We are proud to announce that we have entered into an SBA-approved Mentor-Protégé Agreement with the Panagora Group. Together we will leverage our shared passion for turning evidence into action to grow, expand our work and impact with USAID, and help improve SDVOSB utilization at USAID.
Over the past twenty years, the use of cash transfers in development and humanitarian interventions has experienced exponential growth. Both evidence and ethics have contributed to its rise. Extensive research has demonstrated how cash transfers can serve as critical lifelines in both acute humanitarian emergencies and more stable development contexts, whilst also providing recipients with […]
USAID released a revised version of its policy on designing and implementing development projects and activities, governed by ADS Chapter 201. This is one of the largest revisions of the ADS in recent years and it includes some significant changes to the way USAID plans to operate its Program Cycle. One single sentence, in particular, stood out to us: All impact evaluations must include a cost-analysis of the intervention or interventions being studied (ADS 201.3.6.4) Economist Kristen Schubert discusses the changes, implications, and challenges for implementing partners…
Armed conflict and other situations of violence can lead to changes in both the formal and informal economic systems in any given country or region. These changes often create what scholars call a “war economy.” In the short term, the consequences of conflict include human casualties and the physical destruction of assets and infrastructure. In […]
Causal Design has been awarded a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), distinguishing the firm as a trusted and valued provider of independent monitoring and evaluation services in the international development sector.
https://eship.georgetown.edu/2019/10/30/ventureforward-season-two-ep-2-causal-design/
I’m really excited to be a part of the development community that uses WeWork for office space in the US. Next week, WeWork K Street (DC) and Cooper/Smith are hosting a panel discussion on data collection, analysis, and use in international development. The (large) panel includes staff from 8 different wework-based firms all working in data for development.
Come check out the panel, ask some hard questions, and enjoy the free drinks.
This week’s blog will feature a set of Stata tricks we used to addresses a particular issue that we encountered in our dataset. Many of the variables were in string form and were not useable for Stata analysis. Furthermore, the values of the variables were not in the correct order for our purposes. A couple of commands came in handy here. Loops are useful for many different repetitive commands. They allowed us to quickly recode the values of a set of variables that have similar categorical values and also enabled us to destring sets of variables, setting them to numeric values. These numeric values were in turn reordered to fit a desired pattern. Finally, the labels for the numeric values were recoded to appear as the original text instead of just “1, 2, 3, etc”.
Building scalable and sustainable food systems presents many challenges along farming value chains – not least of which is the point where our small holder famers interact with agricultural inputs. For an isolated farmer with limited education, making wise choices about farming can be challenging, meaning that many farmers fall short of the mark when it comes to running successful commercial enterprises.
The coefplot command allows you to plot results from estimation commands. It is a user package, so you will have to find and install it by inputting into the Stata command line:
findit coefplot
