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Evaluation and taking lessons forward

Dean Karlan, founder and director of the non-profit research organization Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), at a recent workshop in Seattle, clarified a misconception about their work: Karlan discourages looking backward to see if a donor’s money made a difference. Instead, Karlan recommends building evaluation into the planning process for future projects. Evaluation will help sharpen the overall project and deliver more useful, credible results. “We need to understand whether programs are really effective or not so that we know as donors what to support, and as practitioners what we should be doing. Rigorous evaluations help us do just that. We also must learn why programs work, rather than merely evaluate whether something works. It is the why that helps us know what lessons to take from one country to another, from one year to the next.”[1]

IPA’s research spans a variety of fields, including microfinance, education, health, agriculture, charitable giving, political participation, and social capital. Attendees at the Global Washington workshop heard from Dean Karlan, Jake Appel, Tania Alfonso, Anna York and Mary Kay Gugerty about the methodologies for assessing program impacts.

IPA promotes the use of rigorous experimentation, or “randomized control trial” experiments, to evaluate whether an intervention has an impact and if so, why the intervention worked. The team presented what makes a good evaluation, including the detailed assessments needed and the time involved to collect quality data.  The heart of a randomized trial is making one set of data (with the intervention) equal to the other set (without the intervention) in order to answer the question: where would the studied population have been without the intervention. As IPA notes in their website FAQs: “If we want to know how effective a program is, we need to have a comparison group. Without a comparison, we can’t really say anything about what would have happened without the program. And the only way of having a fair comparison group is with random assignment.” [2] Using case studies, attendees shared questions and opinions about the value of randomized control trial evaluation. Attendees also learned about cost-benefits of randomized control trial evaluation. The workshop provided attendees a great opportunity to ask questions of Dean Karlan and Jake Appel regarding their new book, More Than Good intentions. In their book, Karlan and Appel claim that accounting for irrational behavior and introducing a method of controlled experiments will help fix the problem of failed humanitarian interventions for poverty alleviation.

Overall attendees were able to reflect collaboratively upon implementing greater strategies for evaluating interventions. One participant learned enough to recommend  her organization take a step back and revisit their evaluation plan: rather than conduct a small randomized trial, the organization decided to focus on telling “success stories” in the coming year. If you want to know more, please read IPA’s blog, http://www.poverty-action.org/blog or write to Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA) at contact@poverty-action.org.

Global Washington joins Global Campaign for Aid Transparency

One of the four principles that Global Washington identified in its 2009 white paper on global aid effectiveness and highlighted in its 2010 policy paper is “Transparency and Accountability” — information on strategy, goals, and spending [should be] clear and readily available to U.S. taxpayers and international beneficiaries.

It turns out that Global Washington is in line with much of the rest of the world in its call for transparency. Publish What You Fund, a London-based group, is sponsoring a global campaign for aid transparency, in preparation for the upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Korea in early December.

The upcoming High Level Forum will be the fourth such forum sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At the third forum, held in Accra, Ghana, in 2008, OECD issued the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which included the following action:

“We will make aid more transparent. Developing countries will facilitate parliamentary oversight by implementing greater transparency in public financial management, including public disclosure of revenues, budgets, expenditures, procurement and audits. Donors will publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on volume, allocation and, when available, results of development expenditure to enable more accurate budget, accounting and audit by developing countries.”

Publish What You Fund is working with a global coalition of partners, including U.S.-based Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), to collect organizations willing to sign onto a petition urging governments and other donors to make their aid more transparent. Global Washington has recently signed onto the petition, and urges individual members to sign on as well.

Guest Blog: Why are all these white folks deciding what Africa needs?

This guest post from Kunle Oguneye, president of the Seattle chapter of The African Network was originally posted in Humanosphere and is reposted here with permission.

One glaring omission which prevails in the global health and development community in the Greater Seattle region is the absence of Africans or Indians or Chinese or Vietnamese.  Those of us who live in the poverty-stricken regions of the world have no input in the so-called solutions to eradicate malaria or to fight global-poverty.

I find it quite disturbing that the so-called beneficiaries are not consulted when seeking solutions to the challenges that we face on a daily basis.  I would not be so concerned about this, but for the fact that some of the policies and activities of well-intentioned advocates may actually be detrimental to the poor communities of this world.  Why does the global development community assume that we Africans don’t know what works in addressing poverty?  Why do they assume that we do not have the answers?  Why does a white man or woman visit Africa and immediately prescribe a solution based on their three-week visit?

Many of us in the African immigrant community have seen poverty first-hand.  Many of us have watched our relatives and friends pull themselves out of poverty or further fall into poverty.  We understand what solutions can and do work.  We understand that technology can help, but only to a point.  We understand that you cannot address a society’s problems without boots on the ground.  We understand that no program will be successful without the buy-in of the community.

Another glaring omission in the debate around global development is the absence of the business community.  Communities thrive around business.  All the efforts to provide a village with bed nets and anti-malaria drugs will ultimately fail, if those villagers do not have the means to purchase those items once the initial donations run out.  We must be encouraging businesses to engage with the developing world.

We need to stop presenting the image of Africans and indeed the developing world as helpless lost souls who need help from the benevolent white man or woman in order to survive.

If the community is really sincere about development, then they should ask the people of that community what works.  Help them acquire the necessary infrastructure, provide relevant educational opportunities and then get out of the way.

Kunle Oguneye