The convincing argument of Dead Aid

Editor's note: The above photo was taken by The Cord's Photography Manager,
Nick Lachance. Used with permission.

On Friday, November 13th, Dambisa Moyo came to Waterloo to speak at UW's Hagey Hall. Moyo is a Zambian-born economist with a Masters degree from Harvard and a PhD from Oxford, who has worked for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank.

In April, she was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People (#37). She has debated Paul Collier and Stephen Lewis. And the book she was speaking about, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There Is A Better Way For Africa, is a New York Times Bestseller. In short, she's kind of a big deal. Needless to say, I was excited to see her speak.

Dead Aid has drawn a great deal of criticism and instigated a lot of debate, particularly within the development community. It was the first book I bought upon my return from Sierra Leone, and my interest was no doubt piqued in large part because of my first-hand experience in development work.

And the fact her book has drawn such strong reactions is by no means surprising. Her central thesis is that aid has not only failed to help African nations escape poverty, but actually helped perpetuate further poverty. Moyo doesn't shy away from condemning the aid industry, and her criticisms are couched in a rather no-nonsense vernacular. Clearly, she didn't write this book to make friends.

But I think a lot of the criticisms levelled at Moyo stem from knee-jerk reactions that fundamentally miss the book's point. As is unfortunately common, most of the people asking questions at the lecture lacked even a basic understanding of Dead Aid, attacking Moyo for failing to offer alternate solutions to addressing the ills of the African continent, and thereby broadcasting to everyone in attendance that they hadn't read the book at all. In reality, the entire second half of the book does just that, arguing that rather than ineffective aid transfers that create a culture of aid dependence, African governments would benefit from market-based solutions.

I'm not really concerned with laying out the exact arguments of the book, as those who are truly interested will presumably read it themselves. But an extremely basic overview of her suggestions includes entering into capital markets; attracting foreign direct investment; cultivating strong ties with the world's largest emerging power, the Chinese; removing barriers to profitable trade, particularly amongst fellow African countries; and exploiting the opportunities of microfinance.

Otherwise stated, Moyo looks to cold, hard economics as the way out of poverty for the continent from whence she came. It's not nearly as warm and fuzzy as the aid "solution", nor does it allow Westerners to give themselves a moralistic pat on the back for their benevolence in nobly helping poor Africans who supposedly cannot help themselves.

And so, it really comes as no shock that it's met with some resistance. But the reality is that there are far more impoverished Africans in the world today than there were before the West started funnelling billions of dollars in aid transfers, so perhaps it's time we tried to understand why, as uncomfortable as it may make us feel.

First, it's important to distinguish that Moyo is not railing against all kinds of aid. Though she acknowledges problems with both emergency/humanitarian aid, "which is mobilized and dispensed in response to catastrophes and calamities", and charity-based aid, "which is disbursed by charitable organizations to institutions or people on the ground", she nonetheless allows them to escape her vitriolic fervour.

Instead, it is systemic aid - both bilateral (direct government-to-government transfers) and multilateral (transfered to individual governments via institutions such as the World Bank) - that Moyo picks apart with surgical precision. For me, the book's most compelling condemnation of this bilateral and multilateral aid was the idea that it props up corrupt governments.

In theory, these aid transfers come with conditionalities that must be met, regarding how and to what ends the aid is dispensed. But the reality is that we've created such an immense industry built around aid that the inherent systems discourage stemming the flow of money - even when conditionalities aren't met.

... there is simply a pressure to lend. The World Bank employs 10,000 people, the IMF over 2,500; add another 5,000 for the other UN agencies; add to that the employees of at least 25,000 registered NGOs, private charities and the army of government aid agencies: taken together around 500,000 people, the population of Swaziland. Sometimes they make loans, sometimes they give grants, but they are all in the business of aid ... seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and decade after decade.

Their livelihoods depend on aid, just as those of the officials who take it. For most developmental organizations, successful lending is measured almost entirely by the size of the donor's lending portfolio, and not by how much of the aid is actually used for its intended purpose. As a consequence, the incentives built into the development organizations perpetuate the cycle of lending to even the most corrupt countries. Donors are subject to 'fiscal year' concerns ... Any non-disbursed amounts increase the likelihood that their subsequent aid programmes will be slashed.

- "Chapter 4: The Silent Killer of Growth", page 54

In other words, systemic aid flows directly into the pockets of sometimes corrupt governments, who can choose to use or abuse it with remarkable ease and few repercussions. Unlike in the private sector, where a government could screw around once before the money is cut off, aid allows them to become increasingly corrupt, content in the knowledge that they're likely going to keep getting money regardless.

Of course, Moyo's clarion call for the abandonment of the current aid model would be considerably less compelling were she not offering another road. Consider this:

In December 2005, at the Second Conference of Chinese and African Entrepreneurs, China's Premier, Wen Jibao, pledged that China's trade with Africa would rise to US$100 billion a year within five years. Forget the capital markets, forget FDI [Foreign Direct Investment], forget the US$40 billion a year aid programme, and forget trade with any other country in the world - this is just trade with China. Assuming that nothing else changed, that could be US$100 billion in 2010, US$100 billion in 2011, and the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that.

By 2015, just five years later, that would be US$500 billion of trade income - 50 per cent of the trillion dollars of aid that has made its way to Africa in the past sixty years. The difference is, of course, one is laced with bromide, the other steroids.

- "Chapter 8: Let's Trade", page 114

I am by no means an expert in economics, and in fact often find myself wildly indifferent to it, given that my capitalist impulses rarely go beyond how to buy my next batch of CDs. I'm in no position to give Ms. Moyo a peer review in any academic journal. But if I understand what she's saying at all, it makes a lot of sense. And it builds on modes of thought that began to germinate for me while in Sierra Leone.

About four months into my time in Salone, I attended a movie night put on by IMATT. One of the films they showed was a documentary about Freetown around the time it gained its independence in 1961. The footage was interesting, but also shocking and more than a little depressing.

The country had double-decker buses and a functioning train system. There were movie theatres. The roads were well maintained. It was home to the first university in sub-Saharan Africa, where countries that are now considered leaps and bounds ahead of Sierra Leone, like Nigeria and Ghana, would send their best and brightest. In short, it was bubbling with promise.

Fast forward nearly fifty years and the movie theatres were gone. The train system was no more. Many of the roads remained, sure, but few looked as though they'd been touched since. It was a society that had clearly regressed.

Obviously, I'm not advocating that a return to colonialism is the answer. But there were certainly days when it seemed a tempting option.

My work with JHR doesn't fall into the category which Moyo so vehemently opposes in Dead Aid. JHR seeks to build a country's knowledge and skills in the field of media, thereby enabling a well-functioning fourth estate, one of the crucial components of any healthy political system. I believe in that work. But on days where you don't help one of your reporters produce a story that makes a difference, it can be deflating. At times, you wish you could just point to a well-paved road and say, "That's what I contributed."

In essence, this is what the Chinese have been doing across the continent in recent years - investing a ton of money in building roads and infrastructure. Their motives are not altruistic, but self-interested, as making the continent easier to do business in has tangible benefits for them. But something tells me Africans don't really care about the motives. If anything, they'd probably prefer someone whose end goal is creating business opportunities that will lead to jobs.

At its core, Dead Aid derives its strength from Moyo's willingness to work from somewhat unconventional assumptions - like, for example, that self-interested actions need not necessarily have negative impacts on others. Or take this excerpt about the ideal political conditions for economic growth:

The uncomfortable truth is that far from being a prerequisite for economic growth, democracy can hamper development as democratic regimes find it difficult to push through economically beneficial legislation amid rival parties and jockeying interests. In a perfect world, what poor countries at the lowest rungs of society need is not a multi-party democracy, but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving (unfortunately, too often countries end up with more dictator and less benevolence).

- "Chapter 3: Aid Is Not Working", page 42

Here, again, Moyo counters prevailing wisdom that democracy = good and dictators = bad. Rwanda, though mentioned only in passing in the book, provides an instructive example, and one which Moyo drew on considerably more in her lecture.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is a vocal opponent to reliance on aid. And though his regime, particularly in its earlier days, could more accurately be described as authoritarian than democratic, he's done a remarkable job of pulling his country - which was a veritable portrait of Hell on Earth just 15 years ago - up by its bootstraps. Of the four countries I visited in sub-Saharan Africa, it was easily the most developed. And Kagame is one of the only heads of state across the continent that Western governments advocate doing business with.

The bottom line is this: Dead Aid is not without its imperfections. At times, Moyo comes off as a little over-the-top, oversimplifying the issues to paint aid as the sole reason for Africa's underdevelopment. But on the whole, her arguments are compelling enough to forgive any overzealousness conjured by her passion to see her native Zambia and the rest of Africa move forward with the rest of the world.

My friends Brandon and Jen have first dibs on borrowing the book, but if you find the contents of this post even mildly stimulating, I highly recommend you add your name to that list.

A Long Way Wrong?

Before I left for Sierra Leone, I read Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, about his experiences in the country's decade-long civil war. At the time, I posted a blog entry addressing the controversy that had emerged around the accuracy of the memoir, concluding that I wasn't especially concerned if every minute detail was precise.

But while I was in Sierra Leone, I was interested in what some of my colleagues might think about it. Always eager to learn more, Sheik borrowed the book first and decried it with his typical passion as a fraud. Interestingly, the first reason he gave for not believing Beah's account was that the book was "too well written" to have been penned by a child soldier.

After Sheik, I lent the book to Muctaru Wurie, the man behind Kalleone's above-average web presence. I didn't actually do any work for JHR with Muctar; unlike many of the Kalleone journalists, he was older than me and was more focused on developing his web skills and his work for one of the telecommunications companies. But we spoke frequently on many topics, and it didn't take long to understand that he was a highly intelligent man and a very competent journalist.

When Muctar did exercise his journalistic chops, it was not for Kalleone, but writing for a very good quarterly magazine called Sierra Eye. In fact, as one of the main contributors to the magazine, he asked me to do a critical evaluation of their eighth overall issue.

I obliged, and sent him an email the day before I left on my Liberia-Guinea adventure, going through the publication in all aspects, including minutiae such as font and photo cropping choices. The mere fact I bothered talking about those things was a testament to its overall quality, as they would have fallen by the wayside in a critical evaluation of most Salone publications, where basics like 'having sources' and 'not fabricating quotes' were slightly more significant areas for improvement.

Needless to say, upon my return to Freetown after my two-and-a-half week trip, I was a tad surprised to have my email, which I had assumed would be shared only with the magazine's top brass, published as the featured letter to the editor in Sierra Eye's ninth edition.

Anyway, after Muctar's first reading of Beah's book, he shared Sheik's strong distaste for it, and asked if he could hold onto it a little longer, as he wanted to write an article about the book for the next issue of Sierra Eye. I agreed, and, in the end, the book remained behind in Sierra Leone, as the piece was not yet finished when it came time for me to come home.

But Muctar did pour a great deal of work into a fine investigation of the controversy surrounding A Long Way Gone and the merits of the book itself, ultimately publishing an in-depth piece entitled "A Long Way From The Truth". American blogger-journalist Janice Harayda called his piece "the first comprehensive investigation by a Sierra Leonean journalist" on the Beah story.

Much like the initial critique of Beah's story in The Australian, Muctar questions Beah's grasp of timelines. Through interviews with authoritative sources, such as those involved with the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, he finds that the SL army was not found to recruit child soldiers until 1997 and the mass flight of Sierra Leoneans from Mattru Jong due to rebel attacks didn't occur until 1995.

This calls into question Beah's assertion that he was recruited in 1993 during such an attack there, and leads Sheik to theorize that he was actually recruited by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

Other discrepancies include Beah's claim that he saw a dead child wearing a Tupac Shakur All Eyez on Me t-shirt before the album was even released, and his claim that Le 300 constituted "two months' salary". The latter in particular is blatantly incorrect to anyone who has been to Sierra Leone; that is less than half of a single fare for the poda podas, Freetown's cheapest mode of transport.

Another seemingly obvious slip-up concerns the speaker who announced the rebel coup:

It was the crooked and disjointed blend of Krio and English voice of the late Corporal Tamba Gborie, a junior army recruit, that announced the coup in the early hours of Sunday 25th May but Ishmael stated in his book that it was Johnny Paul Koroma who came on air to announce that Tejan Kabbah had been overthrown.

... Clearly, everyone who was here at that time knew that what was described as the most embarrassing coup broadcast of all time was delivered by the late Corporal Gborie, who was later convicted of treason and shot by firing squad.

These fairly obvious inaccuracies do make me question the publishers of Beah's memoir (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) a little more and I certainly sympathize for the anger of both Sheik and Muctar about these errors being broadcast to arguably the widest international audience to ever read about their country.

But, barring the details of Beah's horrific experience being completely fabricated, I still have trouble judging him too harshly, just as I did a year ago. After all, as Muctar himself writes, the general details of his story align with the tragic realities of Salone's war, and they're realities I can't even fathom living through.

When someone with a true sense of the was in Sierra Leone look[s] at A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, the story of Ishmael's experience as a child combatant is neither strange nor too horrible in the context of what happened during the war.

There are stories wors[e] than his (see the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) Report at www.trcsierraleone.org). Truth is, kids who fought with the RUF have a more barbaric story to tell. From the way his war experience was told, it could have come from a genuine child combatant.

Editor's Note: I just came across this statement issued in January 2008 by Beah regarding The Australian's claims against him. Clearly, Muctar's piece shows there were a few errors, but I'm inclined to believe they were not malicious. (Updated on Wednesday, November 25, 2009)

Nostalgia inspired by a pair of former trainers

This morning, the jhr Facebook fan page noted an upcoming event in Toronto at the end of the month, featuring former jhr Sierra Leone trainer, Jennifer Hollett. More famous for her time as one of the few competent VJs in MuchMusic's history, Hollett was among the first trainers jhr sent into Sierra Leone.

While there, she produced this two-minute video about a day in the life of a jhr trainer, specifically her colleague, Danny Glenwright.



I figured I'd share this because it's a pretty well put-together and concise look at essentially the role I played while in Sierra Leone, although every trainer's experience is unique and I worked in radio, not print.

It was also a little hit of nostalgia, as the video features an interview with my Country Director, Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell, at Stop Press, the restaurant where I held some of my workshops. In addition, Glenwright worked at the Concord Times newspaper, the same media house that hosted my roommates Bryna and Kevin, and which I visited on a couple occasions. There are some recognizable faces among the journalists featured, such as the perpetually friendly Ibrahim Tarawallie, who gets significant screen time around the 0:35 mark.

Interestingly, this is the first time I've laid eyes on Glenwright, and he looks nothing like I expected. In the lead-up to my interview with jhr, I devoured everything Glenwright wrote on the jhr site, most of which has been taken down as the site has evolved.

I found his blend of stubborn optimism and engaging prose uniquely inspiring. I still recall one post in particular that detailed all the difficulties encountered in covering the 2007 local elections, including the theft of his camera, yet ended with the statement, "There's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be right now."

Danny was also kind enough to answer my questions - some of which were on point, and some of which were hilariously naive in retrospect - before my interview and departure. After watching this video, I read back on some of our correspondence. Here is just one example of his responses:

Me: It seems to me that one difficulty in reporting in general in Sierra Leone is in impressing the importance of timely reporting. Is this a fair observation? Acknowledging that the infrastructure in SL newsrooms isn't reliable enough to ensure as stable a production cycle as we're accustomed to in the West, what steps do you think are most feasible for furthering the progress of getting papers distributed with relevant, up-to-date reporting?

Danny: Yep, you're dead-on here. It's incredibly difficult to adjust to this. Deadlines? What's that? This aspect of the job frustrated me from day one. Eventually you have to adapt. I found I tried to meet my colleagues somewhere in the middle.

Here's the thing: you will quickly learn, once on the ground, that there's a reason why things are so slow. Traffic jams take hours, business hours are unreliable, electricity and generators are unreliable, interviews fall through, printers break, politicians are ALWAYS late, everyone is always late, timelines and deadlines are very tough to keep.

That said, there is also a culture of laziness and passing the buck. As much as I often acknowledged outside reasons why things were slow, I also tried to draw attention to the other 'inside' reasons why they didn't have to be. It's a balancing act and it's tough not to succumb to the lethargy that daily attacks the newsroom.

In the end, I think I was able to communicate that 'news' means something that is new and therefore it has to be timely and we shouldn't be sitting around the newsroom until midnight every day. Overall, it's a tough call. Salone is a very different pace of life than we're used to and it's a huge adjustment. Everyone approaches it differently and I don't think it pays to get mad or impose our way of doing things there. It doesn't work for many reasons. You have to compromise. Good luck.

The words seemed insightful then and continue to resonate 11 months later. Were it not for Danny taking the time to give thoughtful, detailed responses to my questions, I imagine I wouldn't have been prepared to adapt to Salone as well as I feel I did. I like to think I paid that forward to the crew that came in after me. Either way, a sincere thanks to Mr. Danny Glenwright is clearly in order.

My Mastercard commercial

Phone bill for frantic calls and texts home, having lost my passport less than 48 hours before a transcontinental flight:

$11 CAD

Having passport photos taken three times to meet Canada's ridiculously anal specifications:

$18

Bribe of police chief to expedite the writing of an incident report for lost passport:

$18

Emergency travel document to leave Sierra Leone, procured through two days of exhaustive paperwork and generally astronomical stress levels:

$29

Changing flight six hours before takeoff to add a day-long stopover in Nairobi:

$50

Helicopter to Lungi International Airport to ensure I caught my plane to Kenya:

$78

Utterly useless day-long stopover in Nairobi:

$204

Final cost of temporary passport at the Canadian Embassy in Rwanda:

$206

Coming face-to-face with critically endangered mountain gorillas, climbing to the top of a dormant volcano, and just generally getting to take the vacation my brother spent $5000 to fly halfway around the world for:

Priceless

In a culture where the majority of advertising campaigns are remarkably awful, Mastercard really did hit a home run with that one; it managed to ingrain itself so deeply into North American culture that I not only appropriated it for this blog, but even felt weird not ending it with, "There's some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard." And I don't even own a Mastercard.


Editor's note: I'm back, both on the continent and in the blogosphere. I touched down in Toronto Tuesday afternoon and am thrilled to be home. But while my eight-month adventure abroad has come to an end, this blog won't follow suit quite yet. There are still a few posts to come detailing my trips to Morocco and Rwanda, as well as a couple Sierra Leone ones I merely haven't had a chance to post. Though I'm sure the audience will fall off considerably now that I'm home, I'll try to get these final posts together by the end of the month, in between catching up with friends, playing baseball, and starting the new job.

Help me reintegrate ... by watching movies!

In my last post, I ruminated on the dangers of reverse culture shock. Presumably, you, the concerned reader, thought to yourself, "This simply will not do. How can I help Mike minimize these feelings of isolation?" For the answer, I'm turning to the cinema.

This blog has made repeated mention of my love of music (like here, for example, or here. Here too), but save for the occasional Anchorman reference, I've given no play to my other pop culture passion, film. Until now.

The way I see it, if I can quickly update my grasp of Western cultural iconography by ravenously devouring the most important flicks of the here and now, I will in the process minimize at least one avenue for potential alienation. And that sounds like a pretty good excuse to watch movies to me.

Here's where you come in. Some films are obvious must-sees whose buzz has reached me even in Freetown, such as Slumdog Millionaire. But there are many, many more for which I am relying on the considerable knowledge of my film nerd friends.

Thus, I am now accepting proposals for single- and double-feature bills of the best the movie industry has pumped out in the last eight months. Both in-theatre and video release options are acceptable.

The annual cache from the November Oscar blitz will have hit rental shelves by now, I presume, but I'm also down for some light summer fare at the cineplex. After all, this is by far the longest stretch I've gone without adding a five-digit AFI number to my collection and I'm straight-up fiending. (If you've never gone to the movies with me, don't even try to understand this last comment.)

Tell me to shut up

I'll be home in two weeks. This is clearly exciting. But a small part of me is also a tad nervous about the repatriation process.

You see, I've heard quite a lot about 'reverse culture shock' - how difficult it can be to return to one's original society after spending time abroad under vastly different circumstances.

As early as my first week in Salone, colleagues who were much more experienced expats than me explained that no one would be interested in hearing much about my life here once I returned to Canada. I immediately recalled a pre-departure breakfast with my buddy Scott Sobering, in which he told me I was one of the few people that had wanted an in-depth rundown of his summer in Peru. His pre-depature training had warned of the likelihood his friends would show major excitement prior to his departure and minimal interest upon his return.

Just a couple weeks ago, JHR sent me a reintegration handbook explaining the common experience of reverse culture shock:

In an overseas culture, host nationals expect newcomers to make mistakes and be different. Most intuitively understand that foreigners will experience stress adapting to the new physical and social environment and will long for their family and friends back home. At home, on the other hand, everyone expects the returnee to fit in quickly. They are much less tolerant of mistakes and have little empathy for the difficulties of reverse culture shock - such problems are not expected or often accepted.

'Intolerant' and 'unempathetic' doesn't exactly sound like my friends and family. My gut reaction is to merely assume that the people who have a difficult time with re-immersion simply don't have as wicked cool a support base as I do.

But my Toronto boss, Carissa, confided over dinner a couple weeks ago that the relative ease with which I adapted into Sierra Leonean culture makes her think the return home will actually be the toughest part of the experience for me. Only time will tell, I suppose.

The supposed isolation that comes with stepping off that plane does make logical sense. We're talking about eight months of life developments for my friends that, despite my best efforts, I'm not fully up to speed on. Eight months of inside jokes I won't get. Eight months of incomprehensible yet somehow hilarious bar stories - except that for me they'll probably be more parts incomprehensible than hilarious.

Perhaps this very process of reverse culture shock accounts to some degree for the fact that people that live and work abroad tend to turn it into a lifestyle, spending major chunks of their adult life on far-flung shores.

One of the JHR handbook's suggestions is to find mentors that understand the difficulties of reverse culture shock. This is one area where I feel I have a leg up, having such a wealth of friends that are not only interested in the kind of work I was doing abroad, but have also done or are currently doing similar things internationally. While I'm sure most people won't have entire notebooks filled with questions for me, I will be legitimately surprised if a select few aren't reasonably inquisitive.

And as far as I'm concerned, either reaction is fine. The fact I'm trying to prepare myself to some degree for this allegedly wide-ranging reaction is by no means a commentary on the beloved people who have been reading this blog. You are all beautiful, wonderful folks, whether you want a three-sentence summary of my last eight months or a three-day one.

Rather, this is simply a note of warning. To say that, sometimes, I might start rambling about something Sierra Leonean and you might have to tell me to stuff it. And on those occasions, I'll indulge the urge by firing an email to one of the cool folks I've met here.

Eight months is by no means an eternity, but in a situation as disparate from my Canadian life as this one, it is long enough to redefine what comprises a familiar day. And it will likely take me a little time to get re-acclimatized and back into the swing of Canadian life. Your patience is appreciated.

Meet Rob Hayes

Rob Hayes is one of many prolific alumni of my first-year residence floor, Willison Hall, B2 - aka., quite possibly, the most stunning assemblage of minds on any Laurier residence floor in 2003-04. Oh, let's not be modest. Ever.

Rob and I have a lot in common. In first year, we were a pair of English majors in a sea of biz kids, and we did the only thing arts students with an interest in social acceptance would do: we played up the stereotypes of our kind.

For me, this meant things like editing essays for many a floormate and running a brief yet popular word-a-day program. Rob took the considerably more hilarious step of learning enough business terminology to deliver inspired pre-exam motivational speeches to our B2 peers.

If memory serves, we also reinforced the stereotype of the hard-partying arts majors, taking second and third in a Ty McLellan-led clean sweep of the podium during the speed trials for funneling in the B2 beer-lympics. We were the only three arts students in the competition, and it was my first-ever funnel, having entered university as a relative non-drinker. Even six years later, I imagine the lucrative salaries of our business counterparts are hollow compensation for that traumatic defeat.

Our shared interests run much deeper, though - Radio Laurier, relentless sarcasm, saving the world. The list goes on. At my Toronto going-away party with my Willison crew, Rob showed unparalleled interest in the quest that lay in front of me. In fact, he was so seriously considering applying for the JHR Liberia posting that he pulled me onto the back porch with a bottle of whiskey, saying, "We drink until you've convinced me to go for it."

Unfortunately for both our livers, I failed to talk him into it. But Rob hasn't let that avert his gaze from the general theme of improving the messy state of affairs on our planet. He even recently started a non-profit organization (I assume, given the dot-org suffix), and wrote a hilarious post about me.

So, when he asked me to help him in his latest quest, it seemed the least I could do. I now turn it over to Rob to explain:

I have entered a young advertisers competition (Cannes Young Lions), for which I had to make a commercial for Oxfam UK, and had 48 hours to do it.

I have two weeks to get as many views and votes as I can for it.... Mikey, I was wondering if you could pimp it on your blog - I recall you have a robust following....

Check out the video here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HZlvy4w0Hw

To vote, go to http://www.youtube.com/canneslions and search for 'therobhayes' (stupid website, no, there's no easier way), click my video, and give me a thumbs up. It's titled 'Oxfam ad'. Genius, eh?

... Come'on Mike Brown, it's about saving the world.

What can I say? I am a sucker for saving the world. He only has one week left. The more votes he gets before June 1st, the better. If you have a few spare minutes, I'd certainly appreciate you helping a brother out. Thanks. You're a pal.

... Oh, you want a Sierra Leone connection, eh? Well, according to a May 20th report from IRIN, Freetown is one of the world's most vulnerable populations to the very real risks of climate change. With your vote, Rob Hayes could fix that. Single-handedly.

Or at least score a trip to the Cannes Film Festival. Truth be told, I didn't have time to really read up on the details of the competition.