Tag Archives: Africa

The philanthropy data gap: measuring what matters – Tavneet Suri

MIT Sloan Associate Prof. Tavneet Suri

MIT Sloan Associate Prof. Tavneet Suri

From Financial Times

As philanthropy becomes a common source of finance for poverty-fighting programmes, it is natural for donors to want data about their impact on the people they want to help.

Yet measuring the benefits of philanthropy is surprisingly hard. How can we define and measure “income” in a village of subsistence farmers? Can we ask a street kid enrolled in a violence-prevention programme about his illegal activities? How do we know if a change in nutritional outcomes was the result of a social programme and not some other variable, like a change in food prices? How can we measure non-quantitative or non-monetary outcomes, like women’s empowerment or entrepreneurial motivation?

For many years, aid impact studies were based on anecdotal evidence or fragments of data. Over the past decade, searching for a more rigorous approach, development researchers have applied the “gold standard” of medical research: randomised controlled trials. In an RCT, researchers allocate an intervention, such as a microfinance loan, to a randomly selected test group of people and compare their outcomes with a control group. Read More »

Biggest obstacles to decent health care in the developing world are managerial — Anjali Sastry

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Anjali Sastry

From the Huffington Post

Picture yourself going to the doctor. You arrive by car, park nearby, and when you enter a receptionist greets you and checks your information on a computer. You’re led into a comfortable, well-lit office; the cabinets are fully stocked. Your records are on hand. The nurses and doctors are well educated and knowledgeable, their equipment at the ready. If they can’t help you, they refer you to someone who can.

Now try to picture the same scene in sub-Saharan Africa. If you’re wealthy, your experience may be similar. But if you’re not, it’s altogether different. The roads are unpaved and riddled with potholes; it might take all day to get to the clinic by public transport. The queue to see the doctor is long–an eight-hour wait is not unusual–and there’s nowhere to sit. You might have to bribe someone to be seen. The electricity is unreliable; the clinic’s supplies are running low. Your medical records are incomplete, perhaps even non-existent. The doctors and nurses, while trained and dedicated, are not up-to-date on current treatments, and lack access to the tools they need.

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The excitement of a new beginning: The first MIT Sloan Africa Business Conference

The first ever MIT Sloan Africa Business Conference began and ended with a bang. Conference attendees had an exciting energy surrounding them at the event. Walking out of the elevator onto the 6th floor of the MIT Media Center, where the conference was being held, you could easily sense the enthusiasm of business professionals, entrepreneurs, professors, and students discussing ways to put Africa on the world business map using innovation as the key driver.

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M-PESA: Kenya’s fast-growing mobile payment system

MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Tavneet Suri

I grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and so my research on M-PESA, the cell phone-based payment system that has spread like wildfire across the country, strikes a deeply personal chord. Most of my research on this has been in collaboration with William (Billy) Jack at Georgetown who lived in Kenya himself for a few years. We both experienced the frustrations of what in the US would be the simplest of money transactions, and felt that M-PESA could fulfill a need of many Kenyans.

In practice, the adoption of M-PESA has been faster than we, and most other observers, had anticipated. In four short years it has been widely embraced by Kenyans, and has already had a big impact on the lives of people I’ve known for years. I did my dissertation on the adoption of farming technologies in Africa, and it’s still a subject that interests me a great deal. I’ve looked at the implementation of seed technologies in Kenya, and the diffusion of improved coffee farming practices in Rwanda. It often takes decades for these kinds of technologies to fully penetrate a population.

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