i have been feeling terribly empty since dec 2019 ; for 11 years however sad the year seemed to me to be on missed sdg opportunities, i had the privilege -thanks to japan embassy who introduced me - to see fazle abed for a few minutes and listen to new partnership changing parts of the world i often had to spend months searching and new partners who had woken up to a challenge that i had never seen them take on systematically below
i dont know the whole answer but i am hopeful about the new 6 monthly magazine of brac international here's dec 2020
my favorite pieces from pages 12 on how brac workers in the field in 11 countries beyond bangaldesh are helping mitigate covid as well as stay safe themselves and how much of the ultra poor sir fazle's son is now the worldwide mapmaker of- i understand there are pure academics who are glad that the nobel economics prize 2019 was awarded to mit poverty lab for including ultra in their random trials approach but i am interested in the next innovations sdg youth need to pilot and scale where they work; i cant wait for 5 years of evidence before my next abedian stimulation
to add to my personal hopes shameran abed was announced last month as not just the head of all brac's main innovations in finance for the poorest but the head of brac international- may your god or your faith be with him
The field was craving for bullet-proof approaches for measuring true causality.
The Banerjee-Duflo-Kremer randomization revolution provided just this kind of robust technique. But there were two problems: The first was scale. Decent sized randomized trials with the power to detect real effects are expensive to carry out. The second one was “external validity”—the biggest criticism then and today of randomized trials is that the answers they yield are simply local results that may not apply to the rest of the world. There needed to be generous sources of reliable funding and lots of replications across many countries. The solution was Banerjee and Duflo’s creation in 2003 of the Poverty Action Lab with Sendhil Mullainathan, which after substantial funding by MIT graduate Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel became “JPAL”. With this kind of institutional development able to attract tens of millions of dollars in research funds, leading development economists and their doctoral students at MIT and Harvard were up and running, yielding some of the most credible and important results seen to date on a wide array of poverty programs carried out across the developing world.
Some of these early results, such as the Miguel and Kremer work on de-worming, led to a dramatic scaling up of the intervention and even to new global movements such as the Deworm the World Initiative. Work by Duflo and Banerjee validated the holistic poverty intervention approach of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) across seven countries. Other of their work in India and Morocco has challenged the notion of strong microfinance impacts, indeed finding that microfinance only seems to help the top 10-15% of entrepreneurs. New results from randomized trials emerge seemingly every week, and they are changing the way billions of dollars are allocated in poverty aid.
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