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Feed the world The Economist: Daily news and views How hunger has changed across the developing world TWENTY-NINE countries suffer from "alarming" levels of hunger, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report published on Monday October 11th. The "Global Hunger Index" (GHI) gives developing countries scores based on three indicators: the proportion of people who are undernourished, the proportion of children under five who are underweight, and the child mortality rate. The worst possible score is 100, but in practice, anything over 25 is considered "alarming". Scores under five, meanwhile, are indicative of "low hunger". Since 1990 the overall level of the index has fallen by almost a quarter (though the data do not cover the period of the global recession beginning in 2008). Two-thirds of the 99 countries counted in 1990 have reduced their populations' hunger levels. Kuwait, Malaysia, Turkey and M...

Making the case for microsavings PSD Blog - The World Bank Group Editor's Note: Jeanette Thomas is a Communications Manager at CGAP. It's never been too difficult to make the case for what savings can do for poor people. Stuart Rutherford's work with SafeSave nailed that one fairly convincingly some years back. Since then, MicroSave and many others such as Women's World Banking and the Portfolios of the Poor project have reinforced the message time and again: low-income clients see considerable consumption-smoothing benefits from savings. But what's always been much harder is convincing microfinance institutions that savings make good business sense. So news from a research study released last week is highly welcome. CGAP researchers Glenn Westley and Xavier Martin Palomas had full access to the 2008 books of two institutions offering savings— ADOPEM in the Dominican Republic, and Centenary Bank in Uganda. Savings accounts wit...

Impact evaluations, good and bad Chris Blattman In an interesting new working paper , Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes discuss different levels of rigor in the context of evaluating the impact of a specific intervention. Roughly speaking, they compare the current approach being used in that project (before and after) to a better approach (using ex post matched controls) to the 'best' approach (randomizing ex ante). For instance: one impact currently claimed is increased cell phone penetration, but of course that has been happening everywhere as time passes, so it mostly goes away (as a direct impact) when controls are used. Part of what makes the paper interesting is that their chosen example is a large (potentially huge) media-friendly intervention: the Millenium Villages Project . Doing evaluation right is important, especially so for exciting but untested ideas. But part of what I found interesting is that there is no randomization, althou...

When Rigorous Impact Evaluation Is Not a luxury: Scrutinizing the Millennium Villages Global Development: Views from the Center Back in 2004 a major new development project started in Bar-Sauri, Kenya.  This Millennium Village Project (MVP) seeks to break individual village clusters free from poverty with an intense, combined aid package for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. The United Nations and Columbia University began the pilot phase in Bar-Sauri and have extended it to [...] Sent with Reeder  

Aid and austerity Baobab IN THE print edition this week, we have a piece on the Global Fund , the main multilateral agency dealing with AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and the difficulties of extracting money from donors in these austere times. Here on Baobab, we have delved deeper into the issue. Before the meeting the Global Fund distributed three hypothetical financing scenarios to show what was at stake. In the first scenario, the fund gets $13 billion, the minimum investment needed for the organisation to tread water. In practical terms, this would result in 4.4m people being on antiretroviral therapy, compared with 2.5m in 2009 (and compared with the current global need, estimated at 15m). The annual distribution of insecticidal nets would reach 110m, saving an estimated 16m life-years. The prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission would reach 610,000 mothers annually compared to 345,000 in 2009. In scenario number two, it gets $17 billion, the m...

Evaluating the Millennium Villages Africa Can... - End Poverty Here's the quick summary of a new working paper I have co-authored with Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development: When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? We study one high-profile case where it is a necessity: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental intervention in rural Africa. We compare development trends inside versus outside the villages in three countries, and show that estimates of the project's effects depend heavily on the evaluation method. The impact evaluation currently planned by the MVP is unlikely to yield adequate estimates of its effects on Africans in general, for five reasons we explain. But it is not too late to carefully measure the project's effects, by making small and inexpensive changes to the next wave of the project. Michael's own blog post gives more details about...

Decoupling is back, with a vengeance Dani Rodrik's weblog In the early days of the global financial crisis, there was some optimism that developing countries would avoid the downturn that advanced industrial countries experienced. After all, this time it was not they that had engaged in financial excess, and their economic fundamentals looked strong. But these hopes were dashed as international lending dried up and trade collapsed, sending developing countries down the same spiral that industrial nations took. But international trade and finance have both revived, and now we hear an even more ambitious version of the scenario. Developing countries, it is said, are headed for strong growth, regardless of the doom and gloom that has returned to Europe and the United States. More strikingly, many now expect the developing world to become the growth engine of the global economy. Otaviano Canuto, a World Bank vice president, and his collaborators have just pro...