Daily Times

Reinventing the wheel is
always a disastrous business proposition; there is perhaps more money in a copycat strategy compared to first mover advantage. To venture a guess, the guy who invented the wheel probably was labelled a blooming idiot by other cavemen. Even in recent times examples abound of first mover disadvantage. The internet may have been invented by the military but others made the moolah.
It is not that Pakistanis have been breaking ground. Microfinance in recent times has its roots in the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh while its genesis can arguably be traced back to 15th century Europe. A recent development related to Microfinance, which might also be productive domestically, once again originates in Bangladesh: the Graduation Programme of BRAC. As The Economist aptly puts it: “The poor do not just lack money. They are also often short of basic know-how, the support of functioning institutions and faith in their own abilities. BRAC’s idea was to give those in the graduation programme not just chickens but also training on how to keep them, temporary income support to help them to resist the inevitable temptation to eat them, and repeated visits from programme workers to reinforce the training and bolster participants’ confidence.”
Necessity was the birthplace of mobile banking, although geographically Africa can lay claim to dreaming it up. For the record, M-PESA was originally conceived to reduce cash transfer costs in respect to microfinance loan repayments. Today, the cell phone is the poor man’s bank. Conditional cash transfer programmes on a national basis most likely first began in Mexico. Conditionalities generally include that recipients must send their kids to school and for regular checkups, while mothers attend workshops on nutrition and disease control. The money is always disbursed to the mother on a valid assumption that she is more likely to spend on the family. Unconditional cash transfers perhaps originated in Africa and in 2006 there were studies on the impact of cash transfers on nutrition. All in all, the strategy to learn from successful interventions for the poor has been productive for Pakistan.
In their radical book, Poor Economics, Banerjee and Duflo point out that the social returns of directly investing in children and mothers are tremendous. Amongst all the rest, their suggestions to employ nudges in the fields of nutrition and health make the most sense: free chlorine dispensers at the water source, the village well, rewards such as staple food provisions for immunising children, free administering of de-worming medicines and provision of nutritional supplements at school, public investment in water and sanitation.
Two kilos of lentils and a set of plates might even be a more effective enticement for polio immunisation in Pakistan compared with the option of armed guards with every team. And if eradicating malaria does result in long-term reduction of poverty then increased provision of cheaper nets should be the government’s objective. Changing the timings of government health centres so that they remain open during evenings when the poor come home from labour sounds prescient.
The book was instrumental in solving a particular riddle related to all the television antennas fixed around kachi abadis (slums). According to the authors’ findings, making life less boring and to forget all their troubles even if for a little while is a priority for the poor. In the absence of a television, their spending on festivity increases. More importantly, the consensus was tasty food is desirable when unemployed. When the poor get a chance to spend a little more, they do not get more calories; they get better tasting calories. Apparently, the poor are not very different from the rest of society. Hence, programmes that assume the poor will act rationally or which penalise the poor on assumed wastefulness are barking up the wrong tree.
On education, the authors tackle the question “Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn even when they attend school?” Their answer makes perfect economic sense. Nowhere in the world are children willing to go to school. The poor strategically place all their bets on the child expected to succeed the most: optimisation of meagre resources. Simultaneously, the paucity of good teachers, if such a commodity exists in schools catering for the poor in the first place, ensures that children who fall behind are completely ignored till they drop out or are redirected to remunerative labour to support the family. Specific to Pakistan, even in the case of the most industrious and intelligent child, efforts are made to send him off to the Middle East in the hope of a better future for the entire family. In such a scenario it obviously makes sense to also have more children to hedge the bets.
Programmes where intelligent rural students are engaged to tutor their siblings and other village children might mitigate this curse. Obviously, there are no shortcuts to engaging good teachers and charitable organisations could do a lot of good by designing programmes that pay urban teachers handsomely for periodic stints in public schools in rural areas. Serendipitously, if the government is incapable of operating public schools it is expected to also make a total mess of engaging good teachers on market salaries or voucher schemes to pay for private school. Private charities perhaps are the best option to manage such schemes.
While the objective was not a book review of any sort, as an afterthought, this is an appropriate medium to promote a debate on the ideas assimilated from around the world to alleviate poverty. The plethora of findings and recommendations in the book need careful study and analysis. For instance, in the case of farmers, encouraging the buying of fertilisers in advance, through a voucher that ensures delivery at the time of sowing, right after the harvest when farmers have money in hand, might even be an opportunity for fertiliser companies.
Prudential regulation of the State Bank of Pakistan may require banks, at least the too big to fail kind, to operate bank accounts free of charge and at subsidised minimum costs in poor areas, especially designed to pamper the saving habits of the poor. But for all initiatives for the poor, stringent monitoring for compliance and implementation in letter and spirit is imperative. To the government’s credit it has come up with programmes for the benefit of unemployed youth and has recently announced an ambitious programme to help the farmers. However, execution is where initiatives for the poor are always humbled. If the poor are to be helped, learning how to help them must come first.

The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. He can be reached at syed.bakhtiyarkazmi@gmail.com and on twitter @leaccountant