Aspiring to a better future: can a simple psychological intervention reduce poverty?

How do aspirations influence investment decisions for people living in poverty? Does this change as peoples economic conditions improve? To answer these questions, we design a workshop teaching techniques to raise aspirations and plan to achieve them. We cross-randomise this with large unconditional cash transfers in a 415-village, 8,300-person, 1.5-year experiment in Kenya. The workshop substantially raises aspirations, investment, and living standards. But the workshop +cash produces similar effects to cash alone, potentially because cash raises aspirations. Thus, helping people living in poverty set higher aspirations can raise investment and living standards, but improving economic conditions can activate the same process

Essays on the scale-up of extensions to cash transfers

This thesis contributes to the scientific and policy debate surrounding the so-called graduation approach – an integrated development intervention that directly targets the poorest households in low-income countries and provides them with a combination of assets at no cost. Though the components vary, they always involve transfers (of a productive and/or monetary asset) alongside extended training and coaching activities (intended to cultivate some intangible asset). Randomized evaluations of the graduation approach have demonstrated poverty reduction across contexts and in the long run. This has attracted policy attention, as training and coaching interventions could be expanded in widespread social protection schemes that already identify low-income households and provide them with cash transfers. The case for scaling up these intangible extensions could be strengthened through a better understanding of whether and why the integrated approach is more cost-effective than its constituent components, such as transfers alone. Gaps also remain in the science of implementation. Past evaluations have been conducted mainly in nonprofit pilot settings and may not be predictive of the at-scale effects that will materialize in the institutional contexts of governments. Anticipating that the fidelity and impact of the intangible extensions will tend to suffer with scale, we evaluate two innovations to protect implementation quality. One involves the attempt to identify the most critical ingredients: all else equal, a simpler approach will be more scalable. The other innovation involves the design of the funding agreements: when funders pay implementers as a function of demonstrated impact, scale-up efforts will tend to accelerate where the critical success factors happen to be in place. We add to recent evidence underlining the potential of the integrated graduation approach. We find that it tends to resist simplification attempts. Paying implementers as a function of demonstrated poverty impacts comes with complications, but some of these are mitigated with scale.</p

Essays on the scale-up of extensions to cash transfers

This thesis contributes to the scientific and policy debate surrounding the so-called graduation approach â an integrated development intervention that directly targets the poorest households in low-income countries and provides them with a combination of assets at no cost. Though the components vary, they always involve transfers (of a productive and/or monetary asset) alongside extended training and coaching activities (intended to cultivate some intangible asset). Randomized evaluations of the graduation approach have demonstrated poverty reduction across contexts and in the long run. This has attracted policy attention, as training and coaching interventions could be expanded in widespread social protection schemes that already identify low-income households and provide them with cash transfers. The case for scaling up these intangible extensions could be strengthened through a better understanding of whether and why the integrated approach is more cost-effective than its constituent components, such as transfers alone. Gaps also remain in the science of implementation. Past evaluations have been conducted mainly in nonprofit pilot settings and may not be predictive of the at-scale effects that will materialize in the institutional contexts of governments. Anticipating that the fidelity and impact of the intangible extensions will tend to suffer with scale, we evaluate two innovations to protect implementation quality. One involves the attempt to identify the most critical ingredients: all else equal, a simpler approach will be more scalable. The other innovation involves the design of the funding agreements: when funders pay implementers as a function of demonstrated impact, scale-up efforts will tend to accelerate where the critical success factors happen to be in place. We add to recent evidence underlining the potential of the integrated graduation approach. We find that it tends to resist simplification attempts. Paying implementers as a function of demonstrated poverty impacts comes with complications, but some of these are mitigated with scale.</p

The Outgrower Opportunity

RCT on malaria & contract farming in Zambi

Methods used in the development of Common Data Models for health data – A Scoping Review Protocol

Common Data Models (CDMs) are essential tools for data harmonization, which can lead to significant improvements in healthcare. CDMs harmonize data from disparate sources and eases collaborations across institutions which lead to generation of larger standardized data repositories across different entities. This Scoping Review (Sc-R) on methods used in the development of CDMs for healthcare aims to obtain a broad overview of approaches that are used in developing CDMs, i.e., Common Data Elements (CDEs) or Common Data Sets (CDS) for different disease domains on an international level. To get an overview of the state-of-the-art literature databases, namely PubMed, Web of Science, Science Direct, and Scopus are searched for five-year publications, starting from 2017, with associated keywords. The included articles will be evaluated methodically and a list of different types of methods will be created. The methods will then be categorized into groups

Use of Metadata-Driven Approaches for Data Harmonization in the Medical Domain: Scoping Review

BackgroundMultisite clinical studies are increasingly using real-world data to gain real-world evidence. However, due to the heterogeneity of source data, it is difficult to analyze such data in a unified way across clinics. Therefore, the implementation of Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) or Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) processes for harmonizing local health data is necessary, in order to guarantee the data quality for research. However, the development of such processes is time-consuming and unsustainable. A promising way to ease this is the generalization of ETL/ELT processes. ObjectiveIn this work, we investigate existing possibilities for the development of generic ETL/ELT processes. Particularly, we focus on approaches with low development complexity by using descriptive metadata and structural metadata. MethodsWe conducted a literature review following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. We used 4 publication databases (ie, PubMed, IEEE Explore, Web of Science, and Biomed Center) to search for relevant publications from 2012 to 2022. The PRISMA flow was then visualized using an R-based tool (Evidence Synthesis Hackathon). All relevant contents of the publications were extracted into a spreadsheet for further analysis and visualization. ResultsRegarding the PRISMA guidelines, we included 33 publications in this literature review. All included publications were categorized into 7 different focus groups (ie, medicine, data warehouse, big data, industry, geoinformatics, archaeology, and military). Based on the extracted data, ontology-based and rule-based approaches were the 2 most used approaches in different thematic categories. Different approaches and tools were chosen to achieve different purposes within the use cases. ConclusionsOur literature review shows that using metadata-driven (MDD) approaches to develop an ETL/ELT process can serve different purposes in different thematic categories. The results show that it is promising to implement an ETL/ELT process by applying MDD approach to automate the data transformation from Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources to Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model. However, the determining of an appropriate MDD approach and tool to implement such an ETL/ELT process remains a challenge. This is due to the lack of comprehensive insight into the characterizations of the MDD approaches presented in this study. Therefore, our next step is to evaluate the MDD approaches presented in this study and to determine the most appropriate MDD approaches and the way to integrate them into the ETL/ELT process. This could verify the ability of using MDD approaches to generalize the ETL process for harmonizing medical data