Do Call Centers Promote School Enrollment?

Yes, according to some new analysis on Indian data by Emily Oster and Bryce Millet of the University of Chicago.

We use panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school-level administrative dataset. This is merged with detailed data on Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) center location and founding dates. Using school fixed effects, we estimate the impact of introducing a new ITES center in the vicinity of the school on enrollment. We find that introducing a new ITES center results in a 5.7% increase in number of children enrolled; these effects are extremely localized. We argue this result is not driven by pre-trends in enrollment or endogenous center placement, and is not a result of ITES-center induced changes in population or increases in income. The effect is driven entirely by English-language schools, consistent with the claim that the impacts are driven by changes in returns to schooling.

The best thing about skyrocketing mobile phone prevalence in Africa that you haven’t heard of yet

is surveying.

Mobile phones are already transforming markets by allowing information on prices to be shared, and are showing the potential to transform service delivery in education, health, agriculture and emergencies (hey TH where is that paper huh?).

I’ve recently heard rumours though of a household survey to be carried out in Sudan via mobile phone. Brian Dillon is trying this already in Tanzania with EDI.

The idea is that you do a regular door-to-door survey first, but also take down everyone’s mobile number so that you can make follow-up questions.

The reason that this is so exciting is it allows for the tracking of changes to individuals over time rather than just the usual one-off snapshot. This gives you a much better shot at untangling causality, and figuring out the process of how people get richer, rather than just describing the characteristics of those who are already rich.

And if research is like a piano recital, then just maybe, a massive proliferation of cheap longitudinal data collection and a thousand research papers, could result in just one crucial insight that could transform the lives of millions.

Social Networks for Development - India Edition

Here it is folks - Kiirti - a one-stop reporting and petitioning platform for Indian governance.

It is a platform to enable effective governance by promoting awareness and citizen engagement. It allows government, non-government and civic organizations to engage with citizens easily through phone, sms, email, and the web.

These guys running this (eMoksha.org) will also be running the Ushahidi platform for the Sudanese elections: Sudan Vote Monitor.

Robots and Development

I’m generally pretty excited by new technology. Not so much this one.

“As part of our ongoing support for the Samfya Resource Centre [Zambia], we have sent them robots.

robots in this context is an experiment for us. We don’t know how it will go. But it’s an experiment the young women of the Samfya Resource Centre are excited about.”

Aptivate International IT Development

Social Networks for Development

I’ve been chatting to Sam Lampert and a colleague about Beyond Planning and what the ultimate social network for development would look like.

I think the big idea is already out there. It is Ushahidi, which aggregates and maps information submitted online or by SMS during elections and crises. But why stop at crises? Why not just have a system which is always on and which can allow citizen reporting on public services?

How about a massive global wikipedia for aid spending, government spending, and politics, with Facebook Connect so contributor’s reputations are at stake, and maps, and links to MP profiles, and voting buttons on public projects, and voting buttons on public projects linked to SMS, which are advertised on the radio (“how is your local school doing? text your marks out of 10 along with your district name to 1234”), and detailed user reviews of projects, and league tables, and links to public data on project spending. Aid and Government projects all in the same place. Aid transparency, government transparency, political transparency, all in the same place.

Geeks of the world - any takers?

The Hole in the Wall Gang

(Photo from Reader’s Digest)

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

The TED talk is here.

The academic papers are here.

The blog is here.

The article explaining how this guy was the inspiration for the plot of Slum-dog Millionaire is here (WTF?!!!).

I am in awe at how cool this. How about this as a solution for pastoralist education in remote Southern Sudan? Can you begin to imagine how the world will look when NGOs are handing out $100 iPhones to kids tending cows in cattle-camps, and there is free global wi-fi access?

Here’s a cool idea from Matthew Taylor

 

Give a small incentive (~£3o) for the unemployed to fill in their claims online - and save a bunch of money in staffing offices. Improve IT literacy in the process.

“a way of saving money, promoting social inclusion and contributing to the vision of digital Britain. Don’t be surprised to read it in a manifesto very soon.”

Just don’t get too carried away and forget about the importance and effectiveness of the actual mortar-and-brick job centres which require claimants to actually go and chat to an job-search advisor once a fortnight to keep on claiming.

How to blog (tech-y edition)

First, write well (I’m still working on this one). Listen to David Roodman.

Then get some decent tools. I use:

Windows Live Writer - Let’s you draft rich-formatted posts (with photos!) offline, and preview you them as they will look on your site. I just discovered this and it is awesome.

FeedDemon - For offline feed-reading. Syncs with Google Reader

Fire Status - Post to Twitter in 2 clicks. It sorts out the links for you and everything

Page2RSS.com - For monitoring sites which don’t have feeds

Twitter

Yes, it is devil spawn, but I've kind of figured out how to use it (this helps), and so I am mostly posting interesting links there rather than saving them all up for a links blog post (which my housemate always complains about). There is a little box on the right of the webpage, or you can click here. I'll try and remember to keep up some lengthier stuff here and not descend entirely into stunted sentences.

On information overload

If information overload is such a problem, why don't we do something about it? We could if we wanted to. How many of us bother to tune our spam filters? How many of us turn off the little evanescent window in Outlook that tells us we have a new email? Who signs off of social media because there's just too much junk? Who turns off their BlackBerry or iPhone in meetings to ensure no distractions? Nobody, that's who — or very few souls anyway. 

Why? First, there is the everlasting hope of something new and exciting. Our work and home lives can be pretty boring, and we're always hoping that something will come across the ether that will liven things up. If I turn up the filtering on the spam filter or turn off the smartphone, I might miss out on an email promising a new job, a text message offering a new relationship, an RSS feed with a new news item, and so forth. Every new communication offers the frisson of a possible life-changing information event, though it seldom delivers on the promise.

Tom Davenport in the FT

Sunday Links

1. World Bank data now in Google search results (but what about all the google-owned-gapminder data?!)

2. If microsavings are more needed, why does microcredit get more attention?

3. Dropping Joy

4. Tony Blair on China (HT: Ingrid Jones)

5. Tim Besley and James Robinson:

"This paper has posed a central question in state formation: how can a civilian government exert control over the army? We have treated this as an incentive problem where the government optimizes relative to a coup constraint. Two potential strategies emerge which seem relevant in looking at the data. The government can maintain a very weak army which is not a threat. Or it can treat the army well, paying it an efficiency wage."

Very sophisticated Conflict Threat and Risk Mapping Analysis

Not what you expect to find in a UN report.

Rare praise for the UN

I think this is brilliant:

UN to deliver food aid by text message 

In a test project targeting 1,000 Iraqi refugee families, the United Nations agency will send a 22-dollar (15-euro) voucher every two months by SMS to each family, who will be provided with a special SIM card. 

The beneficiary can then exchange the electronic voucher for rice, wheat flour, lentils, chickpeas, oil, canned fish, cheese and eggs at selected shops. 

Addressing concerns about mobile phone ownership among the refugee population, WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said all the 130,000 Iraqi refugees currently receiving food aid from the agency in Syria have mobile phones.

Test Drive Google SMS Services (Uganda)

This is cool. Health and agriculture tips, and a "marketplace" all via SMS. I hope it takes off.

Access for Africa

Chris Blattman thinks that publishers should "allow textbooks and academic volumes more than a few years old to be printed copyright-free in Africa".

No need Chris.

I just bought a second-hand book on a Mombasa street corner which was DHL'ed from Europe, which obviously makes far more sense.

Dotty Data......5 Reasons why measuring GDP from Outer Space is a bad idea!

Everyone seems to be blogging about using night-lights to measure GDP (Marginal Revolution, Brad De Long’s blog, the Economist and WSJ blogs, and even here). It does sound uber-cool: Measuring GDP from Outer Space and has pretty pictures to go with it. But really, before we get too excited, here’s why it’s a dubious idea:

1. The major motivation of the underlying paper is that African countries have bad GDP data. But here’s a thought: a lot of Sub-Saharan countries get a LOT of their GDP from minerals and oil. The minefields don’t really create much light (at least not as much as the oil’s worth!) and often most of this wealth does not trickle into local consumption. Think here of all the usual stuff on political economy of resource curse etc. etc. emember President Obiang from Tropical Gangsters still rules Equatorial Guinea…… So basically underestimation seems built-in

2. It’s true we don’t have city-level GDP data. Yeah but first what you’re measuring is not production but expenditure (which is fine since that’s a perfectly valid way to get at GDP). But if you really want expenditure why don’t you just do a usual LSMS-type budget survey in the cities…? Far cheaper than usual African fieldwork (no rural logistics involved!) and guess what, we already know a lot about how to do them properly!

3. But the biggest problem is do we really know what it’s measuring? Does a low GDP estimate from night-lights, especially in Africa, just show a break-down or inadequacy of public provision, the usual way we get electricity???. Just look at Juba, would you? No city power to speak of (most areas of the town don’t even have connections) and generators are way more expensive, both as a fixed cost and to run, than a usual light connection. Of course, you’d see fewer lights…. And its not just the difference caused by the value of electricity !

4. How are lights and GDP related? Even the paper’s evidence shows there just isn’t a one-to-one relationship between growth in GDP and growth in night lights… Read this: In Hungary, Poland and Romania, where incomes rose by 41%, 56%, and 23%, the respective rises in lights were 46%, 80%, and 112%. The relationship doesn’t even seem STABLE!

5. And for the parting argument: Aren’t two error-prone measures better than one? Well, not if the measurement error in the second measure is just far worse than the first one (even if we did know what we were measuring with lights!).Keep everyone guessing which is the ‘right’ number! If you really want more measures, there are other options to choose from: smaller sample surveys possibly? You want local level estimates - how about some small area estimation stuff? Seriously there is enough to complain on the Penn World Tables and GDP estimates: Don’t make it worse!

P.S. This is not your usual correspondent. I’m his usual skeptical audience over beer most days…. Just decided to make the most of his absence from Juba

P.P.S. Lee, before you get to it, measuring population by huts where a Census exists is ALSO a bad idea! And this has nothing to with my love for my day job!!!

Analogue Blogger goes Digital

Sadly here comes more evidence of the usefulness of twitter. White African notes that the Blackboard blogger of Monrovia, a guy who writes the news on a big blackboard for people who can't afford newspapers, now has an actual online blog. Awesome! Here's the link.

In other cool media news, I've just discovered that The Citizen, probably the best (offline) English-language Southern Sudanese newspaper, seems to be building a new office directly opposite the Ministry of Finance. Now I'm just waiting for the website. How about a link-up with the online-only Sudan Tribune?

There was also a great discussion on the World Service about Tolo TV the other day, Afghanistan's most popular private-owned TV station. Although they are downplaying it for obvious reasons, the station was created with seed capital from USAID, and is now hosting Presidential candidate debates and making social progress through Afghan Idol.

Hut-Count

Marginal Revolution picked up on a clever idea by some economists to measure economic growth in places where statistics are unreliable by looking at satellite images of light at night. If any donors are listening, this could be a great way of looking at the economy in Southern Sudan, where we have very few statistics.

It also got me thinking, couldn't we also measure population by satellite? The Census results have been heavily disputed here for political reasons. Surely an alternative estimate could be gained by just counting the number of buildings on Google Maps and multiplying by an estimate of average household size? Has anyone tried this anywhere before?

Twitter

I now have a twitter account. I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet. Very few of my friends are on it. I've so far just responded to a couple of interesting comments by others.

I was very skeptical when I first heard about it. It sounded stupid. But then so did facebook and blogs when I first heard about them. So I was skeptical but curious.

And then all my favourite blogs started talking about twitter, and then I realised that a load of my favourite bloggers were also on twitter. So I finally caved. My god is this the end?

Another big win for transparency and good governance

The GoSS Ministry of Legal Affairs has established a website with copies of all the laws passed by the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly. Fantastic, now I don't have to just read about them in the Tribune.

Now if only the Ministry of Finance could get one so people could find the damn budget themselves.

In other data (non)news - why is so hard to get comparative data on basic aspects of African governments and their budgets? Is there not some repository somewhere of staffing levels and spending levels on different sectors