INTRODUCTION

In August, 2010 the government of Kenya adopted a new constitution. This followed a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Kenyans voted for change. The decisive impetus for reform came from the widespread violence and political crisis that followed the 2007 election. While claims of electoral fraud provided the immediate catalyst for violence, the deeper causes were to be found in the interaction of a highly centralized ‘winner-take-all’ political system with deep social disparities based in part on group identity (Hanson 2008).

Provisions for equity figure prominently in the new constitution. Backed by a bill of rights that opens the door to legal enforcement, citizenship rights have been strengthened in many areas,including access to basic services. ‘Equitable sharing’ has been introduced as a guiding principle for public spending. National and devolved governments are now constitutionally required to redress social disparities, target disadvantaged areas and provide affirmative action for marginalized groups.

Translating these provisions into tangible outcomes will not be straightforward. Equity is a principle that would be readily endorsed by most policymakers in Kenya and Kenya’s citizens have provided their own endorsement through the referendum. However, there is an ongoing debate over what the commitment to equity means in practice, as well as over the pace and direction of reform. Much of that debate has centered on the constitutional injunction requiring ‘equitable sharing’ in public spending.

On most measures of human development, Kenya registers average outcomes considerably above those for sub-Saharan Africa as a region. Yet the national average masks extreme disparities—and the benefits of increased prosperity have been unequally shared.

There are compelling grounds for a strengthened focus on equity in Kenya. In recent years, the country has maintained a respectable, if less than spectacular, record on economic growth. Social indicators are also on an upward trend. On most measures of human development, Kenya registers average outcomes considerably above those for sub-Saharan Africa as a region. Yet the national average masks extreme disparities—and the benefits of increased prosperity have been unequally shared. Some regions and social groups face levels of deprivation that rank alongside the worst in Africa. Moreover, the deep fault lines running through society are widely perceived as a source of injustice and potential political instability.

High levels of inequality in Kenya raise wider concerns. There has been a tendency in domestic debates to see ‘equitable sharing’ as a guiding principle for social justice, rather than as a condition for accelerated growth and enhanced economic efficiency. Yet international evidence strongly suggests that extreme inequality—especially in opportunities for education— is profoundly damaging for economic growth. It follows that redistributive public spending has the potential to support growth.

The current paper focuses on a group of 12 counties located in Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs). They are among the most disadvantaged in the country. Most are characterized by high levels of income poverty, chronic food insecurity and acute deprivation across a wide range of social indicators.

Nowhere is the deprivation starker than in education. The ASAL counties account for a disproportionately large share of Kenya’s out-of-school children, pointing to problems in access and school retention. Gender disparities in education are among the widest in the country. Learning outcomes for the small number of children who get through primary school are for the most part abysmal, even by the generally low national average standards.

Unequal public spending patterns have played no small part in creating the disparities that separate the ASAL counties from the rest of Kenya—and ‘equitable sharing’ could play a role in closing the gap. But what would a more equitable approach to public spending look like in practice?

This paper addresses that question. It looks in some detail at education for two reasons. First, good quality education is itself a powerful motor of enhanced equity. It has the potential to equip children and youth with the skills and competencies that they need to break out of cycles of poverty and to participate more fully in national prosperity. If Kenya is to embark on a more equitable pattern of development, there are strong grounds for prioritizing the creation of more equal opportunities in education. Second, the education sector illustrates many of the wider challenges and debates that Kenya’s policymakers will have to address as they seek to translate constitutional provisions into public spending strategies. In particular, it highlights the importance of weighting for indicators that reflect need in designing formulae for budget allocations.

Our broad conclusion is that, while Kenya clearly needs to avoid public spending reforms that jeopardize service delivery in wealthier counties, redistributive measures are justified on the grounds of efficiency and equity.

The paper is organized as follows. Part 1 provides an overview of the approach to equity enshrined in the constitution. While the spirit of the constitution is unequivocal, the letter is open to a vast array of interpretations. We briefly explore the implications of a range of approaches. Our broad conclusion is that, while Kenya clearly needs to avoid public spending reforms that jeopardize service delivery in wealthier counties, redistributive measures are justified on the grounds of efficiency and equity. Although this paper focuses principally on basic services, we caution against approaches that treat equity as a matter of social sector financing to the exclusion of growth-oriented productive investment.

Part 2 provides an analysis of some key indicators on poverty, health and nutrition. Drawing on household expenditure data, the report locates the 12 ASAL counties in the national league table for the incidence and depth of poverty. Data on health outcomes and access to basic services provide another indicator of the state of human development. While there are some marked variations across counties and indicators, most of the 12 counties register levels of deprivation in poverty and basic health far in excess of those found in other areas.

Part 3 shifts the focus to education. Over the past decade, Kenya has made considerable progress in improving access to basic education. Enrollment rates in primary education have increased sharply since the elimination of school fees in 2003. Transition rates to secondary school are also rising. The record on learning achievement is less impressive. While Kenya lacks a comprehensive national learning assessment, survey evidence points to systemic problems in education quality. In both access and learning, children in the ASAL counties—especially female children—are at a considerable disadvantage. After setting out the national picture, the paper explores the distinctive problems facing these counties.

In Part 4 we look beyond Kenya to wider international experience. Many countries have grappled with the challenge of reducing disparities between less-favored and more-favored regions. There are no blueprints on offer. However, there are some useful lessons and guidelines that may be of some relevance to the policy debate in Kenya. The experience of South Africa may be particularly instructive given the weight attached to equity in the post-apartheid constitution.

Part 5 of the paper explores a range of approaches to financial allocations. Converting constitutional principle into operational practice will require the development of formulae-based approaches. From an equitable financing perspective there is no perfect model. Any formula that is adopted will involve trade-offs between different goals. Policymakers have to determine what weight to attach to different dimensions of equity (for example, gender, income, education and health), the time frame for achieving stated policy goals, and whether to frame targets in terms of outcomes or inputs. These questions go beyond devolved financing. The Kenyan constitution is unequivocal in stipulating that the ‘equitable sharing’ provision applies to all public spending. We therefore undertake a series of formula-based exercises illustrating the allocation patterns that would emerge under different formulae, with specific reference to the 12 ASAL focus counties and to education.

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A key objective of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to assist its member countries in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UNDP pursues this objective in various ways, including through analysis and advice to governments on the progress towards the MDGs (such as support for the preparation and monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies, or PRSs, in poor countries), assistance for capacity building, and financial and technical support for the preparation and implementation of development programs.

The challenge of achieving the MDGs remains daunting in many countries, including Tajikistan. To do so will require that all development partners, i.e., the government, civil society, private business and donors, make every effort to scale up successful development interventions. Scaling up refers to “expanding, adapting and sustaining successful policies, programs and projects on different places and over time to reach a greater number of people.” Interventions that are successful as pilots but are not scaled up will create localized benefits for a small number of beneficiaries, but they will fail to contribute significantly to close the MDG gap.

This paper aims to assess whether and how well UNDP is supporting scaling up in its development programs in Tajikistan. While the principal purpose of this assessment was to assist the UNDP country program director and his team in Tajikistan in their scaling up efforts, it also contributes to the overall growing body of evidence on the scaling up of development interventions worldwide.

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Editors Note: This post is an extended version of a previous post.

Cozzens, Susan and Dhanaraj Thakur (Eds). 2014. Innovation and Inequality: Emerging technologies in an unequal world. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar.

Historically, the debate on innovation has focused on the determinants of the pace of innovation—on the premise that innovation is the driver of long-term economic growth. Analysts and policymakers have taken less interest on how innovation-based growth affects income distribution. Less attention even has received the question of how innovation affects other forms of inequality such as economic opportunity, social mobility, access to education, healthcare, and legal representation, or inequalities in exposure to insalubrious environments, be these physical (through exposure to polluted air, water, food or harmful work conditions) or social (neighborhoods ridden with violence and crime). The relation between innovation, equal political representation and the right for people to have a say in the collective decisions that affect their lives can also be added to the list of neglect.

But neglect has not been universal. A small but growing group of analysts have been working for at least three decades to produce a more careful picture of the relationship between innovation and the economy. A distinguished vanguard of this group has recently published a collection of case studies that illuminates our understanding of innovation and inequality—which is the title of the book. The book is edited by Susan Cozzens and Dhanaraj Thakur. Cozzens is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Vice Provost of Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech. She has studied innovation and inequality long before inequality was a hot topic and led the group that collaborated on this book. Thakur is a faculty member of the school College of Public Service and Urban Affairs at Tennessee State University (while writing the book he taught at the University of West Indies in Jamaica). He is an original and sensible voice in the study of social dimensions of communication technologies.

We’d like to highlight here three aspects of the book: the research design, the empirical focus, and the conceptual framework developed from the case studies in the book.

Edited volumes are all too often a collection of disparate papers, but not in this case. This book is patently the product of a research design that probes the evolution of a set of technologies across a wide variety of national settings and, at the same time, it examines the different reactions to new technologies within specific countries. The second part of the book devotes five chapters to study five emerging technologies—recombinant insulin, genetically modified corn, mobile phones, open-source software, and tissue culture—observing the contrasts and similarities of their evolution in different national environments. In turn, part three considers the experience of eight countries, four of high income—Canada, Germany, Malta, and the U.S.—and four of medium or low income—Argentina, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Mozambique. The stories in part three tell how these countries assimilated these diverse technologies into to their economies and policy environments.

The second aspect to highlight is the deliberate choice of elements for empirical focus. First, the object of inquiry is not all of technology but a discreet set of emerging technologies gaining a specificity that would otherwise be negated if they were to handle the unwieldy concept of “technology” broadly construed. At the same time, this choice reveals the policy orientation of the book because these new entrants have just started to shape the socio-technical spaces they inhabit while the spaces of older technologies have likely ossified. Second, the study offers ample variance in terms of jurisdictions under study, i.e. countries of all income levels; a decision that makes at the same time theory construction more difficult and the test of general premises more robust.[i] We can add that the book avoids sweeping generalizations. Third, they focus on technological projects and their champions, a choice that increases the rigor of the empirical analysis. This choice, naturally, narrows the space of generality but the lessons are more precise and the conjectures are presented with according modesty. The combination of a solid design and clear empirical focus allow the reader to obtain a sense of general insight from the cases taken together that could not be derived from any individual case standing alone.

Economic and technology historians have tackled the effects of technological advancement, from the steam engine to the Internet, but those lessons are not easily applicable to the present because emerging technologies intimate at a different kind of reconfiguration of economic and social structures. It is still too early to know the long-term effects of new technologies like genetically modified crops or mobile phone cash-transfers, but this book does a good job providing useful concepts that begin to form an analytical framework. In addition, the mix of country case studies subverts the disciplinary separation between the economics of innovation (devoted mostly to high-income countries) and development studies (interested in middle and low income economies). As a consequence of these selections, the reader can draw lessons that are likely to apply to technologies and countries other than the ones discussed in this book.

The third aspect we would like to underscore in this review is the conceptual framework. Cozzens, Thakur and their colleagues have done a service to anyone interested in pursuing the empirical and theoretical analysis of innovation and inequality.

For these authors, income distribution is only one part of the puzzle. They observe that inequalities are also part of social, ethnic, and gender cleavages in society. Frances Stewart, from Oxford University, introduced the notion of horizontal inequalities or inequalities at the social group level (for instance, across ethnic groups or genders). She developed the concept to contrast vertical inequalities or inequalities operating at the individual level (such as household income or wealth). The authors of this book borrow Stewart’s concept and pay attention to horizontal inequalities in the technologies they examine and observe that new technologies enter marketplaces that are already configured under historical forms of exclusion. A dramatic example is the lack of access to recombinant insulin in the U.S., because it is expensive and minorities are less likely to have health insurance (see Table 3.1 in p. 80).[ii] Another example is how innovation opens opportunities for entrepreneurs but closes them for women in cultures that systematically exclude women from entrepreneurial activities.

Another key concept is that of complementary assets. A poignant example is the failure of recombinant insulin to reach poor patients in Mozambique who are sent home with old medicine even though insulin is subsidized by the government. The reason why doctors deny the poor the new treatment is that they don’t have the literacy and household resources (e.g. a refrigerator, a clock) necessary to preserve the shots, inject themselves periodically, and read sugar blood levels. Technologies aimed at fighting poverty require complementary assets to be already in place and in the absence of them, they fail to mitigate suffering and ultimately ameliorate inequality. Another illustration of the importance of complementary assets is given by the case of Open Source Software. This technology has a nominal price of zero; however, only individuals who have computers and the time, disposition, and resources to learn how to use open source operative systems benefit. Likewise, companies without the internal resources to adapt open software will not adopt it and remain economically tied to proprietary software.

These observations lead to two critical concepts elaborated in the book: distributional boundaries and the inequalities across technological transitions. Distributional boundaries refer to the reach of the benefits of new technologies, boundaries that could be geographic (as in urban/suburban or center/periphery) or across social cleavages or incomes levels. Standard models of technological diffusion assume the entire population will gradually adopt a new technology, but in reality the authors observe several factors intervene in limiting the scope of diffusion to certain groups. The most insidious factors are monopolies that exercise sufficient control over markets to levy high prices. In these markets, the price becomes an exclusionary barrier to diffusion. This is quite evident in the case of mobile phones (see table 5.1, p. 128) where monopolies (or oligopolies) have market power to create and maintain a distributional boundary between post-pay and high-quality for middle and high income clients and pre-pay and low-quality for poor customers. This boundary renders pre-pay plans doubly regressive because the per-minute rates are higher than post-pay and phone expenses represent a far larger percentage in poor people’s income. Another example of exclusion happens in GMOs because in some countries subsistence farmers cannot afford the prices for engineering seeds; a disadvantage that compounds to their cost and health problems as they have to use more and stronger pesticides.

A technological transition, as used here, is an inflection point in the adoption of a technology that re-shapes its distributional boundaries. When smart phones were introduced, a new market for second-hand or hand-down phones was created in Maputo; people who could not access the top technology get stuck with a sub-par system. By looking at tissue culture they find that “whether it provides benefits to small farmers as well as large ones depends crucially on public interventions in the lower-income countries in our study” (p. 190). In fact, farmers in Costa Rica enjoy much better protections compare to those in Jamaica and Mozambique because the governmental program created to support banana tissue culture was designed and implemented as an extension program aimed at disseminating know-how among small-farmers and not exclusively to large multinational-owned farms. When introducing the same technology, because of this different policy environment, the distributional boundaries were made much more extensive in Costa Rica.

This is a book devoted to present the complexity of the innovation-inequality link. The authors are generous in their descriptions, punctilious in the analysis of their case studies, and cautious and measured in their conclusions. Readers who seek an overarching theory of inequality, a simple story, or a test of causality, are bound to be disappointed. But those readers may find the highest reward from carefully reading all the case studies presented in this book, not only because of the edifying richness of the detail herein but also because they will be invited to rethink the proper way to understand and address the problem of inequality.[iii]
 

A key objective of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is to assist its member countries in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UNDP pursues this objective in various ways, including through analysis and advice to governments on the progress towards the MDGs (such as support for the preparation and monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies, or PRSs, in poor countries), assistance for capacity building, and financial and technical support for the preparation and implementation of development programs.

The challenge of achieving the MDGs remains daunting in many countries, including Tajikistan. To do so will require that all development partners, i.e., the government, civil society, private business and donors, make every effort to scale up successful development interventions. Scaling up refers to “expanding, adapting and sustaining successful policies, programs and projects on different places and over time to reach a greater number of people.” Interventions that are successful as pilots but are not scaled up will create localized benefits for a small number of beneficiaries, but they will fail to contribute significantly to close the MDG gap.

This paper aims to assess whether and how well UNDP is supporting scaling up in its development programs in Tajikistan. While the principal purpose of this assessment was to assist the UNDP country program director and his team in Tajikistan in their scaling up efforts, it also contributes to the overall growing body of evidence on the scaling up of development interventions worldwide.

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In advance of President Obama’s historic trip to Cuba and Argentina, three Brookings scholars participated in a media roundtable to offer context and outline their expectations for the outcomes of the trip. Richard Feinberg and Ted Piccone discussed Cuba–including developments in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, the Cuban economy, and human rights on the island–and Harold Trinkunas offered insight on Argentina, inter-American relations, and the timing of the visit.

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Richard Feinberg:

The idea is to promote a gradual incremental transition to a more open, pluralistic and prosperous Cuba integrated into global markets of goods, capital, and ideas. It is a long-term strategy. It cannot be measured by quarterly reports.

Ted Piccone:

...the key [is] to unlock a whole set of future changes that I think will be net positive for the United States, but it is going to take time, and it is not going to happen overnight.

Harold Trinkunas:

Cuba is really about moving, among other things, a stumbling block to better relations with Latin America, and Argentina is about restoring a positive relationship with a key swing state in the region that was once one of our most important allies in the region.

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