Poor Economics

Innovations for Poverty Action Blog

A beautiful website was launched today for the new book by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Maps! Graphs! Data!

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Zimbabwe introduces cash transfer scheme

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Zimbabwe introduces cash transfer scheme Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Education assistance and child protection and cash transfers at core of national action plan for orphans and vulnerable children Zimbabwe has launched a $75m plan to protect orphans and vulnerable children over the next three years. The money will come from the Zimbabwean government and donors, including the UK, the European Commission and the UN children's agency, Unicef. Some $45m of the money for a child protection fund has been raised from donors, leaving a $30m shortfall that will need to be covered before full national coverage can be ensured. The scheme is part of a national action plan for orphans and vulnerable children that involves education assistance, child protection and cash transfers to the poorest families. Cash transfers have been tried with some success in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Zimbabwe is the latest country to adopt th...
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We Should Expect Good Giving To Be Hard

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We Should Expect Good Giving To Be Hard SSIR Opinion & Analysis Great giving opportunities are few and far between; rather than offering to help donors "check the legitimacy" of particular groups, I believe in urging them to give to only the very best charities. In fact, it's fundamentally very difficult for an individual donor to meaningfully help people. When you want to help people as a donor, you have to get in line behind all of the groups below. For-profit companies. I believe that most of the things you can do that make strangers' lives better are things you can get paid for. Every day people help each other send packages, prepare food, recover from illness, etc. via market transactions. This may seem like a trivial and obvious point, but it's the reason we are so focused on helping the very poor. When you're trying to help people who aren't poor, you're competing with for-profit enterprises. And even the very ...
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The Invisible Christians of #Kony2012

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The Invisible Christians of #Kony2012 AFRICA IS A COUNTRY In the last few days every journalist (or outraged blogger) covering #Kony2012 has been so busy reporting on what the bloggers have been saying and putting together salad after salad of African (and therefore authentic, true etc) opinion, that they have utterly failed to actually do any journalism. That's right: reporting. Finding out what this thing is actually about. So far as I can tell there hasn't been much of this. As a result the conversation has either taken the form of handwringing over What Is To Be Done in Northern Uganda (we all think we know more about this than six-year-old Gavin and so we can all speak with great confidence on such matters) or else gawping blankly at the colossal, though suspiciously self-pronounced, power of social media. A big part of the story that is being missed is that Invisible Children and their project are firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity. ...
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