Top stories
1 week ago
1 week, 3 days ago
Latest posts
Interview with Water Expert Prof. Asit Biswas
Water pollution in Thailand
Providing clean and safe drinking water remains one of the most important challenges in Asia. Increasing urbanisation, more extreme weather patterns and bad water management practices all add to list of obstacles in the way of supplying clean water, in particular to the poor.
The Asian Trends Monitoring team spoke to Prof. Asit Biswas, one of the world’s leading authorities on water management, about the challenges and solutions available to water utilities in Southeast Asia. We asked him about the main obstacles and the most promising approaches to extending piped water supply to Asia’s slum dwellers. Prof. Biswas stressed that we have to get away from conventional thinking when it comes to solving the global water issues. During the interview he further asserted that:
“Money is not the problem, technology is not the problem, management is not the problem, water availability is not the problem, the problem is us!”
Watch the entire interview below.
BRAC and Microfinance
One of the most high profile, and controversial, poverty alleviation tools in BRAC’s toolbox is microfinance. Simply put, proponents of this method argue that without access to capital, poor communities will never be able to break out of the poverty trap. Since the standard commercial bank will not lend to anyone who cannot produce adequate collateral, and their nearest branch is often hundreds of kilometres away anyway, the only solution is to bring the bank to impoverished rural communities. Detractors argue that the high interest rates charged by microfinance lenders (BRAC says theirs are between 18 and 60) are exploiting those who can least afford to be exploited and the often uneducated lendees have no idea what they getting themselves into. In extreme cases people who are unable to pay back their loans might resort to suicide.
A typical BRAC field office. Not as flashy as the main headquarters in Dhaka, but cost effective and functional.
The slum problem: not as easy as it seems
Slums are a huge issue that cities all over the world continue to struggle with. Even the rapidly growing economies in Asia are struggling to deal with what seems to be an inevitable consequence of that growth. People are rapidly migrating to cities in search of better lives and livelihoods, causing a great strain on the supply of housing. As housing prices rise and available supply falls, the poor are forced to build makeshift settlements which are often lacking in basic necessities such as water, electricity and sanitation, and are usually illegal.
A slum in East Jakarta. Photo credit: Jonathan McIntosh
One might wonder why it has been so difficult to deal with the problem. After all, if the problem is poor living conditions, isn’t it enough for governments, housing developers or charitable organizations to build more homes with living conditions that are deemed acceptable? Shouldn’t mass public housing projects be an effective way to solve the slum problem once and for all?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are several layers of complexity that have caused these solutions to fail and the slums to persist.
1. Misunderstood priorities
Modern day slavery in Southeast Asia: an uncomfortable reality
Daniel offering his insight to LKY students on working with and for migrant workers
Last week we had an inspiring visit from Daniel Lo, the Country Manager for the Malaysian arm of the Coalition to Abolish Modern Day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA). CAMSA is a relatively young organization, formed in February 2008 through the joint efforts of BPSOS (formerly known as Boat People SOS), and the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) in Frankfurt Germany. CAMSA international members now consist of BPSOS, ISHR, the Vietnamese Canadian Federation and Tenaganita in Malaysia. CAMSA’s mission is to rescue and protect trafficking victims, punish traffickers through economic and legal measures, and engage in advocacy with the governments of source and destination countries to enact and enforce anti-trafficking laws and policies. They now count four bases in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, focusing on labor trafficking elimination and refugee protection. Daniel is a partner at his law firm and he also takes care of the operations and management of CAMSA – the only anti-trafficking coalition working in Malaysia.
Mega-trend urbanization: how will the urban poor slog through?
A slum in Manila during flooding, courtesy of Jörg Dietze
Rapid growth for the past twenty years has pushed Asian urbanisation to unprecedented levels. While this growth lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, it did not create livable cities. Urban centers in Asia are often home to millions of poor migrants who sought a better life in the city and now live under precarious conditions in urban slums.
Asia’s urban population has grown from 31.5 per cent of the total in 1990 to 42.2 per cent in 2010. While China’s urban population recently outnumbered its rural population, the 50 % mark for all of Asia will likely be exceeded in the year 2026. Estimates predict that Asia’s urban population is increasing by 44 million people every year. One of the mega challenges for the so-called “Asian century” is intra-country inequity according to a book by the Asian Development Bank with the pompous title: Asia 2050 Realizing the Asian Century. By 2050, the report states, “Asia will be transformed as its urban population doubles from 1.6 billion to 3.1″. This massive urbanisation trend will impose unbeknownst pressures on local governments and create enormous governance challenges. Already today, growing inequality is taking a toll and creating a divide between Asia’s rich and privileged and its poor populations.
A month with the world’s largest NGO
The view from the top of BRAC's headquarters. Slums and luxury apartments exist side by side in Downtown Dhaka.
Dhaka is a flat city in a flat country. Sitting smack dab in the middle of the Ganges Delta which makes up much of Bangladesh, there are no hills or other natural geographic features to orient the visitor. Even Singapore with its 163.63 meter tall Bukit Timah has more geographic variety.
More tellingly, other than a couple of large hotels with familiarly generic names, the capital city of the world’s eighth most populous country is almost completely lacking in the corporate skyscrapers which are almost synonymous with East Asia’s modern metropolises. Forty years after becoming an independent country, this country of 142 million still has difficulty attracting large scale foreign investment.
Fittingly, one of the few tall buildings that manages to rise above the perpetual chaos of Dhaka’s street life belongs to BRAC, generally considered to be the world’s largest, and possibly most businesslike, NGO. In the developed world NGOs usually exist in the background, occupying a few square meters wherever they can find the cheapest office space. In Bangladesh they can occupy an entire office complex, complete with hotel, several restaurants, and an adjacent university.
Migration and money: new evidence from RCTs
I am <nearly almost> never disappointed with the blog updates from the David Mackenzie, one of my favourite World Bank bloggers who happens to be incredibly active on the migration and development impact evaluation scene. If you’ve not yet signed up to this blog and you have an interest in these issues I heartily recommend it for a daily dose of food for thought in your inbox. This one post alone highlights the results of several randomized evaluations that deals with questions like:
How accurately do potential migrants predict income earned abroad? Not very according to David and co-authors. They find that migrants under-estimate anticipated income, because of placing too much emphasis on the negative employment experiences of already-abroad migrants and possibly the under-reporting of incomes by migrants “who may be trying to moderate remittance demands by understating incomes”.
More from David, who takes advantage of a natural experiment via a lottery program allowing a select number of Tongan migrants to New Zealand every year to assess the impact of migration on mental health and child health.
The 100 Best NGOs – but where’s Southeast Asia?
The Global Journal has published a list of the Top 100 NGOs according to their definitions, and research criteria. The list is topped by the Wikimedia Foundation, followed by Partners in Health, Oxfam, BRAC and the International Rescue Committee. Unsurprisingly, the list is dominated by US organisations (37), followed by UK (14), Switzerland (9) and France (4); Rest of the world (29). Southeast Asia is sparsely represented: There is Digital Divide Data, a social enterprise from Cambodia, Friends-International, an INGO also based in Cambodia, and the Population and Community Development Association from Thailand.
This new ranking is supposed to represent the top 100 leading actors of the non-profit world:
The first international ranking of its kind, this exclusive in-depth feature will no doubt stimulate debate, while providing academics, diplomats, policymakers, international organizations and the private sector an insight into the ever changing dynamics and innovative approaches of the non-profit world and its 100 leading actors.
In his blog A view from the cave, Tom Murphy raises a few important questions:
- What indicators are used to produce the ranking? (staff size? funding? no. of projects?)
- Why is the ranking methodology not published in detail?
