Better than Trial and Error
By Paul
A recent article in the Forbes magazine on randomized trials of development projects (via PSD blog);
“The Indian antipoverty group Seva Mandir runs an educational program that teaches 4,000 kids ages 7 to 10 math and reading and writing in Hindi. Seva Mandir had a problem: The teachers, recruited from the villages, often with only a tenth-grade education, would show up at the school only 60% of the time. While a teacher could be fired for excessive absenteeism, the remote locations throughout the impoverished state of Rajasthan ruled out regular monitoring.
A classic way of dealing with this problem is to throw money at it--which is what officials at Seva Mandir proposed to do. They would hire an additional teacher for each classroom, doubling the cost. But in stepped a group of development economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For a few years now the group has been testing antipoverty programs using the same scientific technique pharmaceutical researchers use to evaluate new drugs: the comparison of a randomized test group with a control group.
The idea is to divide a targeted population into two groups, then give the aid--microcredit, computers, textbooks, teacher incentives, health care programs--to one group but not the other and compare the results. "We aren't really interested in the more-aid-less-aid debate. We're interested in seeing what works, and what doesn't," says Abhijit Banerjee, a development economist at MIT who (with Esther Duflo of MIT and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard) helped found MIT's Poverty Action Lab.”
Abhijit himself was an ‘activist’as a student in India. There course on Evaluating Social Programs is also conducted at Centre for Micro-Finance in Chennai as well.