A research stereotype: Einstein at his blackboard

Or do you think about the kind of exciting, innovative initiatives and companies – TED, Google and the DFID-funded "What's Your Bright Idea?" contest spring to mind - that have broken down our preconceptions and shown us how thrilling it can be when creative research is put into extraordinary action?

I've been thinking a lot about the latter after going last month to review a DFID-funded programme in Mozambique.

The Africa Community Access Programme (AFCAP) researches how to use local materials and improved techniques in order to make roads cheaper to build and easier to maintain.

A demonstration site I visited in Mozambique, showing how research can directly impact on the quality of the projects we deliver

I visited some fascinating demonstration sites, where each kilometre tested a different blend of materials and techniques. With much of the country's Route 1 running along the coast, the project was trying out different ways of using sand to construct high-quality roads.

The goal of this kind of research isn't just to build something at a lower cost. It has impacts for real people – including the poorest and most vulnerable. It means that traders can transport goods and access markets more cheaply, and children, mothers and the elderly can access schools and hospitals more easily.

In Mozambique, we saw that a number of small- and medium-sized enterprises had sprung up along the roads. Better, more long-lasting housing is being built. And people are expanding the size of the fields they're cultivating because they can get their goods to market.

While the initial investments in research are relatively small, the returns on those investments can be enormous – with tens of thousands of kilometres of roads being built and maintained differently across Africa, saving millions of dollars, and improving the lives of tens of millions of people.

We calculated that the rate of return to our investment in AFCAP in Mozambique will be 30-60%. That's like investing $100 and getting $130-160 back a year later. You won't find those kinds of rates for savings and investments in the current climate.

DFID is at the cutting edge of this kind of research. We recently won 'Best Technological Breakthrough' at the Climate Week Awards for a project to develop drought-tolerant maize in Africa. You can find out more, and access information about research funded by DFID, at our Research For Development site.

So now when I think about research, I think about the peri peri seller I met on the road to Inhambane who has customers coming past all day long, all year round. Not a wild-haired professor in sight.

This year, however, my birthday will be memorable for a different reason. I'll be in Rio de Janeiro – and it will be the day the Rio+20 Earth Summit begins, when all the Heads of State and Ministers arrive. From the UK, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State for the Environment will be taking part. Civil servants like me will probably have arrived a few days earlier, preparing draft compromises on the negotiating text, talking to stakeholders, finalising logistics for the various events taking place around the negotiations, and so on.

All this activity will be taking place because 20 years ago, at the first ever Earth Summit, the international community agreed to find ways to halt pollution and the destruction of natural resources. But sufficient progress has not been made. The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage has remained stubbornly coupled. The next Earth Summit will offer an opportunity for governments, businesses and individuals to consider simple yet radical ways to make sure growth continues without hurting the environment. It's highly ambitious but, unfortunately, urgent and necessary.

There are large green hills to climb ahead. Picture: Marcus Ryder

 But there's yet another reason my birthday will be memorable this year. On 20th June, the UK will host an event on "GDP+" or "beyond GDP", the subject of a debate I took part in a few weeks ago at the Natural History Museum.  As a development economist, "GDP+" is close to my heart. The 2009 report from the eminent economists Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi (also published as a book called Mis-Measuring Our Lives) made clear that few economists have ever seen GDP as the only way to measure and check how well society is progressing. GDP provides us with necessary information, but not sufficient information – and certainly not sufficient information to deliver green growth, poverty reduction or sustainable development.

Indeed, measuring just one outcome in most areas of life isn't sensible, nor is it something we tend to do.  Take birthdays. After the age of ten, few people measure how good their birthdays are just by the size of the presents they receive. Of course we want presents... it's disappointing if we don't get any. But we also care about the type of presents we get, and other aspects of the day. If we get expensive but impersonal presents, or if we have no company all day, we feel somewhat empty. Presents are important, but they're not everything. If we can acknowledge this need to think beyond one indicator for something as simple as birthdays, why is it then that when it comes to economies, we are comfortable with simply looking at one indicator, GDP? It simply isn't sensible. This is why Stiglitz et al were so clear that we should look at our economies in a more holistic way.

When governments have looked at their economies holistically, they've had great results. Since the 1980s, Botswana has used environmental values to guide its spending. The government estimates how far its natural resources are being depleted due to mining, makes sure the revenues from mining are large enough to match this depletion, and re-invested the revenues in long-term development, so as to build up other kinds of resources. It has paid off – between 1990 and 2010 Botswana's per capita GDP rose by almost 60%, alongside strong gains in education and health.  No wonder Botswana believes further action on green growth at Rio+20 will be in its interest.

That's why we'll be hosting the GDP+ event and why we've published a technical paper this week reviewing the different approaches to GDP+ that governments can use. We also realise that many governments in low-income countries have capacity limitations – just estimating GDP is often hard enough. So we will also be discussing the Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystems Services (WAVES) Partnership at the event. WAVES was set up to enable developing countries to try out this work and share experiences with others that are doing the same, such as the UK.

As an economist, I'm really excited Rio+20 offers an opportunity to make progress on this area – it's simple, but radical. For too long economists have focused on just GDP. It's high time we added other indicators, especially environmental ones, to measure progress. And with less than 50 days to go, I'm even more excited that this could all take place during and around my birthday. What an unusual treat!

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This blog is featured on E2B Pulse - the website of the UK carbon reduction network.

This is my first time in Afghanistan and I'm excited and nervous, only having seen one week before the news of attacks in Kabul - just as I was telling my family that living in Kabul was no more dangerous than riding a bike into central London every day.

Afghanistan's beautiful mountains, viewed from the plane

As I sat on the flight, I was curious to see who else would be coming to this intriguing country. There were only a few foreigners, with the bulk of the passengers Afghan families, many of whom were coming to visit family members.

The children behind me were playing 'I spy with my little eye' in English for most of the trip. Two Afghan men caught my eye and I quickly recognised that they were the owners of my local corner shop which made me realise the world really is so small! They were going home for a few weeks with their extended family to sort out business matters.

It was a long journey from London, but I was rewarded with stunning mountain views and a wonderful sunny morning as we touched down at Kabul airport.

The busy streets in central Kabul

As the only blonde person in the terminal, I am grateful for my headscarf. Immigration is remarkably efficient and after a bit of a wait for my luggage my transport whisks me off to the 'Green Zone' where the UK and many other embassies are located, as well as government ministries.

The dusty roads are jam-packed with colourful scenes of noisy traffic - cars, bikes, motorbikes and donkeys and carts - and before I can take it all in, I arrive at the DFID office.

My first impression of DFID staff is that they are a welcoming and very dedicated group of Afghans and UK staff. My job is to work on programmes that support local authorities to deliver basic services such as water and electricity to people in more remote parts of Afghanistan. This is crucial in a country where over a third of the population lives on less than 60p per day.

The population has high expectations of what basic services the government and donors can offer them and DFID is working hard to help meet them in a place which is rebuilding itself after enduring over three decades of conflict.

Business as usual: shops around the Green Zone

I have worked in DFID for seven years on a variety of roles, including working on job creation in conflict areas and providing debt relief to poor countries. Coming to Afghanistan offers me new challenges and the opportunity to make a difference.

Over the next few months I will share my impressions of Afghanistan and its people through this blog. I will be likely to see more of Kabul, as well as visit a number of provinces and districts to see the impact of our projects for myself. I am very much looking forward to gaining my own impressions of this fascinating place.

View of Hundu-Kush Mountains from Kabul

I've worked for various Whitehall departments for a number of years on issues like disability, race equality and violence against women, and my move to DFID presents me with the challenge of adapting from working in a developed country with an abundance of data and information, to working in some of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world.

My first visit to Afghanistan last month highlighted just how different this job is going to be. Given current security concerns, the Embassy compound in Kabul was in lock-down, allowing no visits off-site for the duration of my visit. So although I cannot claim to have really seen any of Afghanistan or even Kabul, I did get a sense of the day-to-day reality of working in Afghanistan – restricted movement, set meal times, and constant reminders of security threats. It made me appreciate the level of challenge we have set for ourselves, committing, for example, to support nearly 200,000 children in school by 2015.

The challenge I find compelling is in thinking through how to measure the progress of our work Afghanistan and the rest of Western Asia. The issues faced working to make a real and sustained difference to the lives of the region's poor people are pronounced: security problems threaten delivery, data sources can be unreliable, irregular, or low in quality, and relationships between the UK and foreign governments determine the tone of our engagement.

Dushanbe Fruit Market

But in particular, some of the topics that I am curious about and that occur to me to blog about are:

1) How can Asian countries work together to make life better for the people that live there – for example, how can DFID support regional trade, and help prevent human trafficking?

2) How do we measure and achieve sustainability? It is one thing to build a school, and quite another to support a long-term rise in the education levels of a developing country.

3) How is the results agenda in international development shaping the way DFID and other partners approach development? For instance, is there a risk we end up only doing that which we can measure?

4) The way we compare across countries in the region – can we do this or are we really just trying to compare apples and pears? Or should I say oranges and lemons - which reminds me of the Meyer Lemon, a cross between the two I came across during a recent visit to Dushanbe market in Tajikistan.

I look forward to exploring these things, and exploring more of Asia as the weeks and months progress!

Two children who will benefit from new mosquito nets

When I first met David last year, I was tracking the distribution of some of the 2.35 million mosquito nets DFID had provided in Ghana's Western and Central region (read my blog about it here and watch a video about the campaign here).

Most of Ghana's cocoa, and other resources like gold and timber, come from these two regions in Ghana, and their coastal location and large forested areas mean malaria is an ever-present problem.

As David explains as he takes me around Upper East, the story here is very different. For several months a year, the dry desert wind (known as the Harmattan) blows down from the Sahara into Northern Ghana and mosquitoes are therefore not as prevalent. But when the rains come, malaria returns, and these inaccessible communities in the poorest regions of Ghana are those that are worst affected.

An extended family in Namologo outside their house where their new nets have just been hung up

David takes me to a village called Namologo and I speak to Francis, one of the volunteers from the village who has been helping distribute the nets there. He explains what happens when he gets malaria: "I have difficulty breathing, my body is weak and cold, I can't eat".

Awuni Margaret has been the Community Health Nurse for Namologo and nine other villages for the last ten years. She's run outreach programmes and immunisation programmes, and is now supervising the mosquito net distribution. She continues Frances' story: "Malaria is the main problem, ahead of all the other cases". Even for those who get it in mild form and can try to go to work or school, "their productivity is low... and students are not able to catch up with their friends."

Francis' clinic has run out of rapid diagnostic tests for malaria, and severe cases have to be referred to the regional hospital, several hours' travel away. For those who don't have health insurance, or can't afford to pay the medical bills, this is a journey that might not even happen.

Eva and her child Sapana in front of her new net

Prevention then, is better than cure, and David explains to me how UNICEF and the Ghana Health Service have been working to distribute the 700,000 nets DFID provided for Upper East region, and make sure people use them.

The key to the campaign's success, he explains, will be social mobilisation. Not just telling people that they will be receiving nets, but actually getting volunteers to put them up inside people's houses and make sure recipients know how to use them, and why they are important.

Radio, word of mouth, even getting volunteers to stand on the rooftop of the tallest house in the village and shout - every method has been used to try and get the message across.

David's area of expertise is logistics and he relishes the challenges of working out how to get mosquito nets to Ghana's most inaccessible regions. He draws up microplans for reaching the farthest flung communities, and tells me about how he and his team "had to climb over rocky mountains to get to remote villages where vehicles can't go."

One mosquito net recipient peers out of the window in front of his new net

There's no doubt that these are the communities most in need of this protection from malaria. Most of those I spoke to had never had a mosquito net before, or if they had it was several years old or broken.

Eva is another beneficiary in the village, who received a net for the first time, and proudly poses in front of it for a photograph, holding her baby, Sapana. It's thanks to the work of people like David, Frances and Awuni Margaret that the net is now up inside her home. Hopefully, Eva and Sapana can sleep safely, protected from malaria beneath it.

A bigger, more important question is whether Zimbabwe is improving for its ordinary citizens and that is much harder to answer. Clearly the country has stabilised in economic and security terms since the crisis of 2008, but there is little 'hard' statistical evidence to track the trends in indicators that measure poverty - or the lack of it.

With support from various agencies, including the EU, UK and in particular USAID, the national statistics agency ZimStats has just released the results from its wide-ranging Demographic  and Health Survey (DHS) 2010/11, that is conducted regularly at five yearly intervals. Since the last DHS survey the country has seen huge changes - the disappearance of the Zim dollar and mass migration; and the rollout of ARV drugs for HIV infected people, for example, but what effect has this all had?

Despite the intervening crisis of 2008 it's very welcome to see an overall decline in the adult HIV infection rate from 18% to 15%, although still very high, with one third of women in their 30s and men in their 40s being infected. The good news is that clearly safer sex practices and awareness are helping to protect young Zimbabweans. Campaigns against malaria are also working - the ownership and use of mosquito nets has increased threefold since 2005 and infant mortality has dropped slightly.

However what the statistics also reveal is the deterioration of basic services, which have resumed since 2008 but are still well below the level of a decade ago. Maternal mortality rates have jumped, just as the number of births supported by trained attendants has slumped and nurses have left the country. Primary school attendance has dropped by 4% overall since 2005/6 and is now below the 90% threshold; secondary school attendance has increased slightly but there are still less than half of teenagers in school and that does not bode well at all.

Young Zimbabweans, Plumtree

Zimbabwe used to boast proudly of it near universal adult literacy rates, now there are 2% fewer literate young men in their late teens, as opposed to those in their early 20s. A disrupted education has a much less dramatic effect in comparison to the cholera epidemics and chronic food shortages that accompanied the 2008 crisis.

However the impact of young unemployed men lacking basic skills and knowledge can be potentially disastrous, as many other African countries can attest. Rapidly scaling up second change education chances for young Zimbabweans who dropped out of school is one of the key priorities of the Education Transition Fund, a multi donor initiative that is moving on to a new phase with European and UK support, having completed a major textbook distribution campaign in 2011.

The beauty that is Bamyan

After 15 months, the time has come for me to leave this beautiful country and return home to friends, family and (fingers crossed) a beautiful Spring back in London!

As my time here draws to a close I can't help but think back to when I first arrived and all the changes I have seen. I have been working on a programme to help local government deliver basic services in recently secured districts.

Voting in the Sangin elections

As a result of this work, locals in the province of Helmand now have better perceptions of their local government, are more satisfied with basic services such as healthcare, education, informal justice and irrigation for agriculture, and are therefore less likely to support the insurgency.

Further evidence of this can be found in Sangin (a district in Helmand province), infamous for its dangerous past where many British and American soldiers lost their lives. Sangin now has its first ever District Community Council. Over 2,000 people travelled across the province to vote in these elections which is a clear demonstration of the positive changes since last year. The freedom of movement, the willingness of the population to engage in democratic elections, and the total control and administration of this process by the Afghan authorities shows progress unthinkable even one year ago.

The remaining Buddhas

What next, you might ask – we want to build on the success in Helmand and work in other provinces in Afghanistan to help strengthen local government service delivery. The French are interested in working with the UK in Kapisa and Laghman provinces (just north of Kabul), the Australians are looking at a possible partnership in Uruzgan (bordering North East Helmand), New Zealand is considering working with us in Bamyan (famous for its Buddha statues before the Taliban blew them up in 2001) and we may also work with Italy in Herat (bordering Iran in the west).

It has been a challenging few months in Afghanistan with the burning of the Holy Koran, the killing of two US military advisers at the Ministry of Interior and the tragic incident in Kandahar. My life in the British compound means my sense of the life outside is limited.  I obtain most of my news through TV and Afghan colleagues; but you feel the rise and wane of tension palpably.

What gets me through these times is my Kabul 'family' made up of colleagues and co-workers. We have been watching the TV series 'Band of Brothers' and while my experience is very different to the difficult job our brave armed forces do on the front line, amongst my embassy colleagues there is a strong camaraderie built through shared experience. I owe a huge debt of thanks to all those colleagues* here that have made life easier, ensuring the stress and strain of working here does not take too much of a toll.

The Bamyan bazaar

So do I leave here feeling positive about the future of Afghanistan? Yes, I do. I was speaking with one of my Afghan colleagues who said that the Taliban had distorted the world's view of his country. My experience of Afghans is that they are brave, resilient people who are also very friendly and incredibly hospitable - I hope that soon the world gets to see that side of Afghanistan.

I leave here with a heavy heart but proud to have worked as part of a joint effort to help strengthen this country and put it back on a path the Afghan people deserve after enduring over three decades of conflict. The upcoming Tokyo conference in July will bring donor countries together to discuss how they will support Afghanistan in the future. There is still a long way to go - and there will be more bumps in the road - but I’m confident Afghanistan is heading in the right direction.

*I'm hoping that one or two of said colleagues will be blogging from here after I've gone - so watch this space!

Sleeping under an insecticide-treated bednet is the best way to prevent malaria. Picture: Thomas Omondi/DFID

It's moth season in Kinshasa.

Every month here seems to bring different insects. Sometimes it's giant flying beetles. Other times it's swarms of brown paper-like flies. Just now there are moths everywhere - moths as big as my two hands; tiny moths; you name it.

But every season here is mosquito season.

Mosquitoes carry and transmit malaria. Photo: science.howstuffworks.com

Being a wet, equatorial country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) suffers from malaria across 97% of the country.

The burden of malaria in the DRC is enormous, and alone the country accounts for nearly 10% of all malaria cases in Africa.

One of the first things I learnt about working in development is that everything is interconnected. If we don't tackle malaria, it will be very difficult to improve people's health outcomes in DRC. Not only that, but if people are sick with malaria, they are unable to go to school, or get their goods to market, or seek employment.

In my current job, though, there's another set of links to consider. As DFID DRC's Climate and Environment Advisor, I look at all of our programmes to ensure we've thought through how to handle any climate and environment risks and opportunities.

Right now I'm looking at a new programme to tackle malaria in DRC. 

The programme will provide 10 million long-lasting insecticide-treated bednets to people in the DRC by 2015. This is clearly crucial to helping people here live healthier lives. But what are the climate and environment risks and opportunities?

For a start, we need to consider how and where the bednets are produced, treated with insecticide, and packaged. Is there a way to cut down on the amount of waste from the bednets, or to ship them rather than fly them around the world?

Next, what happens to the bednets when they reach the end of their lifespan? Many bednets have been found being used as fishing nets or for other household uses. But they contain residual pesticides and there may be better uses for them. What's the scope for providing incentives to recycle them, such as providing free or discounted replacement bednets?

Thinking about the interconnectedness of development challenges again, how might we address drainage and waste management to reduce the amounts of standing water that forms breeding grounds for mosquitoes? Another of DFID DRC's programmes is in the water and sanitation sector, so we can think about both of these programmes in tandem to make sure they complement one another.

Finally, a crucial link between climate change and malaria is that, as temperatures and rainfall patterns shift, malaria will move to areas where it wasn't a problem before. We need to be able to plan for a changing future, not just for how malaria affects people today.

In this way, we can think through how to achieve 'win-wins' that deliver both development results and tackle climate and environment challenges in one go.

On World Malaria Day, it's these kinds of win-wins and links we need to keep in mind as we try to count malaria out.

So I'll focus on the mosquitoes, and not the moths, today. Just as soon as I've shooed the last few out of the office!

We spent our last few weeks in Afjalpur making sure we had met all of the targets laid out in our day-to-day plan and compiling a handover folder so that the next ICS volunteers know every detail of the work we have done.

Whilst our programme followed the ethos of sharing skills, knowledge and good practice, there were a few things that we bought to make a lasting impact on the community. Firstly, we were able to use some of our remaining budget to carry out a vaccination camp for 'badla' (or 'black quarter' in English) - an infectious disease which is particularly threatening to cattle at this time of year.

Playing in one of the many ponds in Afjalpur, north-west Bangladesh

We also bought a community notice board so that the co-operative members are able to find out times of meetings. This will save them a lot of time and energy in the future as the 28 members are spread far and wide throughout the village. It will also help to mobilise the members to actively participate in the co-operative and take responsibility for their own meetings long after ICS volunteers have left the village, thus ensuring their own sustainable development.

To further our messages on hygiene, which we had particularly highlighted during our first Community Action Day, we bought soaps, toothbrushes and toothpaste for the students of the community school. In the following days it seemed to become the new craze for children to wander through the village brushing their teeth and it was great to see them clearly taking note of our tooth-brushing and hand-washing messages at a young age. 

After we had finished all of that, squeezed everything into our rucksacks and said our long and tearful goodbyes, we were off to spend our final three days in Dhaka.

A Dhaka University professor gives a talk during the National Level Sharing event

The teams of UK and national volunteers from Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bagerhat and Rangpur came back together to evaluate the programme and prepare for the National Level Sharing event to be held at Dhaka University on our final day.

We made a video (that you can watch at the top of this blog) summing up our wonderful experience and presented this to the audience, which included representatives from the Bangladesh government, our partner organisations and DFID Bangladesh, amongst many others.

The event was an excellent opportunity to share our challenges, as well as successes, with people who will be around to support and monitor the next cycle. It was also testament to how keen DFID and VSO have been to listen to our suggestions and feedback throughout the programme, particularly as this was the pilot year.

As it has recently been announced that another 7000 young people will be volunteering on the International Citizen Service in the next three years, it is really positive that both of these organisations are so willing to make alterations according to the suggestions of young people from the UK and abroad who have participated in the programme.

Now that I have returned to the UK (and have full-access to a computer and an internet connection far faster than I've been used to) I have been able to read back through my blogs and reflect on an incredible three months.

UK and national volunteers at the VSO Bangladesh National Level Sharing event at Dhaka University

My experience was everything I had anticipated in my first entry, yet I certainly wasn't prepared for how real the statistics I had read would become. Listening to the 28 dairy co-operative members speak about the daily struggle of living hand to mouth whilst we conducted our base-line survey at the beginning of our project immediately put things into perspective.

I have since spent three months living alongside people who are affected by the gender inequality, climate change and extreme poverty that I read about in article after article. Moreover, these people have become close friends. It was a busy three months and of course there were difficulties along the way, but it is in overcoming such difficulties that our team was strengthened and the already improved situation of our co-operative members shows how much we achieved.

I have taken a lot from this experience and try as I did to write blogs and reflect on my time in Bangladesh along the way, I know that it will only be in years to come that I am able to really look back at just how much I have learnt from this opportunity.

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Find out more about the International Citizen Service and how you could make a difference in some of the world's poorest communities.

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Have you ever been to the cinema and seen a trailer for a film that you previously had no interest in watching and then suddenly thought to yourself, "That is a movie I CANNOT MISS"?

That was the idea behind this three-minute film by a talented young filmmaker called Ryan Youngblood that I stumbled across in Kigalione day and I think he and producer Doune Porter more than fulfilled their brief.

On April 26, during WHO's first-ever World Immunization Week, Ghana will introduce not just one but two new vaccines into its immunisation programme. It's part of a global effort supported by DFID and one every Brit can be proud to support.

The pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines will protect infants against the leading causes of the two biggest killers of children in Ghana and throughout the developing world - pneumonia and diarrhoea.

The GAVI Alliance and our partners UNICEF and WHO are working with Ghana's Ministry of Health to plan a massive celebration in Accra at which the first children will be vaccinated.

Lifesaving: childhood vaccinations save lives

On the same day, halfway across the world, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, our friends at the UN Foundation will be launching the Shot@Life campaign to encourage the American public to champion vaccines as one of the most cost-effective ways to save children's lives around the world.

As you can imagine, back in Ghana our colleagues at the Ministry of Health are feeling more than a little pressure and this film brilliantly captures the careful, methodical planning process that is involved in introducing new vaccines into the national health programme.

It also portrays the skill, wit and energy that Ghanaian health professionals are investing in this extraordinary initiative.

Like the best trailers, our little film has all the right ingredients to make you want to know what happens next: handsome men, beautiful women, tragedy, suspense, despair, hope and raw determination!

Watch it now: you won't be disappointed.
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Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British Government.

• The vaccines have been financed with contributions from GAVI donors including the UK, Italyand the US, and co-financed by the Government of Ghana.
• More than 400,000 Ghanaian children will be immunised against pneumococcal disease thanks to a US $2.6 million contribution by JP Morgan, matched by the UK through the GAVI Matching Fund for a total contribution of US $5.2 million.

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Find out more about how DFID works with the GAVI Alliance and other private foundations.