Suchergebnisse

Although knowledge about effectiveness of insecticide‐treated bed nets (ITNs) is fairly widespread in Ghana, their use remains far from universal. We test and validate the hypothesis that health education of hospitals and health centers in rural Ghana is more effective for groups that display relatively high trust to health providers. We estimate heterogeneous impacts of health education on ITN and/or bed net use and on fever as a crude proxy for malaria in the Brong Ahafo and Upper East regions in Ghana, with help of propensity‐adjusted regression. The degree of trust in health providers appears to be a key factor in determining the effectiveness of health education in both regions. The effect is not ruled out by controlling for general trust. There are indications of nonlinear effects. The Kassena‐Nankana seems to be an exception to this rule—despite low trust in health providers, health education is highly effective for this ethnic group.

This article discusses voluntary contributions to health education in Peru, using a new experimental setup to identify voluntary contributions to local public goods. The experiment enables individuals to contribute to a health education meeting facilitated by an NGO, which they know will only be organized if the cumulative investment level exceeds a certain threshold value. In contrast to expectations of aid distributors, individuals contributed a substantial amount of money, despite the supposed long-term nature of the benefits. The result suggests that donor paternalism, undermining the agency of beneficiaries to exercise control over funds, is not always necessary to guarantee investment in local public goods. We explore multiple interpretations, suggesting that "unaccounted for" short-term benefits from participation as well as liquidity and paternalistic altruism add to explaining the relatively high investment. More in general, the article shows the potential for using experimental research methods in the area of nonprofit management.

The sharp increase in the number of experimental studies evaluating development programs raises the need for accurate intraclass correlations (ICC) to conduct power calculations so that researchers can design studies to detect meaningful effects with sufficient statistical power. The intraclass correlation is an important parameter for determining the statistical power of cluster-randomized trials. The parameter is rarely available to researchers planning a study until after the design is set and data are already collected. This paper takes an important step towards helping researchers working in sub-Saharan Africa to accurately estimate appropriate sample sizes for their clustered RCTs. The study draws from rich data sets in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We present ICCs for a wide range of domains common for development research. Our results suggest that ICCs for commonly studied indicators in sub-Saharan Africa are lower than is often assumed in power calculations. ICC values are especially low for indicators associated with child nutrition and food security, suggesting that cluster-RCTs might be a viable design even when faced with limited budgets because sample size requirements are not much different from an individual random assignment design.

AbstractWe study the impact of the COVID‐19 lockdown in 2020 on the monthly savings of self‐help groups (SHGs) in India, and the role of SHGs in mitigating the economic effects of the lockdown. Administrative data suggest that monthly savings of SHGs declined by 66% between March and July of 2020, with larger declines in areas with more stringent lockdowns. Survey data revealed that SHG and non‐SHG households had similar consumption and income losses during the lockdown. Households with SHG members and those that received assistance from SHGs in procuring ration or accessing community kitchens reported significantly higher food security, however.