April 10, 2009
Commentary
Skepticism Doesn't Have to Take the Day Off
We were pleased to see Bill Easterly highlight The Hunger Project, a partner of our's in Ghana, on his blog, Aid Watch. In fact, it wasn't necessary for skepticism to take a full day off because there is a rigorous evaluation of the project underway. With funding from the Robertson Foundation, researchers at Yale, Berkeley and IPA have just begun a study of the project's impact on the communities in Eastern Ghana.
The interesting thing about this project is the impressive committment of THP to not only the mission of their organization but to independent assessment of the "epicenter strategy". One reason is that while the benefits of the program seem positive, the project is indeed expensive. And the costs are not borne just by THP, the people in the communities are expected to devote considerable time to help create, design, and build the epicenters. Are these resources best spent in this way?
The randomized evaluation approach is feasible here because the epicenter project cannot expand to all communities at once, and so researchers and local leaders were able to randomly select communities in public lottery to receive either early or later implementation of the program. We of course cannot control which individuals participate in THP, but we can measure the overall impact on the community from receiving an epicenter. By using natural constraints to implementation, we will measure, using both quantiative and qualitative tools, the impact of a complex and multifaceted community development approach on the health, nutrition, income, the role of women, social cohesion and education in the communities. This will be an exciting project for us because of the community aspect of the intervention. No two epicenters will be the same. This adaptive process of course will make it more difficult to state clearly the procedures to put in place, but it does validate, or not, the impact from the *process* of building and funding an epicenter, with full community involvement and direction and leadership.
The long and short of it
This sounds like a fascinating project, especially in the breadth of outcomes it seeks to track -- everything from health to income to empowerment. What's the timeframe of the project? Maybe the epicenter approach does have a positive impact on, say, the role of women; but maybe it takes a long time to observe these changes. Will the researchers be following up far into the future to try and capture longer-term effects?
Re: The long and the short of it
Yes, the study does aim to measure long-term impacts. Currently the researchers plan to measure impacts at five years and, depending on the results, will propose a second followup at 10 years or thereabout. Given the breadth of outcomes this project aims to capture, the ability to track changes over the long term will be an important component of the study. Robertson Foundation and The Hunger Project deserve kudos for investing in this kind of rigorous evaluation.