As someone who until recently worked for USAID, I wanted to share this NPR interview with Dean Karlan, USAID's Chief Economist who resigned yesterday. The interview covers the importance of program evaluation and evidence in fighting poverty and what has been happening at USAID.
Here's a helpful Forum summary of Dean Karlan's work from shortly after he was appointed as USAID's Chief Economist.
Below are a few quotes; the interview is worth reading in full.
What was it like when you took on this new kind of job for USAID?
I was greeted by many talented people who were enthusiastic about the kinds of changes that I was hoping to help lead. And there's no way we would have accomplished what we did without their collaboration and support.
For a long while, the field of foreign aid and development didn't have the evidence it needed to understand how to inform programs and make them more cost effective. But the world has changed a lot in the past 20 years and we've seen a huge increase in the quantity of careful program evaluations.
Now we have a great deal more evidence to know what works and what doesn't to fight poverty. And while USAID was using that evidence when I arrived, there's a lot of areas where it could improve its program design by doing a better job at synthesizing what's out there. That was my job.
And when we took that approach, we had already begun moving the needle in how programs were designed to follow more tightly the evidence and produce more evidence on cost effectiveness.
For instance, we were working on a set of resilience awards for rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa where households are particularly prone to the vulnerabilities of drought or flood. The awards, totaling about half a billion dollars, help these individuals develop their own income-generating activity, which contributes to local economic development. This program has been evaluated repeatedly by me and others with very strong results in terms of household income, food security, and it actually reduces the need for future humanitarian support. Our office had been working with Uganda, Somalia and Madagascar to help build out these programs and take them to new places.
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If you want to reform foreign aid, this isn't the way to do it. This approach is going to radically increase the cost of all future foreign aid. That's because if you want to work with anybody in the future and you tell them, "No, no, no, this time we're here. We're not going to fold on you," how are you going to convince them of that? When you can't trust someone, it makes you reluctant to make agreements with them. And that means doing less good with more money to have the same positive impact as we were having before.
There's a lot of good that USAID has done across the board in terms of health, education, helping farmers, and helping people in crisis.
Now, there are people who are going to be radically worse off and sick and not educated in the same way because of what's happened. Literally taking people who are in hospitals and stopping treatments because the money is not there.
And not just that — people are going to die. A lot of people.
So we now have a million million tragedies that could have been avoided.
This sucks