The Liberian information minister has acknowledged that the ebola outbreak ravaging his country is “overtaxing” the public health system; MSF drops the pretenses and claims the system is “falling apart” (BBC). There are two ways to interpret the current epidemic in the Mano Region: one could argue, as the minister does, that the scale of the crisis is due to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea being on the “frontline” of the disease; or one could argue, taking a step back, that it is the weakness of the Liberian state which has allowed this outbreak to become a full-blown epidemic (the same claim could be made about the inability of Nigeria‘s state elite to educate and protect its citizens in the North). There are many figures being thrown around in the current crisis: but what are the numbers that really matter?
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You can’t escape the KKV
A year and a half into my postdoc/researcher/comms person at ESID, one could take a look at my recent papers and interpret that I have given up on the methodological training that I received as a political science grad student: for the most part I have collected qualitative data and analyzed it in a more narrative than positivist way to make policy points. That is because I have learned that policy research is about persuasion as much as it is about the quality of the evidence. Plus I have wholeheartedly adopted Max Weber‘s philosophy that social science is the purposeful act of organizing the world to address relevant questions.
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Two papers finished this week
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Boardgames
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Enter Doctor Development!
There’s a new hero in the Global South. He hails from the Global North, he’s been trained in the best development studies programs, and the goodness of his intentions is only matched by the sloppiness of his actions: meet Doctor Development! (not a doctor doctor, you know, but he insists people use his title).
I came across a post at CGD today commenting on the new site ForeignAssistance.gov set up by the US government, of which I was completely unaware. When you click on the site you find a seemingly revolutionary web portal containing data on where and with what aims American foreign aid is spent. It is not too different – although a bit more comprehensive and accessible – than DFID‘s own new website. However, I hesitate to celebrate ForeignAssistance.gov as a success: while it does increase the transparency of aid data, it tells citizens disappointingly little about the aid process, much less the actual challenges of development.