Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is all very well and good, but how do we know that this was an effective way to give aid?
This is a scene from Samaritans, a new TV comedy that's recently started in Kenya.
The show makes fun of a fictional NGO that has no clue what its purpose is.
The fact that a TV channel in Kenya is making fun of pointless charities underlines the idea that aid workers can pile in while having little real knowledge of whether they're making a difference.
This is another way in which the MIT students made their project different.
They set up a randomised controlled trial, an RCT as they're known.
They're basically the gold standard way of measuring the effectiveness of a treatment in medical trials.
But in this case, they gave one group of people not medicine, but money.
The other group, a control group, received nothing.
Such controlled trials are rapidly catching on in development aid, although they're still by no means the standard approach.
A year later, researchers returned to the villagers to examine what impact the money had made.
They spent about six hours with each villager, asking them questions about the past year.
That's Paul Niehaus again.
So what can the trial tell us?
Well, the reported results show that those who got the cash were indeed better off at the end of a year than those who got nothing.
They held almost 60% more assets after spending the money on livestock and home improvements.
And for those that invested in animals, their income increased.
All positive things.
But there are some important questions this experiment's results don't answer.
Will this cash injection have had any long-term impact?
Showing 1541–1560 of 4,250 · page 78 of 213
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