Nick Wadhams

No roads, no jobs? Innovate

One more picture from my brief trip to western Uganda.

I came across this scene at the site of a washed out road near Lake Albert. What's happening here? Three guys are rebuilding a dirt road with spades and axes. Looking on is a line of young men who have strung a piece of twine across the road and are demanding cash from anyone who wants to pass. Behind me, out of the picture, is another line of young men to catch people going the other way. Their argument? We take it upon ourselves to fix the road, you pay us for it.

Extortion is one word for it. Necessity is another. This is what happens in a place that has been neglected by the government for decades. There is no infrastructure, and there are no jobs. Until oil was found here a few yaers ago, even driving out to western Uganda from Kampala was a near impossibility.

I'm not sure if this is "community empowerment," "capacity building," or "awareness-raising." But you have to admire these guys for their business sense.

Rhinos on the move

I was up near Mount Kenya this week to cover the relocation of four northern white rhinoceros to Kenya. Here are some pictures.

The plane arrives

Rhinos waiting to be put on trucks

Not sure what to make of this

I spent the day in western Uganda touring the concession where Tullow Oil has drilled wells in search of the black stuff. Tullow has found plenty of what it's looking for, possibly priming Uganda to become Africa's next big oil producer. 

Apropos of very little having to do with oil, this sign, next to a school near the shores of Lake Albert, struck me as curious.

 

Maybe I'm reading too much into a faded old sign, but why would the government feel compelled to note that Nyawaiga Primary School is "government aided?" Aren't all public primary schools government aided?

My theory on this has to do, perhaps oddly, with Uganda's reliance on foreign aid. Outside help makes up more than 40 percent of the country's budget. Everywhere you go, you see signs for schools, clinics, and other services that would be publicly funded in developed countries giving little shout-outs (shouts-out?) to the foreign NGOs or development agencies responsible for their existence.

You might think that the government, not donors, ought to be responsible for providing these services to its citizens, and you'd be right. But the Ugandan government, like many governments in Africa, provides so few of these things to its own people, particularly in rural areas. I suppose the existence of a school building that does not rely on foreign funding is an achievement that the government would want to trumpet.

Uninvolved

Even the U.N. is probably not so linguistically obtuse to have a sign that says "Involved in Africa," but this is still mildly amusing.

Female Condom Redux

In a story for Time.com, I revisited the story of Uganda bringing back the female condom. Partly this was because I got some more interesting reporting after submitting a story I wrote for The Lancet. The big issue for me is this: How much credibility you ought to give nongovernmental organizations that demand a particular initiative? Do they really think that women need the female condom? Or do they see a potential female condom campaign as a source of revenue?

My suspicion in the case of Uganda's female condom initiatve is that it's the latter. It's difficult to imagine a product that is poorer suited to fight HIV/AIDS in Uganda, chiefly because the virus is spreading most quickly among people who have more than one longterm partner. Those are the people least likely to use any form of protection at all.

Now there's more literature coming out that lends credence to something it's impossible to ignore when you're on the ground. Local NGOs are often a way for their founders to make a living, and the altruistic part comes later. The people who run them are entrepreneurs more than anything else, skilled in the ways of grant-writing and development-speak. This has been going on for years and ought to come as no surprise -- one of the key indicators of a charitable group's efficiency these days is the percentage of your donation that actually gets to the person you wanted to help. It is hard to fault someone who has the initiative to make some cash, but as in Uganda's case, the trouble comes when the campaigns they preach may actually hinder development or the fight against HIV/AIDS.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I wait for various strings to publish stories I wrote about jatropha curcas, a wild plant that has been hailed as the next great step in the biofuels revolution. Overzealous advocates of jatropha (who in many cases have a financial stake in the plant's success) persuaded poor farmers to plant jatropha based on claims that would be impossible to meet. It turns out jatropha isn't all it's cracked up to be, and smallholder farmers are the ones paying the price.

New York Review of Books

An old New York Review Of Books story on aid to Africa. It gets a response from Jeffrey Sachs, and Sachs gets a rebuttal from the author whose book was originally reviewed.