Rare story: a decent general article on "foreign aid"

"Foreign aid" is a chronic bogeyman for conservatives. And since the US media do a poor job on reporting on it, when they report on it at all. Which isn't often.

This report by Fred de Sam Lazaro is a welcome if rare exception to that trend, A scientific approach to evaluating global anti-poverty programs PBS Newshour 08/23/2019.

It looks at a type of program aimed at the extremely poor that was extensively evaluated using careful controls and professional academic analysis. The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, which emphasizes the careful part of the evaluation. Here is a summary of results:

Fred De Sam Lazaro:

And once Karlan's team finished crunching the numbers, a clear pattern emerged. One year after the program concluded, there were significant gains in all major measures, revenues, savings, food consumption, and total assets.

And policy-makers are listening. Encouraged by the graduation program's results to date, the Ethiopian government has already scaled the project from 500 households to 8,000, according to Mulugeta Berhanu, a longtime aid officer in Ethiopia.

Mulugeta Berhanu:

They have the plan to increase this to 150,000 households in the coming five years. So, research, they have really great impact in convincing policy-makers.

Fred De Sam Lazaro:

It's not just Ethiopia. The program's multipronged attack on extreme poverty has been tested in a six-country study. It proved beneficial and cost-effective in Ghana, India, Pakistan, and Peru, but not in Honduras, where disease wiped out the chickens that most families chose us their asset.

The story also includes the following important point about anecdotes, which political marketers know can be more persuasive than statitstics:

Fred De Sam Lazaro:

So a lot of the marketing, if you will, or the accountability has come in the form of anecdotal information, as opposed to methodical study.

Dean Karlan:

So there's always going to be data points you could pull to tell whatever story you want. And the answer comes from looking in aggregate at the data and looking at the patterns.

it's not likely to convince your proverbial drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving Dinner table. But facts - and actual careful evaluations - do matter.