I explain how I moved from studying schooling to researching wealth and poverty. Those years spanned the global financial crisis, which had insidious effects in Ethiopia.

My doctoral project was about mothers’ schooling and health – I was interested in why kids born to mums who had been to school were more likely to survive – so poverty and wealth were in some ways peripheral to my interests. They figured as “confounders” or “modifiers” of the relationship between education and child health; but with only a slight shift of perspective they clearly mattered in their own right: educational attainment and social-economic status amplified each other; schools served as legitimators of prior class assortments, and so on. I chose the broad term life chances to describe my object of enquiry, because I was aware health in a narrow sense wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

While I was working on my doctoral research, I rented a room in a compound (a tin-fenced courtyard) that I shared with a half-dozen other people, mainly students and lecturers at the local university. We were close enough to the edge of town that you could hear the hyenas that came into the city to scavenge at night; in the rainy season the night soundscape also included frogs who made odd popping and beeping sounds.  The roads in our neighbourhood were unpaved and turned to bogs in the rains. But the place was safe, and in many ways pleasant.

My colleague Dan Mains has written about road-building in Jimma during those years – a march of asphalt and cobble-stone paving was proceeding across the city.  Downtown, in the Merkato commercial district, roads were being widened and many people who lived or owned businesses on these streets were compelled by the government to move several metres back to accommodate new thoroughfares; the widening of roads entailed a swathe of destruction for these neighbourhoods.

This was 2008, and in the USA and Europe the financial system had just come close to collapse, sending shockwaves through the global economy. As financiers scrambled for bankable assets, there was a rush to buy or lease land elsewhere. An indirect effect of the crisis was that food prices rose. I noticed this on my daily trips to the bakers in Jimma. While 1 Birr still bought you a small loaf (really, a bread roll), over the weeks and months of 2008-2009 the size of those loaves got smaller and smaller. Making things more absurd, the bakers would wrap the bread in pages from recycled newspapers from the Arabian Gulf; they consisted largely of ads for luxury condos with views over Dubai.

Another thing I saw in the newspapers while I was living in Jimma was news of a large dam that was being built on one of the country’s major rivers, the Omo. Rather like the road-building projects in the city, the venture seemed to represent a kind development that was simultaneously grandiose and cruel. Once completed, the dam would generate large amounts of electricity for the national grid – indeed, so much that surplus would be sold to neighbouring countries – but at the same time it would undermine the livelihoods of some 100,000 people downstream in Ethiopia who relied on the river, and perhaps a million more across the border in Kenya. The dam would also make it possible to grow sugar and other cash crops on large new plantations.

Five years later, I had the opportunity to go to the Omo Valley and to document some of the changes that were under way. Would the dam and associated projects make life better or worse for people living downstream? In the next post I’ll pick up that part of the story.