Esther Duflo’s new book, co-authored with Abjihit Vinayak Banerjee, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, reclaims the spotlight for tackling poverty and believes that poverty can be allayed, and perhaps eradicated, with the right policies. They believe that all it takes is for politicians to “translate research into action;” encouraging the use of evidence-based case studies as a guide to implementing programs. The book aspires to make 2011 the year where the “economics of poverty” is at the forefront of international political dialogues.
Duflo is certain that this book will capture the attention of people in various fields of work because the global poverty gap impacts and fascinates us all. Duflo is a professor at MIT and “is credited with making development economics chic.” She was “one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development […] when very few university faculties were devoted to the subject.”
Duflo acknowledges that a significant impediment to this process has been entreating policy-makers “to apply the results of research into action.” She states that “sometimes they do not know the evidence and so cannot take the right approach.” The struggle, then, lies within transplanting and refitting the results of econometric research into program planning and performance.
When conducting research, Duflo “uses randomized field experiments to identify highly specific programs that can alleviate poverty.” She is the Director of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). J-PAL conducts scientific studies in various countries, working with private and public organizations to implement poverty eliminating programs. J-PAL works hard to identify impediments to progress through evaluations. They have “carried out over 235 evaluations (long-term studies lasting up to three years) that examine the various mechanisms that control our standard of living like employment and education.
In Kenya, for instance, J-PAL’s researchers found that school absenteeism was linked to intestinal worms. When de-worming pills were administered to children, researchers found that absenteeism was reduced by 25%.Since then, the Bill Gates Foundation has supported a programme to provide de-worming medicine to those who need it, and J-PAL helped to start Deworm the World, a non-profit group that helped the Kenyan government treat 3.6 million children in 2009, according to MIT.
De-Worm the World unites world powers dedicated to improving child health and assists them with running successful de-worming programs. Their aim is to connect established educational programs to funders and to provide the technical support necessary to carry out de-worming efforts and raise awareness of this group of neglected diseases.
The most common group of worms that affect the poorest populations is called Soil-Transmitted Helminthes (STH). STHs cause today’s most Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) including ascariasis (roundworm), hookworm, and trichasiasis (whipworm).
J-PAL was, in part, responsible for the establishment of De-Worm the World and their work continues to have a positive impact on the architecture of poverty elimination program planning and implementing. It seems as though their evaluation approach to eliminating poverty employs cultural competency and “searching” methods. Because the economic landscape is so vast and diverse from region to region, it is not accurate to practice solutions under the impression that poverty in some regions of Nigeria persists for the same reasons as impoverished areas of Albania. Indeed, there is a unique ethos to the mechanisms that engender poverty; however, the factors that can alleviate or perpetuate it vary. In order to surmount stubborn poverty traps, it is imperative that evaluations are culturally competent and consider the financial and logistical capacity of a community.
With the release of her new book and continued evaluation efforts with the J-PAL team, Duflo “hope[s] to try to improve policies that affect the lives of the poor, leading to better health, education, and access to finance.”
Read the full Guardian UK article here.