 So why don't we just collect, say, three questions to start and then I'll give the speakers some time to respond. And please, questions, not too long comments. Please. That's, okay. I'm Sylvia from Ghana. I work with the Institute of Stascale Social and Economic Research, ISA. I like the note on which you ended, that's to the last presenter. Elida is Elida only because of his people. Yeah. And to Abdullah. I believe you are from the north. You are an elite and you are advocating for your people, which is very, very good. But in my opinion, I think you shouldn't neglect or you shouldn't close your eyes to the marginalization. That happens in the south. Because all that I always say is that as citizens, we should learn to vote, not on ethnicity. We should get the people who can do the job. Because already the framework of, I mean, you know, legislature and everything is that then we have enough national representation. So if we don't have a southern president, nothing is going to happen in the north. Or if we don't have a northern president, nothing is going to happen in the south. It's wrong. Until our leaders learn to have the national interest at heart. No matter where they come from, we are not going anywhere. Really, we are not going anywhere. So when you are appointed as a leader in the nation, make sure whether it is the south, it is in the north, wherever is to us, let it work for the interest of the country. Because yes, we have currently the situation in Ghana where Abdullah, I'm sure you know, we have a northern president at the moment. Fans that are supposed to go to the north for, I mean, poverty reduction are being misused. So will you tell me is because he's from the north or from the south? And the nature and the structure of all things happens, not from one leader to the other. It's been colonial. Colonials, during colonial rule, they came to settle in the south, build infrastructure in the south. Okay, so government, subsequent governments have been trying to bridge the gap between the north and the south. So let's work together as guardians, as one people that I believe in developed countries happen as much. No matter where they come from, they want to develop the nation at large. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I think the gentleman in the back here. Thank you. I'm Amarokon from UNDP. My first question is for Abdullah. You presented some figures for poverty in the north and northwest. It's one of the poorest countries at the same. You said those are the areas where you produce rice for exports. So something seems to be missing there. Unless, for example, there are some price controls or enclave economics like mining where you produce, but within limited group is producing the exports. So something is missing there. The second question goes to Beatrice on the trash collections. I'm wondering whether the trash collected are used for productive purposes, like, for example, producing fertilizer. There are several examples elsewhere where you can use trash for productive purposes, especially when the fertilizer prices are very high. Thank you. Thanks. The woman in the front here. Hi, I'm Katrin Rosner from GIZ. I have two questions. One goes to the fifth speaker. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you to the three of you. My question will be your conclusion or one of the things you said was, okay, in general, Sub-Saharan African institutions provide poor services and so on. I was just wondering if maybe not in this paper, but in one of your papers you looked a little bit at the distributional if-tracts of institution according to either if it's a research country or not, for example, or maybe we all know the research course theory. Does it have any effect on the distributional capacity of these institutions? And does the colonial past matter do institutions in French-speaking countries and British-formal colonies or Belgium, does that make any difference? I was just wondering. And then for Ghana, my question would be, what do you think that maybe because you mentioned, okay, the problem also is an ideological one that we can look at at some indicators that we have and it's working for donor organization. I know that very well. Often you have to fulfill some indicators for everybody to be happy. And do you think a shift away from the poverty line approach to more, okay, inequality indicators could also shift the idea first of donor organizations to second and also partner governments to a more equal distribution within the country as well. Great. Let's get one more question and then I'll give our presenter some time to respond in the back. Thank you. A quick comment and a question for Beatriz. Last year I attended a meeting at the Clinton Global Initiative. I'm not going to mention any names, but one person high up in the foundation in the initiative claimed that no mayor would be elected or re-elected because of trash collection. And you proved that that is wrong. And there are even some examples of the US history. New York mayors were re-elected or not re-elected on trash issues. So that shows that even people high up in the hierarchy in the donor community are not aware or downplay the importance of waste collection or waste management in general. It's a neglected issue. And also following up with the person from UNDP, yeah, are they trying to promote not only composting, organic waste, but recycling activities, paper, plastics, metals, and so forth? In many places that I've been, they're informal people already doing this. But are there formal efforts to promote this? Okay, thank you. Why don't we have responses from our presenters and we'll start with our first presenter. I have been listening to presentations and I really found some complementarity though. I gave very general views about institutional role. But point, I think at the last presentation they mentioned how important democracy, accountability, and that's linked to social contract. It's very public goods provision and how that is financed. That sort of engagement is needed at different levels. And what I found in Africa, nation-state building has been very difficult because that layer of structure, institution configuration was not there. And at the central level, leaders didn't have institutional structure to engage with domestic stakeholders. And in the particularly, initially I said, you know, leaders are personal, not the impersonal state structure was built. And then in the period of institution reforms which are instigated because of the crisis by international organizations, particularly World Bank IMF, that time government were signing dotted lines of reforms but they are not engaged domestic stakeholders. And to your questions, a lot of resource-rich countries, leaders didn't need to engage because they could manage to deal with transnational corporations and with other things, getting rent, mineral rent, natural resources, and not really their accountability was needed to get tax collections that they can manage predately getting their interests, their own political leaders' interests could be secured and no accountability. So issue is how to make, you know, at many levels, municipal level and all this engagement, coalition of people who are getting engaged in public goods and how to build and how to make that sustainable system, you need to get lots of ongoing and that is collective action organizations and they need that institution configuration and resource-based economies often they can bypass because they can get some other ways at the back of the room or under the table to get the political leaders to get by and now it came to the point even though African growth is a lot based on natural resources now younger generation is really no longer, you know, quiet about its accountability transfer and as you said, it's necessary to build a nation state and globalization requires strong nation state, market-based, corporate-led, finance-dominated globalization will not ensure, you know, inclusiveness. It is state, but not the necessary state, big central state, but it had to be built configurations from different so that voice could be heard. That is a sort of story and it's important, cause natural resource cause stories it's very much that it allows political leaders to bypass that important engagement with the domestic stakeholders. Sorry, I took a long time. Thank you very much. So, are you going to start? Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for your very insightful questions. I'm going to start with the second question that was directed to me, which is about resolving the puzzle between the north being the poorest and it being a major exporter of raised neighboring countries. I'm not sure you got the point I made clearly enough. The north, I mean I use that particular point in relation to an attempt to debunk the notion that the north is poor because it has bad geography and that it lacks agricultural potential. I mean which was one of the major reasons being advanced in excluding or in explaining the exclusion of those poorer upper regions from the minimum challenge account. In any case, when I said the north being a major exporter of rise, I am not talking of today. I was referring to the 1970s when the north used to export rice when Ghana became self-sufficient and rice as well as being able to export some substantial quantities to neighboring countries. So the idea of exportation is not in reference to the in fact today Ghana is a major importer of rice. We depend on rice imports and the question is why? As far as I'm concerned, it goes back to the issue of politics. It's about politics. It's about the power relationship between civil society groups, on the one hand, between government and between donors. You have a situation in which society organizations are pushing for lowering the rise import types. Government is in the middle because donors are not interested in that. In 2003, the rise import types was raised by the 2003 national budget to increase it from 20 to 25%. This particular law this particular bill was passed into law in parliament shortly, but it was implemented for only three days as a result of donor pressure. In fact, we never heard about that law. When the government announced that the implementation of that particular act was repealed, we never heard about it until 2005 when the cabinet or parliament was convened to appeal that law. And there's a lot of evidence to show that there was a lot of behind-the-scenes pressures from donor agencies, from the IMF on ideological grounds and so on. And also partly because most of the major importers of rising to Ghana are those doing account to the United States and so forth. Ghana is a very big rise market for the United States of America and so on. So it goes back to the point of politics that was raising. Coming back to Sylvia's points, let me start by noting that just colonialism, the problem of the North South inequality has to do with history partly. There are a lot of explanations. I mean, the interest that I am having is to indicate that those explanations are way fully inadequate and they cannot explain why the situation has persisted until date. The roots of it, historical, if you want to find out the origins of it, yes, colonialism matters. Ghana celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2007. We've been we're getting independent as far back as 1957. A lot have changed. Why hasn't that problem been resolved? That can be explained by virtue of colonial or historical factors as far as colonialism is concerned. That is one. Secondly, you made a point that I think I should correct that I'm an ordinary advocate for the North. Yes, I am an ordinary but I am not advocating for the North and in fact, I say Northern political elites are a major problem to the development of the North. There is no doubt about that and if you look at the conclusions I drew, I said that haven't marginalized regions being strongly represented in government is neither unnecessary nor a sufficient condition to resolve their developmental backwaters. In any case, when Ghana became a major exporter of rice in the 1970s, I was impressed. In fact, that was the only regime in which there was no Northern representation. But I think we need to distinguish between what is idealistic and what is realistic. The points about let us see ourselves as one blah blah and so on, I share in those sentiments but that is the idealistic aspect of the story. The reality is completely different and my interest was to add a political dimension to the explanation of spatial inequality. If you look at the political settlements framework, I mean facts and code distinguish between two broad types of political settlements. There is the primary political settlements which is about looking at the national level elites but there is also the role of subnational elites which in terms of secondary political settlements and it plays a part. I mean if you just focus on the North alone the North in itself is not a kind of a homogeneous place there are a lot of diversity and in fact there are a lot of power struggles among the three Northern regions. Why do sources have to be sent to the North? Even there are power struggles after whether it should go to the Northern region the Upper East region or the East or the Upper West region. So I am not in any way asked of an argument that the problem about Northern Guiness and the development is about sudden political elites far from that nor am I advocating for North. Sorry In one of your slides you mentioned that there is a coalition of the South against the North I saw it that's why I took the stance that let's get the people who can do the job not people who are from the regions I think I commend the President and the President and the President and I think I commend the President's government for the dust they've taken that we are not taking people from the regions to the regions we are bringing we are going to bring people from other regions to develop other regions that is fair okay let's two seconds I think you should probably look at the slides so they would probably upload them I don't see any North versus South coalition in Ghana in fact if you talk of coalitions in Ghana it is about whether you are an NDC or NPP it depends on which political party you belong to and Northern political elites will belong to the NPP consider themselves as more of NPPs than Northness that is the reality and that is why I see Northern political elites as being a part of the store or the problem so there isn't any Northern versus Southern I'm talking of dominant elites within a particular ruling coalition okay we can continue discussions after but let's give the final word to Beatrice super quickly since I'm standing between you and lunch and I'm responding to questions about trash which I think we can all agree is a problem there's no disagreement there so just quickly on two points the questions related to whether the trash that's being collected is being recycled or composted or if it's being sorted by metals cardboard plastics the answer is at the time that I did this study which was 2008 to 2009 no it was all combined trash that was being taken directly to an open air dump the instances in which it was being sorted were two and I know Martin you talked about one yesterday in your presentation which is scavengers like the idea that the individuals particularly in Maputo the trash density was the highest you had individuals living in the collection sites themselves so where the dumpsters were in the center part of town they'd be living there and taking the plastics out to sell them so you saw that type of activity and you also saw I interviewed Recicle which was a South African firm that came into the Maputo area and started to do this on a commercial basis so they were working with the city to start it on a commercial basis so those are the two examples in which you would start to see at least 2008 to 2009 some level of recycling occurring both at the micro level with those individuals living at the sites and then with this contract with Recicle which was a South African firm very quickly I just wanted to respond to the question about do colonial institutions and it was directed at Machiko myself do colonial institutions make a difference in Berra in Mozambique it does what you saw there in terms of 80% of the population is rural and what you saw in terms of the administrative structures at the sub-national level and how they were set up as colonial institutions to basically be able to control territory from predominantly what we would call urban areas and so even the way that the different heads of the departments were called and the way that the political structure was set up at that level that all came initially from the Portuguese so that is still in place today so I don't have anything else to add thank you very much thank you everyone this is obviously a really exciting set of papers so please come up and talk to our speakers take them to lunch continue your questioning thank you very much