Faced with the crisis in development aid, the rise of evaluation methods

Here, there are no grand speeches about the goals of sustainable development by 2030 in the world, as was the case recently at the ^4th International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville. And even fewer dazzling multi-billion dollar promises. In Dakar, in the halls of the African Center for Advanced Studies in Management (CESAG), where a summer school devoted to "development methodologies" was held from July 7 to 10, the focus was on experiments that could reduce poverty in the world.

Among the hundred participants, one researcher wants to measure how menstruation influences girls' schooling in Benue State, Nigeria. Others wonder whether texting market prices to farmers could help them make better decisions, or whether artificial intelligence can help young graduates in South Africa find jobs. There are also NGO leaders and senior government officials evaluating a program aimed at halting the decline in girls' school enrollment between primary and secondary school in Madagascar.

Whatever their projects, professions, or nationalities, everyone was there to learn "evaluation methods." Popularized by the work of economists Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, who won the Nobel Prize in 2019, the so-called "randomized evaluation" method is increasingly used in NGO projects or public policies. Inspired by clinical trials in pharmaceutical laboratories, it consists of comparing the results of a program on one population, compared to another which has not benefited from it, to measure its effectiveness.

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