Researchers in Ethiopia followed 1,000 villagers for seven years to test whether a package of assets, savings, food and coaching could lift the poorest households out of extreme poverty, PBS NewsHour reported.
Goats being taken to market near Shire in northern Ethiopia, photographed on May 1, 2013. (Adam Jones / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0) [file photo]
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reported on the study in August 2019. It was run by Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit founded in 2002 by economist Dean Karlan that partners with Yale University and Northwestern University. More than one in four Ethiopians lived on less than $2 a day, the program said.
Five hundred villagers were randomly assigned to receive the aid and another 500 to a control group, an approach Karlan compared to medical trials. Field surveyors including Tedros Kesete and Taame Tesfaye assessed both groups at the start and again after one, three and seven years.
Each treated household chose a productive asset worth $360, most often goats, though some picked oxen or bees. Households were encouraged to save at a community bank and received staple food worth $8 a month during the lean season, which the control group in Ethiopia also received. They also got weekly coaching visits for two years.
One year after the program ended, the treated households showed significant gains in revenues, savings, food consumption and total assets, according to the report.
Mulugeta Berhanu, a longtime aid officer in Ethiopia, said the government had scaled the approach from 500 to 8,000 households and planned to reach 150,000 households in five years.
In a six-country study, the approach proved beneficial and cost-effective in Ghana, India, Pakistan and Peru, but not in Honduras, where disease killed the chickens most families had chosen, PBS reported.
“Anybody who ever tells you that all aid is wasted is wrong. And anybody who tells you that all aid works is wrong,” Karlan told the program.
Sources: PBS NewsHour: “A scientific approach to evaluating anti-poverty programs” (Aug. 2019)