Why am I here?

I'm a real boy!

and I don't mean that in the metaphysical, gazing-at-the-stars-around-a-campfire "what are we all here for?" kind of way.

I figure it's about time to actually explain what it is that brought me across a continent, an ocean and another continent: work.



Kenneth Dale Drive


This sucker’s going to be pretty dense. So as little rewards for your readership, I’m going to stick in mostly unrelated photos of the office and my daily back-of-a-motorbike-taxi commute.



The office. That's my desk on the right.


Kenneth Dale Drive from the other side

As I mentioned in my first post, I'm here with an organization called Innovations for Poverty Action (www.poverty-action.org). So far my short response when folks have asked me what I do is “research on microfinance. Well… that’s not really entirely true.

Every year, billions of dollars are spent in the interest of “international development”. Thousands of NGOs, funds and foundations throw their energy, money and manpower at projects that they think and hope are going to make a difference in their cause of choice – be that alleviating poverty, promoting environmentally responsible agriculture, distributing medicine, purifying drinking water, or any one of a million other causes. That there are so many people willing to spend so much money in order to promote the wellbeing across national (and continental) lines is undoubtedly terrific.


The problem is no one knows whether all this stuff actually works.



The conference room. Oooo!



The view out my window

Thinking of it in terms of pharmaceuticals makes most sense. Imagine scientists in a drug company – intelligent, experienced scientists no doubt – decide that they are pretty sure a certain new chemical compound will significantly slow the brain cell death involved in Alzheimer’s. They come to this conclusion based on the effectiveness of similar chemicals in treating similar diseases, so it seems to make sense.

Could you imagine that pharmaceutical company, based solely on this logic, immediately undertaking mass production of this drug and disseminating it worldwide without ever actually testing it? Of course not! (for one thing I think the FDA might have something to say about it)
Before a drug ever hits mass markets, it’s tested rigorously through randomized medical trials – patients are recruited and some are randomly chosen to receive the drug and others do not. After a certain amount of time, the two groups are compared (the treatment group versus the control group) and the results are derived from any discernable differences between the groups. If the treatment group is found to be significantly better off than the control group, it can be assumed that this difference is purely due to the effects of the drug.

Hooray! MAKE THAT DRUG! But ONLY after the completion of this rigorous evaluation to ascertain that the drug a) actually works, b) doesn’t cause harm (or at least more harm than good) and c) works well enough to justify the costs of production and distribution.



Police-in-training march by the office singing marching songs.


A Subaru in its native element




So this makes perfect sense in medicine… but why are so many people in so many organizations around the world willing to spend so much time and money on what are effectively social medical treatments without ever actually finding out if they work? Or without determining what use of that time and money works best?

That thinking is what led a handful of Yale, Harvard and MIT professors to start IPA, Ideas 42 and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, respectively. The idea is to rigorously test development programs BEFORE undergoing massive cost-intensive implementation – in order to make sure the program works and is designed for maximum effect. What we do, in the jargon, is to conduct “impact evaluations”.






This short presentation gives a great idea of what these organizations aim to do: http://www.povertyactionlab.org/MDG/Duflo%20-%20Best%20buys%20to%20reach%20the%20MDGs.pdf


I was hired to essentially design and run two of these impact evaluations:


1. SaveMoRe: Savings Mobilization Research
(I named this one, and I’m quite impressed with my acronym)

The Foundation for Internatonal Community Assistance (FINCA) is an international microfinance institute. Basically this means that they have branches in developing countries around the world that work like small nonprofit banks – providing loans, savings accounts, credit or any one of a number of other financial products that are specifically targeted at benefiting the ultra-poor.

FINCA wanted to try out a couple new ways of enticing poor folks in Uganda and Ecuador to open savings accounts, so they approached IPA to work hand-in-hand with them in order to help them determine which incentives to try out and to find out which ones work best.

Enter Daniel.

(Okay, actually, enter Daniel’s boss to put up a job posting for a project associate to run this impact evaluation.)

We are still very much in the design phase for this project, but the idea so far is to do a two-phase evaluation.
First, we are going to find out whether making savings accounts free makes a significant difference in the number of accounts open. Currently the cost of opening an account with FINCA is 11000 Ugandan Shillings (UGX) – or about $6. On top of this there is a monthly maintenance fee of 1000UGX (about $0.60). Will eliminating this fee make people much more likely to open accounts? Let’s find out! And, what’s more, will people value free accounts? Will people with free accounts use them as much as people with paid accounts? Let’s find out!

The second part is to test a couple techniques for encouraging people to actively continue saving once they open account. To that end we are going to test the effects of personalized savings consultations (in which new clients are helped to define their savings goals) and automatic every-other-weekly text messages informing them of their account balance.

The plan is to start this project in January, and it will run for about 8 months before we collect our results. Wooo!


Good for you! You've made it this far! Here are some pretty pictures as a reward:


The normal view during my commute


The Hungry Caterpillar!!





2. Starting a Lifetime of Savings: Teaching the Practice of Savings to Ugandan Youth
We lovingly call this one SaLSa (yes, we’re hot on the partially-capital-letter-acronyms)

Thiiiiis is the big one. The budget is about 10 times the size of SaveMoRe, and whereas SaveMoRe is happening in four FINCA branches in and around Kampala, SaLSa’s going to be implemented at about 250 sites all over the country.

This one was also IPA’s own baby. IPA applied for and won a grant from the Financial Education Fund to conduct this study on the effectiveness of financial education to youth. The need for this project comes from the intersection of two critical and defining concerns of the Ugandan population: the fact that fifty percent of Ugandans are below 18 years of age and that the country’s current savings rate is exceptionally low, even judging by Sub-Saharan African standards. So let’s see if we can get those kids saving early! Woohoo! Get excited!

Enter Daniel. Again.

(Photo break!)









For this sucker we’re again working with FINCA, as well as an organization called the Straight Talk Foundation. STF has a network of youth clubs allllll over the country, and has a really good reputation with the youth of Uganda. So we are going to tap into that network of clubs in order to test two things: financial literacy training, and youth group bank accounts. We are I am hard at work trying to figure out how the heck to best teach kids to save money, though I’ll be getting some help from Freedom from Hunger on the development of a curriculum.

Oh yeah, and I have to figure out how FINCA should design a bank account that kids in youth groups would like and use.

Do I sound like I’m in over my head yet? No? Well how about when I remind you that this project is to be conducted in 250 clubs all around a country in which about 35 different languages are spoken. Oh, and this one is ALSO set to start in January. 2010 is going to start off with a bang for Daniel. New Year’s resolution? Don’t lose my damn mind.
This sucker’s supposed to run until about May of 2011











So those are my babies. I spent 4.5 years studying psychology and political science in order to land myself a job trying to figure out how the hell to design savings accounts. Hah!

Seriously, though. The amount I’m learning is incredible – I’ve basically spend the past couple weeks self-administering a master’s level education in behavioral economics and research design. Awesome. And scary. And awesome. It’s a hell of a lot of work already (and I know it’s only just starting), but already the moments of epiphany have been numerous thrilling – the moments of figuring out how to solve a potentially damning hang-up in our design (such as setting up an IPA call center and having FINCA marketers call the center in order to find out which treatment group a new client is randomly assigned to – that was one of my best brain-children so far!).


Ok, I’m sorry this one has been so dense. I’ll try to make my next post as inane as possible in order to make up for it!


Aaaand some more photos:


One of my favorite buildings.






Space-man Daniel, signing off.