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How Do We Recover From the Worst Floods in Pakistan's History?
274 Plays3 years ago
Tahir Andrabi unpacks the stages of disaster recovery that Pakistan will go through. We use his experience working on the 2005 earthquakes to think through what an effective flood relief and rehabilitation effort will look like. We talk about what the long-term effects might be on livelihoods and on health and education outcomes, and the interventions that can help minimize these effects.
Tahir is the Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He was the inaugeral Dean of the LUMS School of Education, and a co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan. It's his research on education that has achieved the most prominence, but the reason I'm talking to him for this episode is his work on disaster recovery in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.
Some links to what we talked about:
- An archived version of RISE-PAK, the information aggregation portal developed by Tahir and his collaborators to aid recovery efforts following the 2005 earthquake.
- Tahir's paper (with Benjamin Daniels and Jishnu Das) on the effects of the 2005 earthquake on income, education, and health outcomes.
- Floods Impact Assessment by Uzair Younis and Ammar Khan, the source for the $13B damage estimate we discussed.
- Abida Parveen's rendition of Ghalib's "Yeh Na Thi Hamari Qismat", from which Tahir quotes a couplet to illustrate Pakistan's climate crisis.
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Transcript
Introduction: Unbacking Us and Pakistan Floods
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello, I'm Asad Lyakat and this is Unbacking Us. Pakistan has been hit by catastrophic floods. When I was recording the first episode of this podcast with Asam Khwaja, we couldn't imagine in our worst nightmares that the next episode would be about a disaster of such epic proportions.
00:00:24
Speaker
I talked to Asim after releasing that episode, and we both shared a feeling of unease about that episode. Because while the balance of payments crisis is an important problem, it pales in significance and relevance compared to the floods.
Shift in Focus: Economic Issues to Flood Recovery
00:00:40
Speaker
I have two more episodes in the pipeline with Fiza Sajad on the urban housing crisis and with Sarah Khan on the gender gap in voting. And I'll release them in due time, but today we'll talk about flood recovery. It's hard to wrap our minds around the sheer scale of the damage that has been caused by these floods. Satellite images show that more than a third of the country is underwater. Most of Pakistan's cropland and livestock seem to have been destroyed.
00:01:10
Speaker
33 million people are reported to have been affected and more than 1,200 have died. A recent estimate by the Atlantic Council's Uzair Yunus and by Amar Khan pins the damages at $13 billion, with 7 billion of them occurring in Sindh province alone. This estimate and others can help us come to terms with the scale of the problem and in the hands of the right people can be put to use in relief and recovery efforts.
Guest Introduction: Tahir Andrabhi and Disaster Recovery
00:01:40
Speaker
But by and large, we simply don't know enough at the local level about where people have been most affected and what are the ways in which they have been affected, what they need most, and when.
00:01:54
Speaker
My guest today is Tahir Andrabhi. He's a professor of economics at Pomona College. He was the inaugural dean of the Lam School of Education, an institution he built up from the ground. I've known him for 11 years now. He's been a mentor to me. I have traveled with him in rural Fazlabad and Kasur and Kharpur and the goats of Karachi. I've learned a lot from him, not just about economics, but also about Ghalib and about how to cook mutton karahi the right way.
00:02:23
Speaker
It's his research and education that has achieved the most prominence, but the reason I'm talking to him today is his work on disaster recovery in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. Along with Jishnudas and Nasim Khwaja and others, he set up Rise Park, which was an information aggregation portal to coordinate disaster relief following the earthquake.
Phases of Disaster Recovery: Rescue to Reconstruction
00:02:47
Speaker
I'll talk to him about what we can learn from that experience to help us recover from the current floods in the weeks and months to come. He has also published research on the long-term effects of the earthquake, on the lives of those who suffered most from the earthquake. And I'll talk to him about what we can learn from that to try and avert negative long-term outcomes for those who have been affected by these floods. Tahir, welcome to Unpacking Us.
00:03:11
Speaker
Thank you, Asit. It's great to be here, even though what brings us together is a very sobering event, a catastrophe, but it's important to talk about it and really think about how to move forward. So I want to start by thinking about what happens in the aftermath of a disaster like a flood or an earthquake. Based on your experience in the 2005 earthquake, how would you characterize the various stages of recovering from a disaster like this? And what stage are we in right now?
00:03:41
Speaker
So typically when disaster professionals think about organizing effort, they talk about four phases. And the phases are really the four R's. There is rescue, there is relief, there is rehabilitation, and reconstruction. So rescue is the immediate, right? What is called the first responders. So the first responders have to act very quickly. So this is where the pictures that you see on the internet of people being rescued from within the raging waters,
00:04:10
Speaker
and so on, and getting them to kind of safe places. Safe places could be like camps, could be more dry ground. A lot of people would go to organized settings, but many people kind of go to friends and family in the Pakistani context where they're the first in the first phase. The interesting really question is, is, you know, Pakistani is particularly in rural areas are very tied to their land.
00:04:38
Speaker
And so getting them to move even out of harm's way, you know, can be a challenge. We saw that in the earthquake.
Relief Efforts: Challenges and Data Needs
00:04:46
Speaker
Now, that could be, you know, as you're a political economist, I mean, that could be because of insecure property rights or just a
00:04:54
Speaker
a familiar kind of a claim to the land. But I think there are some challenges in rescue. Now, in the rescue part, what you need is a particular type of resources, right? I mean, it depends on whether we need helicopters or how localized the problem is. Do people need to be moved over further directions and all that? My sense is that in Pakistan right now, even though
00:05:20
Speaker
The water, rising water has still not finished going through the hole in this basin.
00:05:29
Speaker
There will still be an impetus for rescue. But I think that the rescue phase is coming to an end very soon. And there we get into the next phase, which is relief. And our relief is, I think, where we are either we are already there or just getting into it. So that phase there. And relief is where you really think you have taken people out of imminent harm right away.
00:05:58
Speaker
And then what do you have to do with them? Well, I mean, you have to provide them the basics. The basics are food and nutrition. You need to be able to get to them that. And then shelter. And then you've got to get in the food and nutrition, you've got to think about clean water. You've got to think about hygiene. How are you going to set it up? Are people going to do it on their own in the sense that you provide them some resources and you let them figure it out?
00:06:25
Speaker
Or are you going to provide them in some coordinated centralized manner and so on? Are you going to provide them tents? Are you going to provide them sheets or shelter? Different geographies have different needs. Some might be in the middle of the summer. So some places could be really hot. Others are more in the mountains. So I think the rehabilitation part really requires
00:06:53
Speaker
resource-based and coordination is quite different from the rescue part. Rescue part is where you need these superheroes to rescue. With rehab annotation, you are getting now more into kind of basic organization of relief, and it brings in many more challenges, even though the numbers may not be that dramatic. I mean, the loss of life is not going to happen.
00:07:18
Speaker
But what you can do is have a big impact on kind of more the hidden invisible deaths that may not be attributable to floods, but could be attributable to disease, or you could further aggravate situations like chronic nourishment or hunger and so on. So I think that's where we are right now.
00:07:46
Speaker
Thinking about the various organizational aspects of the relief and recovery stages, the task seems fairly complicated. There are a lot of actors involved, there are various government agencies at various levels, there are NGOs, there are foreign donors, there are individual actors, and then there's very localized kind of community efforts.
00:08:06
Speaker
And these actors need to know what's needed, where it's needed, and when it's needed, and what others are doing so that they don't end up doing the exact same thing in the exact same place. To what extent is this kind of information or data available, and how important is it to these relief and recovery stages?
00:08:27
Speaker
So data is always a problem. So Pakistan, the data resource required for organizing a proper and nationwide large scale rehabilitation effort and then later on a reconstruction effort or thinking about compensation or getting the economy going in these regions or areas, is lack of microdata.
00:08:50
Speaker
So who has this data and why is it not being aggregated and used? Well, you know, Nadra has some information, but not all. The Census Bureau has information on laws in population and some idea about housing structures. The Ag Census has something. But one of my big bugaboos in terms of all of this coordination is try merging the Ag Census with the population census.
00:09:18
Speaker
Not something easy to do. I mean, you know, I spent all my life trying to
Governance and Information in Relief
00:09:22
Speaker
do these kind of things Then Subarco has some information Pakistan Army Uses its own maps. I worked a lot with Pakistan Army because which was the dominant relief force In the 2005 earthquake we did a survey five years later and basically the army covered about 95% of the people They were the main one, but they have their own mapping system
00:09:43
Speaker
And that's not shared by the general public. The mapping system used by the rest of us is by this authority, which has the monopoly on it, called the Surveyor General of Pakistan.
00:09:54
Speaker
Now the Civil General of Pakistan, I mean, I don't want to name names here, but it just looks like an authority which is way behind, right? It's certainly not a 21st century agency. So my point is that organizing something at the micro level, already even trying to ascertain losses and then where to go, and you know, is a very serious task. And I just don't think we are, we have learned anything from the earthquake and invested in that.
00:10:24
Speaker
And I think that that's something that, you know, it's a problem for all of us. And the whole idea of creating these organizations out of the earthquake experience, out of the Federal Relief Commission at the era, things like NDMA, the National Disaster Management Association,
00:10:39
Speaker
is also to be the coordinating body who does something like that. My sense is that they are really focusing a lot on rescue and relief. Going beyond rescue and relief, when we go into rehabilitation, what is the structure of governance and organizational structure within the state that is going to manage it? I think we need to get very quickly working on that right now. If somebody is already not working, they should be.
00:11:07
Speaker
So that completely resonates with me in terms of the rehabilitation stage, but also in terms of the relief stage, because what we're seeing now is a lot of actors collecting funds, collecting in-kind donations to try to get relief to the right places. But we don't have a centralized clearinghouse to figure out where the need is the highest.
00:11:27
Speaker
And so it is going to be useful at that stage too, but from what you're describing and from what we know about what's happening on the ground, it doesn't seem like we have very good efficient allocation of these resources right now.
00:11:41
Speaker
You're absolutely right. I mean, I think that, you know, the problems of organizing relief and then organizing rehabilitation kind of melt into each other. Right. I mean, they are not like these are by the way, these are not like independent, hard and fast stages. Right. Sure. There is there is there is there is a lot of fuzziness. A lot of relief is really becomes part of rehabilitation and a lot of rehabilitation really has to work backwards into the relief. I fully agree.
00:12:11
Speaker
I think that in relief, it might be the problem. The relief, the problem is more acute because people do need relief in a much more time sensitive way, where at least rehabilitation, maybe perhaps they can wait a little bit in terms of the dire need. So I agree. I mean, I think that we just don't know enough
00:12:31
Speaker
Okay, so let's start getting into the weeds a little bit more. What exactly would you like to know and how exactly would that help both organizations and individuals who are trying to help? The problem is, in Pakistan, what we need is a lot of information which is decentralized. So I am bombarded, as you are, as is everybody else, by saying, well, tell us what are more credible organizations that give on the ground.
00:13:01
Speaker
I mean, there's a usual suspects. Well, of course, you know, everybody loves Eddy. And you're sure if somebody asked me, you know, should I give money to Eddy Foundation? I would say yes. Yeah, please do. You know, given their track record and all that. However, I have no idea, you know, where Eddy is
Adapting Models for Current Relief Efforts
00:13:18
Speaker
going. I mean, where is the, is it, you know, what district are they going? I don't even know that. Forget the district, Pakistani district, you got to remember, right? Pakistani districts are very large.
00:13:28
Speaker
Okay. Pakistani districts and a typical Pakistani district, you know, there's like 120, 130 districts in a country of 200 million people, right? So each district is close to like a big and a half to 2 million people, right? On the average, of course, right? Law and urban areas are bigger. But having said that, these are very large expanses, lots and lots of households and people. I'd like to know where people are going. It would be very nice
00:13:52
Speaker
for AD, I'm using AD because they're a credible organization, but AD will tell us very specifically, this is with as much geographical detail, which ideally it would be with the database mapped onto a digital map where I could actually click, right? So, I mean, I would like to know, if I want to say the following, I have some background and said, let's say, and I would say, I'd like to give
00:14:20
Speaker
in one of the Talakas of Kharpur district. Well, how do I know where to give? Where is going? I mean, what might happen, what you worry about, and this is generally true for aid, is that aid will go where it is convenient to give aid.
00:14:37
Speaker
where it is easier to give aid. So what you want to make sure is that the people who actually need it, so what you really worry about is that some places getting a lot of relief, lots of blankets, lots of tents, lots of food packages, and others not.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I think that the only way to do it is to do it kind of a ground level stuff. So one of the things we did in Rice Park is to create this website. And through a lot of work, managed to convince some of the biggest providers of relief, including Pakistan Army, including the UN World Food Program, and including some of the large private NGOs like Islamic Relief and many others. We got about 75 organizations to sign up.
00:15:23
Speaker
on that. It took a lot of work, but not that much. It took two weeks. Can you take a step back and tell us about what Rice Park was? Yeah, I think I should. I get carried away by this whole thing because I think that what you need is to mobilize people. So what Rice Park did is recognize this fundamental complication in this whole problem.
00:15:50
Speaker
So the fundamental complication is that what you need is a lot of decentralized information.
00:15:57
Speaker
What you need is a lot of decentralization, centralized information, I mean, economists, both from the supply side, which is where the providers are going. I need to know what villages are uncovered, what villages where there was more loss, was more aid provided. So that's on the supply side. But then how do I know? So I need to know where the providers go. But then at the same time, I need the demand side. I need to know the demand side, which villages have the highest need?
00:16:23
Speaker
You know, is there pockets of small groups of people? Remember, villages also have settlements. I mean, the villages is a complex spatial structure.
00:16:33
Speaker
So what we need is both this information decentralized. What we need is for villagers to be able to be able to think in terms of uploading information as to what the status is right now. Hey, we are the village number, chuck number of 236 in a particular district in Salaam, Punjab. And we last received some aid.
00:16:56
Speaker
Here, two weeks ago, some relief. It was in the fall of blankets, some food. But what we really need are tents. And perhaps what would be nice is to be able to get some clothing or clean water. And that's an information that needs to come up. And what Rice Park did is facilitated that at different levels. We managed to make a deal
00:17:18
Speaker
I think it was with one of the largest cell phone companies at that time. Remember we were back when the technology was not very good. What is that people could text and there will be an automatic GPS kind of a code on that.
00:17:34
Speaker
So, that would go up. So, I think that's what you need. Now, that's decentralized. There is no way you will be able to get that demand level heterogeneity unless it's done in a decentralized way. And also, the relief providers have to have a full understanding of where it was. So, for example, in the UN, when we talked to the UN, which was the World Food Program, was the one which was
00:17:59
Speaker
coordinating with government agencies to provide these food packages, which is a big part of relief. When we asked them as to what was going on in terms of the coverage, they did not have any data below the district. Even though the people on the ground did, people in the ground were working with whatever information they had, but there was no way if I would call World Food Program and I say, here I am, I have now
00:18:29
Speaker
truckloads of aid that I have organized. I know you guys are providing somewhere. Tell me where to go. Right. Well, I think that question has to be answered. But how does that question get answered? And what's the underlying systematic reason that this question isn't already being answered? So there is what we will call in the language of economics, a market failure.
00:18:54
Speaker
But that is the coordination. The aggregation part, I think, is a technical problem. I think that's the easiest part to solve. I mean, how is this stuff aggregated and then reported back to people? So we need that. But I think the coordination part of how do you get all those different people to sign up? And I think that's part of there has to be a wing in like NDMA or something.
00:19:19
Speaker
with the National Disaster Association Authority, which is thinking in what Assam Kaja, my partner is, and Jishnu Das, my third partner, and we have been working on this stuff forever, what we call systems-level thinking.
00:19:34
Speaker
which is what we really need to understand is what systems level thinking in our view is, it understands that you need to empower actors who are working in this decentralized setting, but you need to solve their problem and their frictions and the problem they face is a lot of it is this coordination problem. That to me is what the organizational structure around relief needs to look like.
Infrastructure for Future Preparedness
00:20:02
Speaker
So I couldn't agree more with you that the technical problem is far easier to solve, especially given the technological progress that has happened since the earthquake. I can very easily imagine the technical infrastructure being set up in a matter of days if somebody were to do it.
00:20:20
Speaker
But it is the coordination problem getting the right actors to adopt this system such that it does become this kind of useful lifeblood of the relief and rehabilitation efforts. That would be the challenge. So now let's think about if someone were to try to put a rice park equivalent together for these floods, what would that take? And how would you think about trying to solve this coordination problem? I think that has to be done at the level of the agencies.
00:20:49
Speaker
So one is this whole data information people. That's Nadra. There is the Census Bureau. We actually got them together. We managed to convince the Federal Relief Commission to create a wing.
00:21:05
Speaker
in which each organization would have a representative who was empowered to share this information, and you would create this common data. It's not that hard. I would say you need about 15 to 20 people in a row. We need the mapping people, the satellite people, the census people.
00:21:23
Speaker
Think about that, right? I mean, and then we need some young people who start telling us how to use this light data, satellite data, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever is the modern techie version of the, I'm still thinking of 20th century or early 21st, but whatever that equivalent is, I don't think it's that hard to create a system. Then you get the media on board. You have to get the telcos in there, right? I mean, the telephone companies. I think they are central to, in the modern day and age,
00:21:53
Speaker
I would say if we can get cell phones which send text messages with an automatic GPS tag to it, saying what we need, just think about it. You make an announcement right now and tell people, hey, wherever you are, tell us what you need. Cloud source that information. But it has to be geo-tagged, so I know exactly where you're coming from.
00:22:15
Speaker
And we can standardize that information as to what format it takes. We can do that. All of this can be done, I tell you, in a day. And that information, when it's standardized, then you have a centralized place where that information can be aggregated and then spewed out to the people. But then you have to then map it. If you want to really start getting into the rehabilitation phase, reconstruction phase, you have to start mapping it into the other data forms.
00:22:45
Speaker
You can merge it when you're a political economist with election commission data, so you can start getting the politicians. And just imagine if all of this information is conveyed to a politician in a particular constituency. And I go and say, in your constituency, I have 3,000 people who are without brackets, or I have 200 people who need some vaccination, or there has been some outbreak of some epidemic.
00:23:14
Speaker
I think all of that, right. So I don't think it's a primary. I think it's eminently doable. Doable by whom? You know, I think the initial impulse has to come from people who are activists. This is what I tell all my students, which is, you know, you can be an activist in terms of mobilizing for age.
00:23:38
Speaker
But I think that you need your comparative advantage. I'm not Bill Gates. My comparative advantage is not money. I'm not going to give a lot of people. Like Tim Cook said, $160 million. Well, most people in Pakistan can't give $160 million. They can't even give anything. I mean, what are you going to give? Not much. But you do have this technical expertise.
00:23:58
Speaker
And my sense is what you need to do is to be able to work on some part of this data site. Listen, this is serious stuff. This is not just about saying, hey, let's take a truck out there and distribute some blankets. I mean, this is now creating a modern infrastructure for a serious policy response.
00:24:22
Speaker
No, absolutely. And I think this serves as an inspiration for people who are listening in, too, to think about ways to contribute beyond just donating. And I should point out that some of these estimates that I gave you earlier about the $13 billion in damages, they are coming from young people who are trying to put together some of the best available information that's out there to try to put together estimates of the damages.
00:24:46
Speaker
but they haven't yet been able to do that at a decentralized enough level such that it's useful to be able to direct our efforts in a meaningful way. So, Asal, I think this is a very good example. I really should, as you did, acknowledge these efforts. I think this could be a nice working group, right? I mean, think about different working groups, right? When you say, how can people contribute? A working group would be, you know, let's think seriously about how would you estimate the damage, right?
00:25:12
Speaker
I mean, think about how would you do the livelihoods. Each one of them is a pretty serious problem. It's not a simple problem. I mean, they're not trivial problems. They're not back on the envelope problems. Okay. So my sense is, you know, I would take that 13 billion, take that methodology and come up with some sort of methodology where if I could translate into some decentralized crowd effort.
00:25:36
Speaker
And should we think about this decentralized effort in the very short run or does this kind of effort extend beyond the immediate aftermath of the flood? Let's put it this way. If somebody is listening right now and says, well, I want to think about it, but before I can really contribute, it's going to take me four or five years of work. I'll tell you when the next flood happens, you'll be ready. We're not doing it just for this flood. We're setting up the infrastructure. And what I mean is like the human, the intellectual
00:26:07
Speaker
infrastructure to deal with these things as they keep on coming. I mean, you know, it's not just about this. So Pakistan made, you know, the point is what I'm worried about is, you know, the earthquake, by the way, right, really brought the country together. So, you know, we do know that Pakistan, you know, this whole idea that Pakistanis can unite for a common cause, they did.
00:26:27
Speaker
at that time. At that time too, there was a lot, all kinds of problems. But we did. People from all over Pakistan. Every province contributed. And I think that Pakistanis do feel it. So I think it will happen. But what I'm worried about is when the sense of emergency dies down, these people will go back into some sort of invisibility and become IDPs or something of the new cycle.
00:26:57
Speaker
Well, what's going to happen to your sense of jazba or this motivation? So this idea of this motivation, which is driven by the disaster, I think has a pretty serious half-life.
Long-term Effects on Health and Education
00:27:10
Speaker
And what I want is to put some structures in place. And I can only talk about the structures that I know of, which is this infrastructure that we talked about.
00:27:21
Speaker
Right. And I think what you said about this not being a one off thing really resonates because climate disasters are going to happen again and again in Pakistan. Pakistan is by some estimates, you know, maybe the seventh or the sixth most affected country by climate change in the years to come. And so these aren't going to be the last big floods in Pakistan. We're going to have more and more of these disasters and then building up that resilience in the long term such that we're ready the next time is going to be super important.
00:27:51
Speaker
I think you're right. I mean, you said about Ghalab. Let me just say, Ghalab said, it's not going to happen once. And I think what we need to do is to say this is the new normal. And this idea that the canonical model of thinking about Pakistan is Pakistani households, Pakistani polity, Pakistani society, Pakistani economy living under
00:28:19
Speaker
or continual, not continuous, but continual shocks. I think that's what we are. I mean, we are living in a world which is going to be volatile.
00:28:32
Speaker
I want to come back to thinking about the effects of these floods. As we move into the next stage of flood relief, we need to think about how to sustain the livelihoods, the health, the education of those affected, and what are the best interventions or policy levers to do that.
00:28:53
Speaker
You have done research on the long-term effects of the 2005 earthquake on health and education outcomes in particular. In light of that research, what would your recommendation be here? Yeah, I think that one thing is the first thing is the following. Okay, so money does help. Okay, let's not kid ourselves. I know people are worried about fiscal space and all of this and stuff on Pakistan right now. But to get the economy moving,
00:29:22
Speaker
And to get livelihoods back in place, there's got to be transfers to these people. Because remember, from Sen onwards, talking about famines and all that, one of the big issues is that there is a loss of purchasing power in these places. It's not just asset loss. It's also livelihoods and income. So what we need to do is to make sure that income goes back into the hands of these people.
00:29:52
Speaker
because that's what they can start spending. And I'm not just talking about from a welfare point of view, but from a systems point of view, because then they can start spending and the spending gets the market going. And when the market starts going, that's where what you do not want is shortages.
00:30:09
Speaker
And what you do not want is inflationary pressures in this economy, right? I mean, if there are shortages, then everybody will need a lot more stuff to come in. So what you want to do is to get, so the government's job is to make sure that they get rid of the supply bottlenecks. So goods can go in. I'm talking about all kinds of goods. In Pakistani market, you know, you go to, I mean, I was in the summer in Kalam, I mean, ground zero right now, and you go to 14,000 feet, and there's a guy that's selling frost.
00:30:38
Speaker
And I'm thinking, how the hell did you get it up there? There's no road or anything, right? So the commercial penetration of Pakistan is pretty high. So I think that's one. So let's not kid ourselves to get, you know, build back better, get the economy moving, all of that. I think there has to be a program. It can be targeted, you know, we can do it through this or we can do it through, you know, classic, I mean, I would say unconditional cash transfers of some sort have to take place.
00:31:07
Speaker
If we think that we can get out of this without it, I know. That's got to be the second phase. Now, under this IMF program, all of this, maybe we need a separate aid for it, but we need to create a proposal. What I don't like is people asking for aid and everything else without having a plan. I think that what I would like to do is to make a plan.
00:31:30
Speaker
which has sufficient detail and is feasible operationally. And then we take it to the world to fund it. I think people are much more willing. I mean, just as we write proposals, we know that, right? People are much more willing to fund us if they think we have a pretty good idea of what we're trying to do. And I think we need to create a full plan for that. So that's one. The problem is money is not enough. There are some problems that money can solve, but others it can't.
00:31:59
Speaker
And that's really the hard part about these disasters. And I'll give you one example from my research, which is probably the most striking thing I've ever encountered in my own field work and research, which is that we always like to think that Pakistanis are resilient. Even the Prime Minister used the word, right? This is a favorite word in Pakistan. Oh, Pakistanis are resilient. They will get back. Well, they do get back. You look at post-earthquake,
00:32:27
Speaker
and you look at the infrastructure in the earthquake affected areas, it's more or less at par with places that did not get the earthquake. And in some dimensions, it's even better because this whole build back matter. You build better buildings, you build better homes. If you look at the schooling, which I look at a lot, even enrollment is back to normal. Household consumption is back to normal.
00:32:57
Speaker
So in all of those dimensions, it looks like it's a success. So we know how to do it. So in that part, there is the micro detail about the immediacy of who to get. And if you want to be more efficient in terms of giving money in some targeted way, though I would say be loose. Don't be too targeted. But where it doesn't come into play is these health shocks for very young children.
00:33:26
Speaker
and in particular of children who were in utero. So this is the irony that the most affected are the people who are not even born yet. I mean, I just saw a news report saying UNFBA or somebody, some UN agency was estimating how many pregnant women are in these affected areas. It is like half a million or something. I think in utero shocks are very strong.
00:33:54
Speaker
And they affect, they are very long-term. And later investments cannot compensate for that. So if you get an in utro shock, your mother, for example, becomes malnourished for an extended period during a pregnancy, you will be born with a low birth weight, a significantly low birth weight. And that low birth weight, your brain development in the first three years will really suffer.
00:34:23
Speaker
Your physical development will really suffer, and you are behind. I mean, in the earthquake area, everything is recovered. But one of the most visibly distressing things that I saw, you know, I went there, you know, first four years later, and then I went there like nine years later, was stunting. I mean, you see kids who are really stunted.
00:34:50
Speaker
Now stunting means you're basically gone for life. I mean, your outcomes are bad. So in utero, I would say, first things first, get a program going where you start counting, figuring out where these pregnant women are. That's number one. Because those kids, if there is significant nutritional loss in the mother, those kids are going to be scarred for life.
00:35:17
Speaker
That's one. Second is our research said, look at what is called the first thousand days. So in U2 is the most important than people who are newborn, zero to one, one to two, and then two to three. This is called the first thousand days. I would say focus on young children there. I mean, if I have to create a priority, I will create a program for mothers and their children.
00:35:43
Speaker
because that's protecting the next generation because those are going to be permanent shocks. Later on, if you give them money two years later, three years later, it's not going to help. That money is needed now. So I think that if there is this rehabilitation phase, I would say there is a sense of emergency. I would say on the economy side, pump in some cash so that these people can stay afloat. They don't die, right? You don't want people to start dying, right? I mean, I'm sure.
00:36:10
Speaker
There's too much pressure for food transfers. But I would give some income transfers also, and then focus on this nutritional program and supplements for young children. Because our research has clearly shown, and we have published it. It's been discussed a lot.
Policy and Community Engagement
00:36:28
Speaker
So it's pretty robust. That's really where the problem is.
00:36:34
Speaker
What about learning classes? That's something that I am working on right now. So this is the issue in learning right now. When schools close for an extended period of time, kids fall behind. When they come back, if you continue as if nothing had happened, and you don't recalibrate either your pedagogy or instruction or the curriculum or how you do it or have a specific program that works with parents, with teachers,
00:37:03
Speaker
you're going to recalibrate the system. If you don't do it, these losses can become permanent. Then again, we have a lost generation because these people come up with very few skills. So think about it across the age spectrum. With very young kids, you have this really physical developmental issue, which is the most serious. As kids get older, they don't suffer physically developmentally because the brain most development has happened, but there is a serious loss of skills.
00:37:31
Speaker
This is on top of extended school closures because of COVID. We already are coming up with like 18 months to 24 months of school closures. And we were just going to start right now after 14th of August, schools were opening, and boom, we are back in this crisis again. So think about a kid who was five years old, four years old, six years old, in March, 2020, when schools shut down. That kid is eight.
00:38:02
Speaker
right now. And certainly, it means over the last two and a half years, the kid has not gone to school at all. Now, if you think about most of these kids, the digital divide really comes in. If your parents are well off and are motivated and are capable and have the resources or the awareness, whatever you want to call it, they can compensate for these losses by doing things at home. And you go to a rich private school, you get all this internet homework, blah, blah, blah.
00:38:31
Speaker
But for the poor kids, they don't even need books at home. They have no resource support material. So what you really have to worry is about catch up. So I think in the long run, the irony is that in COVID, we were worried about that the mortality of the older people is the most. Well, the reality is that one of the biggest burdens is going to be falling on the young people. So Pakistani adults recover.
00:39:01
Speaker
Pakistani children may not. And that's the real emergency. The real emergency is not that there's a roaring floods. The real emergency is that little care that some mob is carrying in our role and what to do about it. And you're going to see not just an effect now, but perhaps over the entire lifetime of that care.
00:39:23
Speaker
So we need to make sure that these kids, we get education going back there. We need to take care, right? I mean, what's public policy? It's about taking care of the most vulnerable people in society.
00:39:42
Speaker
I mean, we've got to identify those, who they are. They can't be invisible because the poor are quite invisible. We don't even know where they are. We need to have this old targeting mechanism. This is modern development economics. This is what I teach. Sathahir, I want to end by asking you for your personal recommendation on what podcast listeners can do to learn more about this or what they can do to help out beyond donating.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that, you know, what is very interesting is that people face in crisis like this, people face or feel a lack of agency and people feel a sense of powerlessness. What can we do? We can't do anything. My sense is what I really would like is for young people to really get to know Pakistan, get to know your country in some deep way, in some micro way.
00:40:34
Speaker
in some grassroots, decentralized way. You know, go down, right? I don't care where, but it would be so nice that in response to these floods, if, you know, Pakistan, by the way, right, in the census data has close to 50,000 villages. Yeah. How many villages can we write a village report on? I don't care whether it's now for relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction. How many people are listening?
00:41:03
Speaker
I mean, if we say that in the next two years, we would start getting these crowdsourced village reports on all these villages, right, as to what the status is, what the situation is. We can create some templates so that they are somewhat commonality to it. But I think that's what we need. I think people need to understand the world that they live in. Otherwise, I think that, you know, both with social media and the fact that we live in so many bubbles,
00:41:32
Speaker
that we really never get to the point of understanding the other, understanding the poor, understanding the vulnerable. We need to really face it. That's why I think field work is so important. Coming face to face with a person, talking about their own life, talking about their own aspirations, talking about what is it that has happened to these people who have gone through the flood. There is a whole social science literature about it. I mean, just test it. Just go in. Go in with your priors. Challenge them.
00:42:00
Speaker
Tahir, this has been a sobering and an inspiring conversation at the same time. Thank you so much for being here.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:42:07
Speaker
Asad, thank you for inviting me and I hope that we can have lots of these conversations. Absolutely. You can find some links to what we talked about in this episode and to the recommendations made by our guest today in the show notes of this episode or on unpackingus.com.
00:42:29
Speaker
Don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this episode. Also, I'd love to hear what you like and don't like about the show. And if you have any ideas for future episodes, you can email me at asadatunpackingus.com. I can't promise to respond to every email, but I do promise to read and think about every email. Thank you for listening.