Community-based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leone’s Ebola Outbreak

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model designed to allay fears about western medical care and, thus, encourage early reporting, isolation, and treatment. We employ new panel data on reported Ebola cases and a difference-in-difference design and find that Community Care Centers dramatically increased reporting, potentially reducing the spread of Ebola. Our results highlight how community-based efforts to increase confidence in health systems can be critical for crisis management

Does microcredit increase aspirational hope? Evidence from a group lending scheme in Sierra Leone:Evidence from a group lending scheme in Sierra Leone

Microcredit has received considerable attention due to its potential to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular through its effects on poverty alleviation, female empowerment and self-employment. To date, its effectiveness has largely been evaluated in terms of relieving external constraints of the poor, such as a lack of financial capital for business development. The current study examines whether, and to what extent, microcredit can change internal constraints, such as aspirational hope. We use a cross-sectional dataset of 1295 women in Sierra Leone, 854 of whom are active borrowers of a Microfinance Institution, BRAC. To assess the relationship between microcredit, aspirational hope and economic welfare, we rely on BRAC's eligibility criteria, that only allow access to finance for women living with-in 4 km of a BRAC branch. We find statistically significant and economically meaningful positive associations with both aspirational hope and economic welfare. Overall, this study suggests that microcredit could play an important role in reducing internal psychological constraints, and via this channel contributes to the realization of the SDGs.</p

Does Conflict affect Preferences? Results from Field Experiments in Burundi

We use experimental data from 35 randomly selected communities in Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social-, risk- and time preferences. These types of preferences are important as they determine people’s propensity to invest and their ability to overcome social dilemmas, so that changes therein foster or hinder economic growth. We find that conflict affects preferences. Individuals that have been exposed to greater levels of violence display more altruistic behavior towards their neighbors, are more risk seeking, and have higher discount rates. Adverse, but temporary, shocks can thus alter savings and investments decisions, and potentially have long-run consequences.civil war, preferences, field experiments, Africa

Meaningful and reliable impact evaluations:Where do opportunities arise to study the impact of development interventions?

Het onderzoeken van de impact van ontwikkelingsinterventies is niet eenvoudig. Simpele vergelijkingen schieten tekort, omdat verschillen in bijvoorbeeld armoede vaak niet alleen door de interventie ontstaan, maar ook door andere factoren. In dit artikel bespreken we voorbeelden van projecten waarin de impact van interventies op een zinvolle en betrouwbare manier is onderzocht. Vervolgens bespreken we een aantal praktische uitdagingen die hierbij komen kijken. We roepen op om kritisch te zijn op impactevaluatiedesigns en samen op zoek te gaan naar kansen om impact op een zinvolle en betrouwbare manier te evalueren.Studying the impact of development interventions is not straightforward. Simple comparisons fall short, because differences in, for example, poverty are often not due to just the intervention, but also to other factors. In this article, we discuss examples of projects that studied the impact of interventions in a meaningful and reliable way. We then discuss some practical challenges. We call for a critical approach to impact evaluation designs and for a joint search for opportunities to evaluate impact in a meaningful and reliable way

Commencement Program, May (1994)

https://red.mnstate.edu/commencement/1159/thumbnail.jp

Measuring Discrimination at the Local Level

A robust literature in the social sciences uses experimental games to study discrimination. Often, these games are played between strangers, and players are given little information about the population from which the other players are drawn. We introduce a formal framework and a set of novel dictator games to make nuanced inferences about social discrimination based on differences in knowledge of the social context and the receiver. Specifically, we explore the effects of 1) varying the distribution of the receiver population, and 2) moving from a known distribution of receivers to full information about each individual receiver. We use this framework to study discriminatory behavior in rural Sierra Leone, a context characterized by discrimination based on elite status—a factor widely regarded as an important cause of the civil war. We find that the magnitude of discrimination is driven by a dictator’s knowledge of the receiver, not by her knowledge about the distribution of receivers. Our findings provide important implications for both the measurement and interpretation of discrimination

Chief for a Day: Elite Capture and Management Performance in a Field Experiment in Sierra Leone

We use a field experiment in Sierra Leone to examine how the identity of the manager influences rent seeking and performance in participatory development projects. Specifically, we vary the composition of a committee responsible for implementing a development project—local elites or randomly selected villagers. The design is unique in that it permits us to explore the effectiveness of two alternative local governance modalities and the extent of elite capture in community projects. We find little evidence that local elites capture project resources. We do observe they are better managers of development projects. Improved performance covaries with a proxy for power of the local chief.This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [N.W.O. Grants 453-10-001 and 45-14-001], the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, and the Economic and Social Research Council [Grant ES/J017620/1]

Social network analysis predicts health behaviours and self-reported health in African villages.

The provision of healthcare in rural African communities is a highly complex and largely unsolved problem. Two main difficulties are the identification of individuals that are most likely affected by disease and the prediction of responses to health interventions. Social networks have been shown to capture health outcomes in a variety of contexts. Yet, it is an open question as to what extent social network analysis can identify and distinguish among households that are most likely to report poor health and those most likely to respond to positive behavioural influences. We use data from seven highly remote, post-conflict villages in Liberia and compare two prominent network measures: in-degree and betweenness. We define in-degree as the frequency in which members from one household are named by another household as a friends. Betweenness is defined as the proportion of shortest friendship paths between any two households in a network that traverses a particular household. We find that in-degree explains the number of ill family members, whereas betweenness explains engagement in preventative health. In-degree and betweenness independently explained self-reported health and behaviour, respectively. Further, we find that betweenness predicts susceptibility to, instead of influence over, good health behaviours. The results suggest that targeting households based on network measures rather than health status may be effective for promoting the uptake of health interventions in rural poor villages.This work was supported by N.W.O. grant #W07.68.116 to Professor Erwin Bulte.This is the final version, originally published by PLOS at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0103500

Sierra Leone locked down early to contain covid, but at a high price

Sierra Leone locked down early and appears to have COVID-19 under control. But the country has paid a very high economic price, with the vast majority of people missing meals or eating less. Julio S. Solís Arce (WZB Berlin Social Science Center), Macartan Humphreys (WZB/Columbia), Niccoló Meriggi (International Growth Centre), Maarten Voors (Wageningen University) and Emilie Yam (IGC) warn that if the virus begins to spread again, these sacrifices may be hard to justify and replicate