William Savedoff

 
William Savedoff
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Bill Savedoff has been working for more than 20 years on economic and social development issues. His work is focused on finding ways to improve the quality of social services in developing countries, with particular attention to incentives, institutions, and political-economy.


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http://www.cgdev.org/content/expert/detail/16573/

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March 19, 2010

Evaluation Agency Created by CGD Shares “Best in Aid” Award

By William Savedoff

William SavedoffAidWatch – the brainchild of noted aid critic (and former CGD fellow) Bill Easterly – has given its Best in Aid Grand Prize to the “Smart Giving movement,” nominated by  Saundra Schimmelpfennig of the blog Good Intentions are Not Enough. AidWatch included the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) as part of this “Smart Giving movement” for its role in learning about what kinds of development programs work (and which ones don’t). Having worked with Ruth Levine and Nancy Birdsall in leading the Evaluation Gap Initiative that led to the creation of 3ie, this is music to my ears.   Read More…

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January 29, 2010

Impact Evaluation Has Come So Far!

By William Savedoff

3ie logoLast week, I attended the board meeting of 3ie (International Initiative for Impact Evaluation), which took place during the Global Development Network’s 11th annual conference. While 3ie is quite new and the Board is working on its strategy and governance, the organization is clearly off to a good start. I was delighted to learn that the recent call for proposals garnered some $20 million worth of high quality proposals—twice the $10 million that 3ie has available to award. We need to know more about what works in development and now the international community has an organization capable of efficiently channeling funds into good quality policy-relevant studies.

If you had asked me whether this would happen back in 2004 when Ruth Levine, Nancy Birdsall and I started the Evaluation Gap Initiative, I’m not sure I would have been so optimistic. Read More…

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January 19, 2010

Out of the Tranches

By William Savedoff

Proposition #1: Details matter

Proposition #2: People hear what they expect to hear

Lemma #1: People often misunderstand details

Theorem: Foreign aid agencies continue to use tranched operations even when a small modification would work better.

I leave the proof to the reader, but this theorem came to mind during recent discussions about Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) as it would apply to financing primary education.

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October 23, 2009

When the Culture of Disbursement Meets the Culture of Corruption

By William Savedoff

A few month’s ago, Ruth Levine recommended that I read Steve Berkman’s book “The World Bank and the Gods of Lending” and yesterday I had the chance to listen over the phone while he gave an informal talk about it at the Center for Global Development. The talk was just as disturbing as the book – in fact, it is one of the most worrisome books about foreign aid that I have ever read. It provides a convincing look at specific project accounts and patterns of disbursement to show that embezzlement and theft of World Bank funds may be the rule rather than the exception in a wide range of programs and countries. Berkman challenges anyone to prove him wrong when he estimates that 30% to 40% of World Bank lending is stolen (not lost to inefficiency but actually stolen). Read More…

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January 26, 2009

Will People in Developing Countries Be Invisible in the Future of Statistical Computing?

By William Savedoff

In “The Future of Statistical Computing,” Leland Wilkinson argues that technological advances are going to shape the future of statistical analysis more than most other factors. The article is a helpful overview of today’s statistical analysis, let alone predicting the future, for someone who remembers doing his first statistical models in Gauss (does anyone else even remember that package?).

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