Earlier last week I had a chance to see Martin Ravallion speak on his new book at an event held at the Center for Global Development. Sandwiched in the middle of a full day of meetings, the 1 and a half hour discussion on the intersection of poverty analysis and role of economics was surprisingly […]
I was just forwarded a Bloomberg article by a good friend along with a note that she finally understood -kinda- what it is we do. Many, my own family included, believe that economists spend their days coming up with theoretical models for what could happen in the market. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to explain […]
With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, IDinsight published a 3ie Working Paper on the “Future of Impact Evaluation.” We really like the team over at IDinsight and think they are spot-on with this work. Causal Design’s primary focus is on providing decision-focused evaluations like they describe in the paper. Their main arguments are listed […]
From MercyCorps.org: We are excited to release Mercy Corps’ newest research, in partnership with Causal Design, bringing more evidence on how households and communities can be resilient in the face of crisis. What Next for Nepal? Evidence of What Matters for Building Resilience After the Gorkha Earthquake When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal in April […]
We are thrilled to announce that Dan Hudner has joined the Causal Design team as our Director of Research. Dan joins us from Mercy Corps where he has served as the Peacebuilding Evaluation Fellow and co-authored research on disaster resilience with Jon Kurtz. Dan combines his expertise in evaluation techniques with experience managing development projects to create […]
May has already been a month of significant transition (More updates to come!). Unfortunately, we are saying farewell to Kevin Kelsey this week. Kevin was our first research analyst, and his shoes will be hard to fill. While on our team, he made substantial contributions to our evaluations of Mercy Corps’ TabangKO (Philippines) and INVEST (Afghanistan) programs. […]
It looks like the folks over at CDG have been digging into the effectiveness of cell-phone based surveys in poor countries. We have used a couple of these platforms including the one used in their study (Voto). Bottom Line Up Front: It looks like this works better than most of us thought. Read their full […]
Let me preface this by saying that these thoughts have been brewing for a while; they do not refer to any specific client or individual experience… /*Begin Rant The industry of evaluation is interesting. Most of our team comes from a research background. While we do program evaluations, we approach it with the tactics of a […]
Causal Design & Mercy Corps Partner to Investigate Cash Transfers in Humanitarian Response Last year Causal Design partnered with Mercy Corps to investigate the impact of various operational models for dispersing cash grants after a natural disaster. Specifically, we wanted to see if the frequency of cash disbursements, offering of financial literacy training, or sending reinforcing voice messages had […]
