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Evaluating the Millennium Villages: Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes
October 12, 2010
In development, it’s good to try new, innovative ideas– but even better to know whether or not they work. My guests this week are Michael Clemens, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Gabriel Demombynes, a senior economist at the World Bank, based in Nairobi, Kenya. They have written a new paper in which they argue that one very high profile development program, the Millennium Villages Project, isn’t being evaluated in a way that would provide clear evidence of its impacts. They propose a better way to evaluate the project.
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Evaluating the Millennium Villages (Blog post by Gabriel Demombynes)
Michael begins by explaining to me the Millennium Villages approach. In targeted villages, the program delivers a full package of services covering health, education, sanitation and more. The package is quite substantial– roughly equal to village residents’ own incomes– and is designed to break villages out of “poverty traps” and put them on a sustainable path towards prosperity. The project began in 2004, and if it works, its founders hope it will serve as a model for development programs in hundreds or thousands of other villages.
The problem, Michael and Gabriel argue, is that the Millennium Villages haven’t done enough to demonstrate the specific impacts of the program. On many measures of development, the regions around targeted villages have advanced almost as rapidly as (or, in some cases, even more rapidly than) the targeted villages themselves. Gabriel tells me of his visits to a Millennium Village site in Kenya and to a non-targeted village in the same province (he writes more about these visits on the World Bank’s Africa Can blog). The Millennium Village had certain advantages– a well-stocked, well-staffed health clinic, for example. However, health workers in the non-targeted village reported that vaccination rates, HIV testing, and attended births have all improved in recent years. Thus, the simple fact that the targeted villages have advanced does not demonstrate to what extent the Millennium Villages approach is responsible for those improvements.
In their paper, Michael and Gabriel lay out an alternative evaluation strategy that could provide more robust evidence of the Millennium Villages’ true impact. “It is absolutely possible, at low cost… [to make] the evaluation much more rigorous and get a much better idea of whether this bold and very interesting initiative should be scaled up,” says Michael.
Listen to the Wonkcast to hear our full conversation. Have something to add? Ideas for future interviews? Post a comment below, or send me an email. If you use iTunes, you can subscribe to get new episodes delivered straight to your computer every week.
My thanks to Wren Elhai for his very able production assistance on the Wonkcast recording and for drafting this blog post.
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Possibly related Wonkcasts:
- What’s Not to Like About the Millennium Development Goals? Todd Moss and Michael Clemens Weigh In.
- Ben Leo: Who Are The Millennium Development Goal Trailblazers?
6 Responses to “Evaluating the Millennium Villages: Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes”
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We value frank and constructive exchanges and encourage you to use your real name in your comments.
October 13th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Thank you for the opportunity to share our comments. This is a topic very dear to me. And here are my ideas:
1) Enough evaluations! Time to scale up. We need more than 10 such villages all over the world. Transfer necessary funds to the poor countries, give them the training, the capacity and they will do the job. Look at the interactive map of the Earth Institute and see where their money goes… The US has about 85 projects running, Alaska alone has 8, China, India, Indonesia… all have less than 10 projects.
2) Reaching the MDGs requires a MASSIVE MOBILIZATION! The Earth Institute, the Clinton Global Initiative, the UN… need to act NOW and for ALL. I have many specific ideas about how to do this and would gladly discuss these with people interested in concrete solutions.
3) Partnerships: development has to happen within the frame of a negotiation between the rich and the poor. Again, I have ideas about how to do this.
The main message is: time to act NOW and for ALL!
Hannah Laufer-Rottman
Executive Director and Founder
Palms for Life Fund – New York
October 13th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Similar problems arise with regard to evaluation of the Millennium Development Project. The Millennium Summit in New York in September, and indeed the entire project, somehow try to suggest that advances are somehow due to the project, but assessment documents and the summit don’t show any linkages between the project and the outcomes. I’ve essay on this at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....35376.html
Aloha, George
October 16th, 2010 at 10:37 am
Please see the response from the Millennium Villages project to the Clemens and Demombynes paper. Available here: http://2mp.tw/50
October 17th, 2010 at 10:20 am
The Washington Post had a nice article today (Sunday, October 17) on “Brazilian scientists turning nation into an agro-power” (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....04144.html ). I believe Brazil’s agro success could also be achieved in many poor countries without a huge investment of funds. Existing programs need to study what is being accomplished in Brazil and borrow some of their ideas.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Above, commenter Kyu Lee of the Earth Institute links to the official statement of the Millennium Village Project on our research paper. In our reply to that statement, my co-author and I explain how much of that statement rests on a basic misunderstanding of fundamental concepts in project impact evaluation.
April 28th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I have been tracking 5 remote Tanzanian villages since 2004 shooting a series of annual films with the same families in each village over 5 years. The aim of DFID in funding the project was to see if and how direct budget support by international donors impacts on the poorest in various rural sectors. The Village Voices box set is available and now being converted into an online study program. http://www.projectvillagevoices.org. We are looking to continue the annual films until MDG D-day 2015 and seeking partners. A comparison of the growth in the various East African Millennium VIllages with the growth in the 5 villages I have been documenting (which have received no direct aid or special interventions) could provide another useful yardstick.