How can we know when an aid project 'works'?
Today Nina Munk released a new book on the Millennium Villages Project, an intensive experimental "solution to extreme poverty" underway across rural Africa. Munk wrote her book, The Idealist, after observing the Project firsthand for six years, and her account is sympathetic to its founder while deeply critical of the Project itself. For Joe Nocera of the New York Times, the book makes it "tough to believe" the project is succeeding; for James Traub in the Wall Street Journal, the book shows how the Project was "beset by immemorial forms of misfortune that Mr. Sachs's team in New York hadn't counted on."
Right, but how do we know when a project works or doesn't? There's bad news and good news. The bad news is that development economists have made little progress on answering big questions like how to "solve poverty".
The good news is that they have gotten much better at telling the difference between a project that does what it says it can do and one that does not. There is a new transparency in development economics. In a new CGD working paper, forthcoming in the journal World Economy, Gabriel Demombynes and I discuss how a new transparency is changing the debate about what works.
[view whole blog post
]
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
See More
Report Abuse