Innovation. Housing. Story Consulting. Paradigms. Design. Adaptive Management. Communications tools. Measuring impact. Scaling impact. What Data Can Do to Fight Poverty. Photo IF social scientists and policy makers have learned anything about how to help the world’s poorest people, it’s not to trust our intuitions or anecdotal evidence about what kinds of antipoverty programs are effective.
Rigorous randomized evaluations of policies, however, can show us what works and what doesn’t. Consider microloans. This celebrated and sensible-sounding strategy — advancing small sums of money to help women in developing countries become entrepreneurs — has been supported by inspiring tales of people pulling themselves out of poverty by creating small businesses. But studies show that such stories are outliers.
Poor Little Rich Women. WHEN our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises.
For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign. Then I met the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-home-moms, of my new habitat.
Learning. Water. Water blogs. Data in development. Food security. NGO fundraising.