Authority Now and in the Old Times

sermon text; MS Word document

The Impact of AIDS on Government Service Delivery: The Case of the Zambia Wildlife Authority

Background: The loss of working-aged adults to HIV/AIDS has been shown to increase the costs of labor to the private sector in Africa. There is little corresponding evidence for the public sector. This study evaluated the impact of AIDS on the capacity of a government agency, the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA), to patrol Zambia’s national parks. Methods: Data were collected from ZAWA on workforce characteristics, recent mortality, costs, and the number of days spent on patrol between 2003 and 2005 by a sample of 76 current patrol officers (reference subjects) and 11 patrol officers who died of AIDS or suspected AIDS (index subjects). An estimate was made of the impact of AIDS on service delivery capacity and labor costs and the potential net benefits of providing treatment. Results: Reference subjects spent an average of 197.4 days on patrol per year. After adjusting for age, years of service, and worksite, index subjects spent 62.8 days on patrol in their last year of service (68% decrease, p<0.0001), 96.8 days on patrol in their second to last year of service (51% decrease, p<0.0001), and 123.7 days on patrol in their third to last year of service (37% decrease, p<0.0001). For each employee who died, ZAWA lost an additional 111 person-days for management, funeral attendance, vacancy, and recruitment and training of a replacement, resulting in a total productivity loss per death of 2.0 person-years. Each AIDS-related death also imposed budgetary costs for care, benefits, recruitment, and training equivalent to 3.3 years’ annual compensation. In 2005, AIDS reduced service delivery capacity by 6.2% and increased labor costs by 9.7%. If antiretroviral therapy could be provided for $500/patient/year, net savings to ZAWA would approach $285,000/year. Conclusion: AIDS is constraining ZAWA’s ability to protect Zambia’s wildlife and parks. Impacts on this government agency are substantially larger than have been observed in the private sector. Provision of ART would result in net budgetary savings to ZAWA and greatly increase its service delivery capacity.

Distributed Placement of Service Facilities in Large-Scale Networks

The effectiveness of service provisioning in largescale networks is highly dependent on the number and location of service facilities deployed at various hosts. The classical, centralized approach to determining the latter would amount to formulating and solving the uncapacitated k-median (UKM) problem (if the requested number of facilities is fixed), or the uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problem (if the number of facilities is also to be optimized). Clearly, such centralized approaches require knowledge of global topological and demand information, and thus do not scale and are not practical for large networks. The key question posed and answered in this paper is the following: "How can we determine in a distributed and scalable manner the number and location of service facilities?" We propose an innovative approach in which topology and demand information is limited to neighborhoods, or balls of small radius around selected facilities, whereas demand information is captured implicitly for the remaining (remote) clients outside these neighborhoods, by mapping them to clients on the edge of the neighborhood; the ball radius regulates the trade-off between scalability and performance. We develop a scalable, distributed approach that answers our key question through an iterative reoptimization of the location and the number of facilities within such balls. We show that even for small values of the radius (1 or 2), our distributed approach achieves performance under various synthetic and real Internet topologies that is comparable to that of optimal, centralized approaches requiring full topology and demand information.