This week I would like to explore more something I saw during my recent visit to Ghana. As I explained in a previous post, a conversation with a rural bank manager made me realize that in Ghana, just like in the United States, people take payday loans.
In 1993 India adopted gender quotas for local councils. In particular, the position of chief councilor (or Pradhan) was reserved for women in 1/3 of the village councils in any given election – and this 1/3 was selected at random. As one might expect, this has led to a surge in the number of women holding this post. It also provides a ripe environment for impact evaluation work.
One area in which we see very little impact evaluation is the realm of trade related interventions and reforms. In a recent paper Olivier Cadot and coauthors give us a discussion of these types of interventions and how we might evaluate them (they also have an attendant book with some applications).
So this past week I was in Ghana following up on some of the projects I am working on there with one of my colleagues. We were designing an agricultural impact evaluation with some of our counterparts, following up on the analysis of the second round of a land tenure impact evaluation and a financial literacy intervention, and exploring the possibility of some work in the rural financial sector. In no particular order, here are some of the things I learned and some things I am still wondering about:
Back in the tail end of last year, I did a post on using workshops with project teams to build impact evaluation design. My friend anonymous requested copies of the presentations. Since I am in the midst of doing another one of these workshops here in Ghana, I thought it would be worth posting them now.
After talking about domestic violence measurement and the need for some kind of model when you think about things like domestic violence with Toan last week, this week I look at a new paper from Jonas Hort and Espen Villanger which both asks the question carefully and definitely makes me think hard about what the ri
Coauthored with Quy-Toan Do
In response to my blog post last week, one of my colleagues stopped me in the hall and pointed out that I missed the point. So in response, I invited him to join this week for a discussion. Our discussion follows:
Toan: A survey without an underlying research question is like salt without pepper. What you need to do is talk about what questions the survey is designed to answer.
coauthored with Sabrina Roshan
Imagine you are out on a pretest of a survey. Part of the goal is to measure the rights women have over property. The enumerator is trying out a question: "can you keep farming this land if you are to be divorced?" The woman responds: "it depends on whose fault it is." Welcome to yet another land where no one has heard of no-fault divorce.
So, if you are like (some of) us, you’ve left the holiday shopping till the last minute. In that vein, we thought we would share some of what we find essential as we do the field (and other) research.
One of the things I learned from other folks at the Bank I work with is the usefulness of doing a workshop early in the early design of an impact evaluation to bring the project and the impact evaluation team together to hammer out design. With one of my colleagues, I did one of these during my recent trip to Ethiopia and a bunch of things stuck out.
