now” group. In today’s FT he argues that monetary policy is the key tool, not fiscal stimulus. Keynes was wrong:

“Britain … recovered faster than any other major nation from the 1930s slump. It did so largely on the basis of cheap money and a balanced budget. Between the slump’s deepest point, in 1932, and 1937 the UK economy grew at an unprecedented 4½ per cent a year. Nor was this due to rearmament spending, which did not start until 1936″.

I await the comments of economic historians on his reading of the 1930s. For the moment let me focus on his central message.

Lawson argues that recapitalizing the banks is the priority. Certainly, deleveraging by the banks has been huge. Nobody can deny that the economy can’t move again until the banks are sorted out. They are the achilles heel of the battered Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. Today Citgroup got a $300 bn bailout.

But is this enough? It won’t be if deflation sets in. Then the real value of debt will rise, which will punish Britain’s already highly indebted households. Once deflationary expectations take hold, they are very difficult to shift as Japan in the 1990s demonstrated. Then monetary policy becomes next to useless: interest rates cannot be cut below zero.

Not using fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending is therefore enormously risky. For sure, consumers might save rather than spend (see my previous post). And Britain will face a big tax bill (after the next election). The gilts market might take fright, but for now they are buying (few want equities).

Back to the lessons Lawson draws from the 1930s: if Britain was to revert to a balanced budget then it would have to cut public spending in a recession rather than raise it. This would have its own deflationary effect which, as economic activity fell, would reduce the tax base – thereby requiring a further expenditure cut to maintain a balanced budget. This is not a recipe for achieving economic recovery.

So, Nigel Lawson’s defiance of the Keynesian consensus is brave, but wrong. His recommendation is too risky. The same goes for doing nothing about climate change (on the latter: go here for a debate between Lawson and Oliver Letwin).

Tony Addison is Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester.

Internationally acclaimed film maker Sorious Samura has a critical article on aid on the BBC News web site in advance of his Panorama programme on aid to Sierra Leone and Uganda – which is broadcast tonight (see our post a few days ago). He writes:

“Where I come from in West Africa, we have a saying: “A fool at 40 is a fool forever”, and most African countries have now been independent for over 40 years. Most are blessed with all the elements to help compete on a global stage….. And yet today, my continent, which is home to 10% of the world’s population, represents just 1% of global trade. I have no doubt we have to take responsibility for our failures. We can’t afford to keep playing the blame game. But when 50 years of foreign aid has failed to lift Africa out of poverty, could corruption be the reason?”

Much of what he says hits the nail on the head. Corruption has been pervasive, and the Rich World must take its share of the blame – for everyone taking a bribe, there is someone giving. And ‘grand corruption’ has been spectacularly rampant in Africa’s oil sector (see EITI here). My IDPM Colleague, Sarah Bracking, has a new book out on corruption and development and what is being done to reduce it (go here).

One point that I do take issue with in Sorious Samura’s article is his view that Uganda is being crippled by what economists term ‘Dutch Disease’, resulting from large aid inflows:

“Large inflows of foreign currency push up the value of the Ugandan shilling making its agricultural and manufactured goods less price competitive. This results in fewer exports and less home-grown, sustainable earnings for the country. Local entrepreneurs such as coffee growers and flower exporters should be cashing in on rising food and commodity prices across the globe at the moment, but they are finding themselves crowded out of their own economy by foreign aid dollars”.

Maybe, but I would like to see hard evidence of this in Uganda’s case. Aid also funds infrastructure investment which, when well-designed, reduces the costs of production, marketing and transport. This raises the profitability of businesses that use the infrastructure. This can more than offset the disincentive to export production resulting from the currency appreciation that Samura worries about, making exporting more profitable, not less, after aid.

As I said it has to be well-designed aid. Aid that simply goes to raising consumption won’t do the trick (although if it is consumption of the poor – including humanitarian aid – then I worry less). And nobody doubts that Africa needs a lot more infrastructure – partly to change the pattern of infrastructure that was created to serve the colonial economy. That pattern still dominates much of Africa 40 years on. Disadvantaged regions, in which chronic poverty is high, especially need better transport infrastructure. Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist, quotes a study that road transport in Francophone Africa is six times more expensive than in Pakistan.

So, I look forward to tonight’s Panorama programme. Sorious Samura will be rightly hard-hitting. We can’t tolerate corruption. And we need well-designed and well-implemented aid. In the meantime, I shall be reading up about Uganda’s aid programme, and whether “Dutch Disease” has been a problem. If you have some suggestions, do please send them along.

Tony Addison is Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester.