In its broadest sense, development requires not simply sustained, robust levels of overall economic growth, but diminishing (and ultimately eliminating) absolute poverty and profound economic inequalities. Effective public action and good governance are essential to bringing about the conditions that create wealth, allow markets to function, and eliminate poverty.

Over 1 billion people in the world today are extremely poor, living on less than 1 dollar a day. Poverty relief requires the active involvement of governments in the provision of public goods such as drinking water, health clinics and services, sanitation, sewage, education, roads, electricity, and emergency relief, among others. In the developing world, failure on the part of government to deliver these public services often constitutes a major impediment to the alleviation of poverty.

The Program on Poverty and Governance Program at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is working to understand the linkages between the quality of governance and developing societies' capacities to meet basic human needs and reduce poverty. Conceived in a broadly comparative international perspective, the Program is engaged in cross-national and field-based research projects, with a particular focus on Latin America and Mexico.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models. Ten years ago, on the eve of the puncturing of the dotcom bubble, the US held the high ground. Its democracy was widely emulated, if not always loved; its technology was sweeping the world; and lightly regulated "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism was seen as the wave of the future. The United States managed to fritter away that moral capital in remarkably short order: the Iraq war and the close association it created between military invasion and democracy promotion tarnished the latter, while the Wall Street financial crisis laid waste to the idea that markets could be trusted to regulate themselves.

China, by contrast, is on a roll. President Hu Jintao's rare state visit to Washington this week comes at a time when many Chinese see their weathering of the financial crisis as a vindication of their own system, and the beginning of an era in which US-style liberal ideas will no longer be dominant. State-owned enterprises are back in vogue, and were the chosen mechanism through which Beijing administered its massive stimulus. The automatic admiration for all things American that many Chinese once felt has given way to a much more nuanced and critical view of US weaknesses - verging, for some, on contempt. It is thus not surprising that polls suggest far more Chinese think their country is going in the right direction than their American counterparts.

But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an "authoritarian capitalist" box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China's model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts. India is a law-governed democracy, in which ordinary people can object to government plans; China's rulers can move more than a million people out of the Three Gorges Dam flood plain with little recourse on their part.

Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped - precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response. They are most attentive to the urban middle class and powerful business interests that generate employment, but they respond to outrage over egregious cases of corruption or incompetence among lower-level party cadres too.

Indeed, the Chinese government often overreacts to what it believes to be public opinion precisely because, as one diplomat resident in Beijing remarked, there are no institutionalised ways of gauging it, such as elections or free media. Instead of calibrating a sensible working relationship with Japan, for example, China escalated a conflict over the detention of a fishing boat captain last year - seemingly in anticipation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment.

Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand - where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment - as a warning of what could happen to them.

Ironically for a country that still claims to be communist, China has grown far more unequal of late. Many peasants and workers share little in the country's growth, while others are ruthlessly exploited. Corruption is pervasive, which exacerbates existing inequalities. At a local level there are countless instances in which government colludes with developers to take land away from hapless peasants. This has contributed to a pent-up anger that explodes in many thousands of acts of social protest, often violent, each year.

The Communist party seems to think it can deal with the problem of inequality through improved responsiveness on the part of its own hier­archy to popular pressures. China's great historical achievement during the past two millennia has been to create high-quality centralised government, which it does much better than most of its authoritarian peers. Today, it is shifting social spending to the neglected interior, to boost consumption and to stave off a social explosion. I doubt whether its approach will work: any top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground. Effective accountability can only come about through a bottom-up process, or what we know as democracy. This is not, in my view, likely to emerge soon. However, down the road, in the face of a major economic downturn, or leaders who are less competent or more corrupt, the system's fragile legitimacy could be openly challenged. Democracy's strengths are often most evident in times of adversity.

However, if the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington's foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests, student demonstrators erected a model of the Statue of Liberty to symbolise their aspirations. Whether anyone in China would do the same at some future date will depend on how Americans address their problems in the present.

The writer is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order, will be published in the spring.

Jenni Williams, a Zimbabwean activist, spoke Tuesday as part of the Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Speaker Series. Williams is national coordinator of Women of Zimbabwe, Arise!, or WOZA, a nonviolent organization that protests against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

“We are human-rights defenders to the nation, mothers to the nation…we defy unjust laws and take our issues to the streets to find a nonviolent way of protesting,” Williams said after showing her audience a slideshow titled “Zimbabwe’s Elections: 30 Years of Torment, Torture & Death,” which depicted images of torture under Robert Mugabe’s regime in her homeland.

Following the slideshow and a video showing members of WOZA protesting for proper electricity, Williams started her speech on a somber note.

“2011 is going to be a year of hell in Zimbabwe, so excuse me for not saying, ‘Happy New Year,’” she said.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly. We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”
-Jenni Williams

In a country where the average life expectancy for women is 37 years, the unemployment rate is 94 percent and Mugabe has been in charge for 30 years, leading a regime accused of corruption, nepotism, bribery and human rights abuse, WOZA seeks to bring democracy and justice to Zimbabwe, she said.

“We aim to mobilize through civic education,” she said. “We capacitate ordinary people with skills for community leadership…we’re creating a society where no new Robert Mugabe can flourish.”

WOZA has carried out 35 street demonstrations in the last 18 months. The grassroots organization relies on ordinary Zimbabweans. Both women and men have swelled its ranks to 75,000 members.

“Our activists are not the employed or the ones who go to university,” Williams said. “They are ordinary people struggling for ordinary everyday things that the politicians needs to be focused on.”

After choosing to remain in Zimbabwe despite mass exodus and the migration of her husband and children to the UK, she has been arrested 33 times, including after the electricity protest. She was held in prison for six days, then returned to her activism once she was freed.

Williams also moves between safe houses in Zimbabwe every six months and was at one time under risk of assassination, she said.

Nonetheless, Williams said, she believes fully in nonviolence, quoting Gandhi and saying, “We love anyone, even our enemies.”

“She’s a pioneer for protecting human rights,” said Davis Albohm, a graduate student in African studies. “She’s doing incredible work that I think a lot of people would not be brave enough to undertake.”

Williams credited her fellow WOZA members for their achievements.

“A shared burden is a burden lightened,” she said. “Our organization has empowered people. We’ve trained them to be human-rights defenders…we see the Zimbabwe we want in our mind’s eye, and we feel it in our hearts.”

Williams said Zimbabwe’s political environment “remains highly violent, uncertain and tense,” speaking of the very real possibility that President Mugabe, now 86, will die in power before opposition defeats him.

Williams said her group’s goals went beyond simply deposing Mugabe.

“Robert Mugabe is only the face of a political system…we want to put the democratic yeast within the society so the loaf will rise,” she said.

Victoria Alvarado ’14 said the talk was “very, very emotionally striking.”

“I found myself in tears at points. She came here to show us that we can help,” Alvarado said.

Williams’ suggestion to the audience was to “appreciate what you have and protect your own rights and freedoms. We need a model to copy.”

And on why she continued to fight a dangerous struggle, Williams cited the future, not only of her nation but of her family.

“If my grandchildren cannot get a better Zimbabwe, they will think of me badly,” she said. “We have to correct the past wrongs and re-establish the social dignity of our people.”

Although txteagle began in 2007 as a purely academic project, the current goal of the company and of its founder and CEO, Nathan Eagle, is to give one billion people a five percent raise. In his presentation, Eagle described the context for which txteagle was designed, how the company's focus has evolved over the past three years, and what steps the company is taking to move closer to achieving this goal in the future.

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Mobile applications developed as a part of MIT's Entrepreneurial Research on Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) project offered some insights into the potential of mobile-based tools. In Rwanda, where electricity is a prepaid service, one of Eagle's former students quickly cornered a significant share of the market by creating scratch cards for crediting one's electricity bill via mobile phone. In Eastern Kenya, a program called SMS Blood Bank was created to enable real time monitoring of blood supplies at local district hospitals in Eastern Kenya. Although SMS reporting of low blood levels resolved the huge amount of latency in the system of local district hospitals (where responses to dips in supply had typically taken up to 4 weeks), the price of reporting blood levels via SMS represented a pay cut for local nurses; despite nurses' initial enthusiasm, SMS reporting tapered off within weeks. When the idea of sending about 10 cents of airtime to compensate nurses for each SMS report of blood level data proved a success, the model behind txteagle was born.

Designed as a means to monetize people's downtime, txteagle has grown rapidly through partnerships with over 220 mobile operators in about 80 countries around the world. In turn for helping these operators analyze their customer data, txteagle has gained access to about 2.1 billion mobile subscribers. Partnering with txteagle is a winning proposition for mobile operators, since the airtime compensation mobile subscribers receive from txteagle improves operators' Average Revenue per User (ARPU), a statistic that had been plummeting as more and more poor people became mobile phone users. By enabling people to carry out work via web browsers or SMS and compensating them via mobile money or airtime, txteagle has become a market leader at efficiently gathering data in the developing world.

Since txteagle was first created, the company has attempted to move from an outsourcing/back-office model to an emphasis on work that leverages a person's unique local knowledge and information. Typically outsourced tasks such as forms processing, audio transcription, inventory management, data cleaning, tagging, and internet search, tend to be less rewarding to the worker. By focusing on local data instead, txteagle enables unprecedented insight into emerging markets, all while optimizing engagement with local customers. Typical tasks include: maps and directions, local market prices and businesses, survey research and polling, and other forms of local knowledge gathering.

One of txteagle's central initiatives, GroundTruth, leverages this local knowledge-based model to carry out better market research. Today, global brands are already spending about $125 billion annually in emerging markets to engage the "next billion," but they typically carry out this research in a sub-optimal way. Through the txteagle platform, Eagle suggests, brands and organizations can use advertising money to design better products and services, conduct market research, and carry out brand engagement. Recent success cases include the use of txteagle to help a program of the United Nations to reach survey respondents directly and to enable the World Bank to obtain better local market price data at lower cost. 

Although txteagle's rapid growth and early successes have been encouraging, the company has ambitious goals for the next two years. The company began by focusing on outside sales through its GroundTruth market research program. Next year, the company  hopes to generate syndicated data and ultimately to create a self-source platform enabling anyone to conduct their own population-level surveys.  By continuing to focus on improving the quality of both their data and workers over time, txteagle aims to have an even greater positive impact on the incomes of the hundreds of millions of mobile phone users at the base of the pyramid.

With the departure of the last U.S. combat brigade from Iraq, the Obama administration has taken a large stride toward its goal of complete American military withdrawal from Iraq by the end of next year. And there are many other signs of progress.

The rate of Iraqi civilian deaths in political violence has fallen by 90 percent from its awful peak in 2006, before "the surge" in American forces and strategy began to roll back the insurgent challenge.

American military deaths in Iraq have fallen to 46 so far this year, by far the lowest level since the American invasion in March 2003, and again a 90 percent decline from the pace of casualties in 2007. In March of this year, Iraq held the most democratic election any Arab country has held in a generation (with the possible exception of Lebanon).

Unfortunately, however, the new milestone in U.S. military disengagement from Iraq comes at a moment when the country is starting to slip backward on both the political and security fronts.

Since the March 7 parliamentary election results were announced, the country's major political alliances have remained hopelessly deadlocked on the formation of a new coalition government. Despite months of negotiations and repeated imploring from high-level U.S. government officials, Iraq's major leaders and parties remain unable to agree on who should be prime minister or how power should be shared.

As Iraq staggers on essentially without a government, electricity and other services remain sporadic, economic reconstruction is delayed and terrorist violence is once again filling the breach. In the deadliest single incident in months, at least 48 people died and more than 140 were injured on Tuesday when a suicide bomber struck outside an army recruiting center in downtown Baghdad.

As the American troops withdraw, Iraq is also losing top government officials, judges and police officers to a rising pace of targeted assassinations. All of this has the familiar signature of al Qaeda in Iraq, although it is difficult to attribute responsibility among the shadowy web of insurgent groups.

Complicating the political impasse are deep continuing divisions along sectarian lines. Iraq's Sunni Arab minority -- which ruled under Saddam Hussein but was marginalized in the wake of his downfall -- bet heavily on the electoral process this time, in marked contrast to the first parliamentary election in 2005.

But the Sunni Arabs were the main group affected when more than 400 parliamentary candidates were disqualified earlier this year for alleged Baathist ties. Now they feel doubly aggrieved in that the political alliance they overwhelmingly supported in March -- former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's al-Iraqiya list -- is being blocked from leading the new government, even though it finished a narrow first in the voting.

The obstacle to a political solution in Baghdad is not only the pair of Shiite-dominated political lists (including that of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who finished second in the vote), but, it is widely believed, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which cannot abide an Iraqi prime minister over whom it does not exercise substantial leverage. Indeed, the only two interests that benefit from Iraq's drift are al Qaeda in Iraq and the hardliners in Iran.

President Obama deserves more than a little sympathy as he confronts this thorny situation. Although he opposed the war in Iraq, he essentially accepted the Bush administration's measured timetable for American military drawdown. Particularly at a time when the budget deficit is soaring and the war in Afghanistan demands more military and financial resources, Obama and most other Americans would like to be out of Iraq completely by yesterday.

But accelerating or even completing the timetable for American military withdrawal in Iraq may only compound the gathering crisis there, for two reasons.

First, as the recent spike in violence is meant to suggest, it is not yet clear that Iraq's security forces are even close to being able to handle the country's security on their own. Privately, most Iraqi political actors (Sunni, Shia and Kurd) would like to see some sort of continued American military presence well beyond 2011. Many worry not only about Iraq's internal security but also about growing Iranian dominance once the United States is completely gone.

And second, U.S. political influence declines markedly as the American military presence phases out.

The worst thing the United States could do at the moment is to take Iraq for granted.

The Obama administration has had the right instinct in trying to press for and facilitate a political breakthrough in Baghdad, but more needs to be done and soon, while the United States still retains significant leverage.

The situation may now require the designation of a high-level American official or envoy to devote sustained attention to the stalemate in Iraq, while working closely with high-level representatives from the United Nations and the European Union. Such combined diplomatic leverage and mediation broke a dangerous political stalemate in Iraq in 2005 and might help again.

One thing should be clear. No matter what one may think of the original decision to invade Iraq (which I still believe was a mistake), Iraq has come too far and the United States has paid too dearly to now stand by and watch it sink back needlessly into chaos.