Politics in a developing country

Location-allocation problems appear in many settings, and O.R. scientists have been involved in numerous cases. My research student (S) was concerned for the location of primary health-care facilities in his home country. He came equipped with the data about the villages and towns in one province. Populations, location of existing facilities, which villages had suitable infrastructure, distances between the population centres, and the government's policy for expanding health services in their five-year plan. So he set out to study where facilities should be located if one had a blank sheet to start with, given the five-year plan. Then he added constraints, because it would not be politically expedient to close facilities, so these had to remain even if they were not in the optimal solution. He was anxious to develop a system that could be replicated on a PC in his country, and this was part of S's work.

One constraint which had to be imposed was that each sector of the province should have the same number of facilities, and that the expansion plan should ensure that no sector had more than one more than any other. This was to keep local leaders and government staff happy. So the expansion gave each sector two facilities, then expanded these to three. Given the existing facilities, and the uneven distribution of population in the sectors of the province, these constraints meant that the location of facilities would not be as good as it could be.

So S completed his research, and presented it in his thesis and in seminars. At one of these, an astute member of the audience asked how S could be confident that the province would implement the solution. Developing country politics is not always what westerners are used to, and an O.R. solution might not be accepted by politiicians. "Well," said S, "my father works in the provincial governor's office. The governor will take his advice." He had never disclosed this in his research.

This is my first contribution to INFORMS Blog challenge/theme for January 2011 "O.R. and Politics"

Displaying data provocatively

For many years, I have been interested in the potential for using O.R. in developing countries. By a process of serendipity, I have just discovered Gapminder, where data about the world's nations are shown in original and challenging ways. I wish that I had discovered the site before now!

Mobile telephones and development

The Independent, the national newspaper that I read daily, had an article yesterday in which Clare Rudebeck explained how the spread of ICT (and especially mobile phones) is improving the quality of life for many people in the Third World.

If you have travelled in a developing country in the last few years, and especially if you have moved from the comfort zone of a hotel, you will have seen vendors of mobile phones and SIM cards. Looking more closely, you may have seen booths where the owner of a phone rents out his phone to members of the public. The article discusses this phenomenon, and quotes Richard Heeks, Professor of Development Informatics at the University of Manchester (UK). Following that lead, I found several items in a newsletter. Operational Research contributes to these, with models of the uncertain future. But had you been forecasting development of telecommunications in sub-Saharan Africa 20 years ago, would you have believed that there would be no need for an infrastructure of fixed telephone lines? I doubt it!

O.R. in developing countries

Following on from the comments about Eritrea, my mind wandered to ask which countries have not been linked to a published O.R. paper.
According to the Traveler's Century Club there are 319 countries in the world (I'm not a member as you have to have visited one hundred or more from their list, and my tally is about sixty). The United Nations has 192 members. The International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) has "over forty five" members (it was 48 when the roll was called at the last IFORS conference, but there are a few national societies whose current existence is uncertain. So we can reckon that there is work on O.R. in those countries.
But which countries are missing?
My quick check found no O.R. papers from:
Burundi
Chad
Djibouti
Swaziland

Bhutan
Burma (Myanmar)
Kazakhstan
Laos
North Korea
Uzbekistan
from my knowledge of Africa and Asia. I would be interested if anyone can correct this list. I need to look at South America.
(My "rules" are that a paper should be about an application in the country, or which has been developed with enough data from the country to claim relevance. The "rules" do not say that the work should have been implemented.)

O.R. in Eritrea

When IAOR prints an abstract relating to O.R. in a developing country, it is usually cross-indexed with the name of that country. So the latest "OR in a DC" abstract marks a rare event -- it is the first that has been included (as far as my records go) about O.R. in Eritrea.

The paper is:
Cost analysis of an integrated disease surveillance and response system: case of Burkina Faso, Eritrea, and Mali
by
Zana C Somda, Martin I Meltzerl, Helen N Perryl, Nancy E Messonnier, Usman Abdulmumini, Goitom Mebrahtu, Massambou Sacko, Kandioura Toure, Salimnta Ouedraogo Ki, Tuoyo Okorosobo, Wondimagegnehu Alemu and Idrissa Sow
published in:
Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation 2009, 7:1doi:10.1186/1478-7547-7-1

Papers with so many authors/co-authors are also rare events.

By the way, if you don't know where Eritrea is, the map shows it in the north-east corner of Africa, bordering on the Red Sea.