I recently viewed a video of a presentation given by Esther Duflo at PopTech 2009.  (Esther Duflo is a development economist who has garnered significant attention for her work on randomized evaluation.  She is based at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which she co-founded.)  What I found most intriguing about her commentary is the way she highlights evaluation as a way to figure out what works in development.  She starts with what we all know to be true: development problems are big, intimidating, and seemingly intractable.  But fortunately, she doesn’t stop there.  She goes on to assert that the most reasonable way to tackle a huge problem is to break it into bite-sized pieces, as simplistic as that sounds.  Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and keynote speaker at the recent GlobeMed Global Health Summit at Northwestern University, made a similar comment during his remarks about the Haiti disaster.  His take involved a rather vivid analogy that he’d heard, quite ironically, from a friend in Chicago.  It goes like something like this.  How does an ant eat an elephant?  Answer: one bite at a time.  (Cue laughter and applause.)  The point is that big problems are composed of smaller, albeit interconnected, problems.

What does this have to do with evaluation?  Well, certain types of evaluation, randomized experiments being an example, can be used as problem-solving mechanisms.  Dr. Duflo describes it as a way to understand behavior (and stimulate behavior change).  For example, figuring out that giving lentils to a mother in an Indian village makes her more likely to immunize her children, has implications for larger problems such as reducing childhood deaths from preventable diseases.  Following Dr. Duflo’s logic, using a mechanism like randomized experiments to figure out what is working on the ground can lend clues that will ‘ladder up’ to solutions for big, complex problems.  For me, the critical take-away is that development problems require an active, iterative, experimental approach.  In other words, there is no silver bullet or universal target; just an assortment of strategic, proximate shots.  However, by engaging in “creative experimentation”, we are likely to come closer to the insights that will inform effective policy-making, thereby creating scalable solutions.

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