Tag Archives: news

Pretty good piece in SSIR by Kevin Starr and Sarah Miers of the Mulago Foundation, why don’t big NGOs scale up other social entrepreneurs’ solutions? They spoke to a bunch of leaders and once they got past the laughter and disbelief at the idea, found “Not created here syndrome” that everybody knows about Big funders like government aid agencies prioritize project-based work Differing priorities at country vs. headquarters Hard to replicate someone else’s idea and get it to work They...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You can register for the big NEUDC development conference, featuring an opening address by Penny Goldberg, held Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 7, now all online! You can also still submit an abstract (500 word limit) for a lightning round session, deadline Monday! Cool paper comparing 150 education interventions from Noam Angrist, David Evans, Deon Filmer, Rachel Glennerster, F. Halsey Rogers and Shwetlena Sabarwal. They use a common...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action I’m working on a new email newsletter, with colleagues including Rachel Strohm (who has been a well-respected dev blogger for years). IPA’s tracking studies on COVID related issues in low- and middle-income countries (along with survey instruments and funding opportunities) on our RECOVR research hub (please submit yours, and let colleagues know). Every other week we’re highlighting some new results from there and elsewhere we...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Planet Money’s new resource for educators pairs podcast episodes with lesson plans, cataloged by topic. It’s a big week for findings from cash studies including: publication of Chris’s study with Fiala and Martinez showing cash benefitted Ugandan participants, but by 9 years later the control group had caught up; Universal Basic Income in Kenya buffered against hard times when COVID and the agricultural lean season hit...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. There’s a lot of basic social science documenting humanity’s flaws, biases, and injustices, but less on fixes. The cover of the new issue of Science today features Salma Mousa’s paper using an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq to promote reconciliation between persecuted Christians and their Muslim neighbors (plain language summary here). Using contact theory, she randomly assigned Muslim players to some teams in a Christian soccer...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Claudia Goldin charts a century of women in the workforce I’ve heard these days in medicine there’s a glut of papers that are all essentially “[thing I was doing already] + in the time of COVID,” which seems like is true of all fields now. The German Development Institute for Evaluation (DEval) has a helpful roundup of several useful new hubs for evidence, research, and methodology resources for dev/social science. A few weeks ago...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Cool panel on Wednesday, now that schools have gone remote, how to assess remotely if kids are learning. And another on Thursday including Anne Karing of Princeton, Jonathan Robinson from UC Santa Cruz, presenting new data on covid impacts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Malawi University of Cape Town economist Grieve Chelwa has been critical of RCTs in the past so my colleague and were braced for his online discussion at Africa...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Professor Lisa Cook explains that black and white inventors put in equivalent numbers of patent applications once in 1899, and never again.  First, a great webinar by Professor Lisa Cook, former economic advisor to President Obama, among many other accomplishments, on how lynchings, violence, and discrimination caused African-American inventions (measured by patent applications) to peak in 1899 and never recover. Here’s the video...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Stanford Political Scientist Hakeem Jefferson hosted a great conversation with a number of scholars on race and the criminal justice system [embedded content] The readings mentioned are assembled in this Dropbox folder and thread, and the Stanford Daily summarized the conversation. A couple of points that jumped out at me were what counts as research/evidence in academic research circles (it seems common for scholars of the black...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Coronavirus patient, comedian Noam Shuster, found herself at the center of an accidental social experiment profiled on the Rough Translation podcast My colleague Kate Glynn-Broderick writes today with an example of how her existing project in Bangladesh, exploring gender gaps in access to mobile money and banking is quickly pivoting to COVID-19, as Bangladesh’s government plans to use those same platforms to distribute social...