Developmental surprises
Making aid effective is difficult. We get it wrong a lot; sometimes that means we just didn’t help much, but sometimes that means we made it worse. The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a list of “best buys,” that is, interventions that have proven to be successful and really cost effective too. Most are the sort of things you might expect, but some seem a bit odd.
Deworming in schools is really effective and costs 50 cents per child. Not only do these kids avoid painful and debilitating parasites but they also go to school about 25% more. Effective, cheap and about what you’d expect.
Quotas for women in politics seem like something progressives might like, but would have little effect on development. Turns out women are good at spending on cool public goods that women want like clean roads and water. They also improve the political participation of women for obvious reasons. The development literature consistently winds up saying that giving women more rights and more power is good for countries not just because they deserve it but because it improves the lives of everyone.
But turns out giving free school uniforms is good too. They reduce school dropout rates and teen childbearing. It seems like schools all require them, so giving them for free reduces the costs of going to school pretty directly. You might also imagine that they remind people about school on a more daily basis by being a symbol of it in the home. That’s just speculation, but I’d be interested in a comparison of giving money equivalent to buying school uniforms (including the cost of travel and time to buy it) and the uniforms themselves.
The rest are mostly obvious — subsidizing schools, bednets, vaccines and remedial reading classes. Another thing that’s key to note is that these should all be fairly uncontroversial interventions. No one can argue that better health or more access to education isn’t a good thing, while a lot of our policy interventions are really hard to get right and wind up screwing things up.
Last it’s also important to note that these are direct interventions in the sense that they don’t rely on the governments of African nations. That makes them both more politically palatable there and probably more effective.
