A recent World Bank Article begins: Many community driven development (CDD) projects have been found to be only mildly pro-poor in their funding allocations. That paper (The Regressive Demands of Demand-Driven Development ) goes on to examine one explanation – that people must first ask for money in order to get it. And in Tanzania […]
If there was one transformational epiphany I wished people at non-profit organizations could have it would be this: No matter who you are, you don’t have very many close, personal, intimate, trusted friends. The average number is actually ZERO, but this illustration assumes you have five. Fifty years ago surveys found that the average American […]
Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, appears to have a problem with exaggerating. In an interview on Charlie Rose, he said he built 11 schools in a part of Pakistan when he had only built three. This 60 minutes investigation shows that some of his most emotionally compelling stories in Three Cups of […]
Many calls for aid reform assert the reasonable assumption that better evidence will lead to better policy. What if this isn’t true? What if policymakers don’t really care about whether their policies align best with the evidence? Are we screwed? No. Good systems can still achieve progress and coordination in spite of the people within […]
So this week our four graduate students in International development from George Washington University returned from their two-week trek across Kenya. Their goal was to visit 20 GlobalGiving projects and ask them all a set of survey questions they had designed. I hoped they would have 15 questions. They left with over 50. The week […]
