Crowdsourcing Poverty Research

A tremendous amount of development research is all but unknown in the countries that are the subject of that research. In Kenya, this is the case with path-breaking papers like the Kremer-Miguel Worms study and the Cohen-Dupas insecticide-treated net pricing experiment.

To increase the visibility of such policy-relevant work, we’re producing a "Kenya 2011 Poverty Research Review" that will be published early next year as part of our larger Poverty Update report, which will be widely publicized in Kenya.

The Poverty Research Review will give an overview of poverty-related research on Kenya published in 2011 in journals or working paper series. There is a wide pool of work to draw from: a search on "Kenya" and "poverty" in Google Scholar produces 12,900 references for works produced in 2011.

As an experiment, I’m going to try drawing from the wisdom of crowds for this project.  Please help me with your suggestions for high-quality papers on poverty-related issues in Kenya that you would like to see highlighted in our review.

There are three ways to collaborate:
1) Add a comment to this blog post with the reference
2) Send it to me via Twitter: @gdemom
3) Add papers directly to my Kenya 2011 Poverty Research Review group on Mendeley, an easy-to-use online bibliography tool. Mendeley, or  “Facebook-for-nerds “ allows you to collaboratively assemble references.

You’ll have to go through a very brief sign-up process to add papers. You do not need to download the desktop version; it works perfectly well just run as an online application. (You should definitely follow the quick instructions to add the "Web Importer" so that you can pull reference information off websites.)

Thanks in advance for joining this effort.