Demand Research in East Timor

I recently went on a mission to East Timor to work with my colleague, Carol Stewart, who is the ILO Fellow placed there to develop the microinsurance market.  East Timor.  What can I say.  From the moment I got off the plane I immediately liked it.  Mopeds with 5 people, buses with children handing out the door, not a road pot-hole free.  Brilliant.  The country has got a raw feel to it.  A place that is currently undeveloped, but has to potential to boom.  That said, it was plain to see there is a lot of development work that needs to be done there.

But enough rambling, to the point of the post:  Whilst on the ground, Carol took me on a demand research session she was doing in the districts with members from Moris Rasik, an MFI that operates in East Timor.  The objective of this demand research was to find out what risks the ladies faced, and how they manage those risks.  This would inform us as to whether there is a role for microinsurance to play.

Carol had lined everything up.  Intrepreter, check.  Contact at Moris Rasik, check.  Transport, check.  Time, venue, check check!  A seamless excursion.

Well for those of you who have worked in developing countries, which I am sure is quite a few, I'm sure you will be in no way surprised to find out that "seamless" is not exactly how the excursion went!

Firstly, the interpreter didn't show up at the pick-up location.  He claimed there wasn't any taxi's to take him there, so we had to drive through rush hour traffic (it's pretty aweful in Dili) to collect him, and then back through it again to get out of the city.

Secondly, the contact wasn't where we said we would meet him.  No sign.  We take out our mobile phones to give him a call, and (thirdly!) there was no phone coverage.  Timor Telecom was off getting a cup of tea.  We then drove around, asking Timorese if they would know where this meeting might be.  "Up the street", "Keep going", "Past the church".  Finally we made it there, over an hour late.  But it doesn't end there...

Moris Rasik's business model is based on the Gurmain model.  They lend to groups of ladies, and the groups are responsible for the repayments.  Thus if any one lady doesn't make the repayment, the others have to cover the cost.  By structuring the loans this way, the groups of ladies in effect self-select, which improves experience for the MFI - they ensure that the people in the group are trustworthy and will repay their loans, otherwise they will have to.

However on this day in question, one lady didn't show.  The rep from the MFI asked where she was, the rest of the ladies didn't know.  The meeting can't start until all members of the group are there, so two of the ladies went off to try to find her.

30 mins  later...  No sign.

1 hour later...  No sign...

1 hour 30 mins later, finally!  They came back, the other lady wasn't to be found.  They went to her house, doors and windows closed, and (unsurprisingly) no one answered their calls...

From other experiences I've heard of people conducting demand research it appears that what happened above is the norm.  You should expect things to go wrong, if they do it's as expected.  If all goes according to plan, well that is akin to a blue moon!

Once we got everyone present we conducted the focus group.  Below is a picture of Carol explaining risk to them via picture cards.  The ladies are enthralled, the kids and intrigued and most importantly, everyone is having a good time.  It was a special moment.

Attending this demand research session was one of the best things I've done to date on my fellowship.  To see the practicalities of conducting a demand research session was invaluable experience for me working in development.  I encountered firsthand the issues faced when trying to do such sessions and what it is actually like to discuss risk with people in rural areas.

It was inspiring to meet and talk to these ladies who are trying to work their way out of poverty.  Not just to read about them, but to actually meet them.  In person.  They were setting up new business, borrowing money from MFI’s, repaying the money and using further funds to expand their business while at the same time raising a family.

I also saw the real desire they had for insurance products.  When Carol explained the enhanced funeral product to them, you could see on their faces that they really wanted the product.  “Where can we buy” they asked.  This is what working in microinsurance is all about.  These are the people we are truly trying to help.  And each time when I feel frustrated, infuriated or defeated in the future, I will (try to!) remember the Timorese ladies.

Report to follow on the results of the demand research.  I will post a link to it up here when it is made available.

Fiji Microinsurance - In Pictures

It's been a while since I've posted.  Moving to Fiji, settling into the new job, trying to push microinsurance (MI) in Fiji, are the excuses I (know i shouldn't but do) use.

Giving that I'm based in Fiji, I thought it would be good to share some facts and figures on the country that are relevant to MI here.  So here we go:

What does Fiji look like?  Well it is an archipelago located in the South Pacific Ocean, roughly 2000 km northeast of New Zealand’s North Island.  The two main islands are Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, where the vast majority of the population lie.

However, when you look at population split by Urban and Rural, you can see that the rural population is far more spread out across provinces than the Urban.  This means that access microinsurance clients in rural areas will be logistically challenging, not to mention all the other challenges of microinsurance (client education, good product development, marketing ..etc.) 

It's GDP has bobbed up and down over the last 10 years and it's GDP per capita still lags behind many other pacific islands and developed nations.  Thus the people generally have low levels of income, are vulnerable and so there is an argument for MI:

Fiji is multi-ethnic with indigenous Fijians now accounting for 57% of the population and Indo-Fijians about 38 percent.   The remaining Fijians are Europeans and people of mixed Fijian-European ancestry, Chinese, Pacific Islanders, and others.  There has however been high emigration from Fiji in recent years, mainly in the Indo-Fijian ethnicity.

To sum up:

Fiji is a load of islands, with a diverse population (outside of urban areas) spread all over the place, who have low levels of income!  For MI this represents a challenge. 

But! There is one thing that is worth mentioning that makes Fiji a great place to work towards developing good MI products:  The people here are quite simply joyous.  There are many trates of the Fijian people I could rattle off here, however I will just list my favourite: 

I have never been in a place before where the people are so quick to laugh.  They laugh all the time.  Good morning, good day, good evening, you end up laughing.  Go to the cinema... Oh my - you get raucous laughter (even when you really aren't supposed to!).  You end up joining in!  To quote Mark Twain, against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.  Never has this been so true as in Fiji.  And that is why this is a great place to work.  The laughter is everywhere, joyous, it's infectious. And what better people to work with, for and in aid of then people who laugh?

LDC IV - Let the Graphs do the Talking

With the Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) now upon us, I decided to create some charts which may be useful for charities and NGOs trying to raise the profile of sanitation on the agenda. Excitingly, End Water Poverty used some of the below charts in one of their presentations! (More to follow on this in subsequent posts). Without further ado, let's get into it!

1). Sanitation MDG LDC Progress:

The light blue is where we need to be in order to reach the MDG by 2015.  The darker blue is where we actually are.  World Bank data goes to 2008, so from this point I have assumed that future progress will the same as past - These estimations are shown as the bubbles in red.

As you can see, we're behind and unless action is taken, and taken now, we're going to slip even further behind

2). That many?!
Here I've used a simple picture to display the number of people living in LDCs who don't have access to sanitation.

When people quote numbers at me it numbs the effect, however if someone shows me a graph like above, I stop to think...  It really is that many.




















3). Baby Killers

The question here is: What are the main diseases that kill new born babies in LDC?  The answer:

That's right, diarrhoea is the number one cause for child death at birth, killing over 6 times as many babies than HIV (that small purple bubble is HIV by the way, I realise it's so small it's hard to read!) and over twice as many babies than malaria! Yet currently the trend has been that HIV has gotten most of the attention.

Hope you enjoyed the graphs, comments and thoughts, as always, welcome.

Water & Sanitation MDGs - Impetus Needed!

The World Bank has a fantastic database with reams of data.  After seeing how successful World Water Day was this year, I wanted to look at how LDCs in Africa are progressing towards the targets for water and sanitation set under Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Adopted by world leaders in the year 2000 and set to be achieved by 2015, the MDGs provide concrete, numerical benchmarks for tackling extreme poverty in its many dimensions.  As we have had 11 years to reach these goals, I investigated how "well" we are doing in achieving them.  More info on the MDGs here.

The MDG in question is number 7: Ensure environmental sustainability, and more specifically Target 7c: Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

The World Bank database contains data on the % of population, by country, who have access to water and sanitation for the years 2000, 2005 and 2008.  I calculated what the % in 2000 needs to reduce to in order to meet the MDG by 2015.  Then, knowing what this target % needs to be, I calculated how far the countries have come towards meeting that target.  

For example, if in a country 40% of its population didn't have access to clean water, this figure would have to fall to 20% by 2015 to reach the MDG.  If it currently has only fallen 10% (to 30%), then that country is 50% of the way to meeting the target.


Average of LDCs in Africa (weighted by population):
 

	2000	Target by 2015	2008	% Complete
Without Access to Sanitation	77%	39%	73%	10%
Without Access to Water	52%	26%	46%	22%

As you can see, LDCs in Africa are only 10% towards achieving the goal for sanitation and 22% for water - not good.


This gives a high level picture, now I wanted to investigate how each individual country is doing in terms of its water and sanitation MDGs using motion charts.  The google doc with the chart is saved here.  The motion chart is on the "Motion Chart" sheet.  Set it up as follows:

• Y-axis set to "Water - Progress to MDG"
• X-axis set to "Country Code"
• Colour set to "Country Code"
• Size set to "Population"

So what we have now is a bubble for each LDC in Africa, the size of the bubble is proportional to the population and its position on the y-axis is the % towards reaching its water MDG. (Feel free to ask questions on how to work the Motion Chart if the above isn't clear)

Looking at water 1st, the below chart shows the % towards the water MDG each country has achieved from 2000 to 2008:

As you can see, small nations such as Malawi, Lesotho and Gambia are doing excellently.  Malawi, which is the highlighted country above, is 92% of the way towards reaching its MDG for water.  On the other hand, conflict nations such as Rwanda and Sierra Leone have actually gotten worse when it comes to access to water.  The small orange bubble at the bottom of the chart is Sierra Leone, where the access to water has decreased by 27%.


Sanitation, unfortunately, shows an even bleaker picture:

Here you can see that the majority of countries have made little progress towards reaching their sanitation MDG, with the vast majority lying around the 10-20% mark.  Populous countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan and Tanzania achieve scores of 9%, 0% and 0%, which bring down the average mark to 10%.

On a positive note, Angola (the highlighted country above) has made decent progress towards its sanitation MDG achieving 57% of it by 2008.  This is valuable information, as whatever policies they are enacting in Angola are significantly improving the access to sanitation.  It would be great to hear from someone who has experience of working on sanitation in Angola.  Please, tell us how they're doing it so other countries can enact similar policies!

Markets Save Water

Markets can have a bad name.  People talk of asymmetry of information leading to participants being taken advantage of, regulations intended to protect such participants failing and speculators distorting the prices.

All of the above have seen to be, on occasion, true and I agree - markets are in no way perfect. However today I saw a talk on TED that showed markets can serve a purpose - they can save water.

In the talk Rob Harmon explains that you can use markets to keep water in streams and rivers.  His project happens in America, where people can have "use it or lose it" rights to water.  If you don't use the water you have a right to, you can potentially lose your right to in the future.  This, of course,
 leads to hoarding and wasting of the precious resource.

Rob developed a market place where companies that want to reduce their water consumption can pay these individuals to NOT hoard/waste the water, and leave it in the stream.  Everybody wins - the company "reduces" their water consumption, the individual receives money for not hoarding/wasting their water and society now has water gushing through it's streams.

The idea here is identical to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, where companies that want (or more correctly "have") to reduce their carbon footprint can pay developing countries not to produce carbon they otherwise would have.

It's an intriguing concept, and one must think of potential uses elsewhere - As opposed to other, shall we say "less friendly" alternatives, Egypt could pay Ethiopia to leave water in the Nile, Iraq could pay Turkey to leave water in the Tigris.  Yet again, everybody wins.

Child & Infant Mortality - The Importance of Access to Water & Sanitation

The number one killer of children under five in Africa is diarrhoea caused by lack of access to clean water & sanitation (Lancet, 2010).  It is responsible for over 4,000 deaths in this age group globally per day. What better place to start my blog, which hopes to show the stats related to development in an interesting way through creative charts and graphs.

The World Health Organization (WHO) website contains data on infant & child (I&C) mortality by country as well as access to W&S facilities.  

Question:  Do higher levels of access to clean water and sanitation lead to lower child and infant mortality?

I wanted to use the data on the WHO website to create a chart that showed the answer to the question above.  And thankfully, after analysing the data, it showed that access to WASH clearly results in lower infant & child mortality rates. Check out this chart:

This is a motion chart.  On motion charts you can track up to four variables at once over time.  The chart above shows the average relationship between Child Mortality and Access to Clean Water from 1990 to 2008 in selected Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Africa.  The colour of the bubbles show the GDP per capita (the warmer the colour the higher the GDP per capita).  Hans Rosling has created some fantastic examples of motion charts, my favorite being the one featured in the talk he gave about the spread of HIV globally.

The motion chart data I created is saved in a google doc that can be viewed here.

There are two motion charts in this google doc:

1. Total sheet - Shows the Child, Infant mortality rates, access to clean water, sanitation for the average of all the LDC countries I investigated
2. Country sheet - Shows the Child, Infant mortality rates, access to clean water, sanitation for each of the LDC countries I investigated

The LDC countries I analysed are the countries that I believe End Water Poverty has a campaigning presence in.  These are:

Burkina Faso	Lesotho	Mali	Senegal
Burundi	Liberia	Mozambique	Togo
Chad	Madagascar	Rwanda	Uganda
Eritrea	Malawi	Sierra Leone	Zambia

On to the charts - Let's look at the "Total" sheet first, as it gives a high level picture of the relationship.  To set up the motion chart, just do the following:

1. Click on the Total sheet
2. For the Y axis set the variable to "Child death per 10,000"
3. For the X axis set the variable to "Water access %"
4. Set the colour to "GDP per capita"
5. Set the size to "Same Size"
6. Press Play!

On pressing play you are observing what happens to the average relationship in the above countries between the child death rate per 10,000 and the access to clean water from 1998 to 2008.  It can be clearly seen that as access to water increases, the child death rate falls.  Brilliant!

You can now play around with the chart, look at the relationship between the C&I mortality rates and access to W&S over time.

It is also worth mentioning that as time goes by the GDP per Capita significantly increases.  In fact, one could argue that once the child death rate drops below approximately 160 deaths per 10,000 (infant 100 per 10,000) the GDP per capita expands rapidly.  Is there an argument here to say that increasing the access to W&S, which in turn will reduce the I&C mortality rates, will lead to an increases in the GDP per capita?  I can see a "Freakeconomics" type argument here, however I'll leave that for another day.

If you would like to look at the individual countries in detail go to the Country sheet.  Here I have the same motion chart as in the Total sheet, however this time it is broken down by country.  The same trend is exhibited here by the majority of countries (Sierra Leone and Rwanda being the exceptions).  In this chart it is evident that countries such as Madagascar, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Chad could potentially reduce their I&C mortality rates by increasing the access to clean W&S.

Delighted to finally get my first post up.  I very much welcome thoughts and comments. Any issues using the motion charts?  Are they useful? Recommendations for further analysis?

Slan go foill

Barry

Introduction

There is reams of data available to analyse and investigate in the area of international development.  Having worked several years as an actuary, (and being inspired by Hans Rosling) I want to do exactly that.  The aim of this blog?  To analyse international development data, providing useful charts and graphs that NGOs could potentially use in campaigning.

This blog will organically evolve.  Views or recommendations made will be very much appreciated, and though feedback I aim to make this blog a useful and informative tool for individuals working in the development sector.

Open to recommendations as to what the next post should be on.  If you are aware of a data set and believe there may be some interesting findings within it - let me know.  I can see what I can make from it.

Thanks for reading

Barry