FAQ

UPDATE

Unfortunately, we aren't supposed to blog about the education project, so I had to take that part of the post down.

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The most frequent question that I have been getting from friends/family is: what is it that you are doing? If I revealed all of what I’m doing in one post, I would have nothing to write about next week, so I will start with the basics here and expand on it later.

I am living in Accra, Ghana, and working for an organization called Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) (www.poverty-action.org). I have been here for two months now, and am signed up for 22 more. IPA is a research organization, and I am running two “field experiments” in public policy, one about education and one in small/micro enterprise business management. The idea behind field experiments is basically that, with a rigorous methodology, you can test different policies/programs to find out if they actually work the way you think they should. They are a whole lot of work, so they are usually only done with big programs/questions.