Randomized trials are changing the way governments and aid organizations study — and deliver — measures to reduce inequality and poverty.
. The lesson, Evans says, is both simple and daunting: scaling up interventions that depend on complex human interactions won’t be easy.
Although replicating the Jamaican experience has proved difficult, Grantham-McGregor says there is little doubt that early interventions can change the lives of disadvantaged children. Her former colleagues at the University of the West Indies have developed online materials for the programme, dubbed Reach Up, that have been used by government agencies in several countries. But, she says, it’s crucial to target interventions to the most disadvantaged people.
In Cameroon, Mbuagbaw says, most of the research is conducted in French — a minority language there — and in a single region around the capital. “All of our health policy is based on research conducted in one province,” he says. Scientists won’t always have the statistical power to assess how an intervention affects different groups of people, Mbuagbaw acknowledges. But at a minimum, they can help other researchers to do so. They can collect and report data on race and ethnicity, gender, education and socio-economic status among their participants, he says, enabling other researchers to pool data from many studies in a systematic review.
And all too often, randomized trials of poverty interventions do not actually report information about the current wealth of the recipients or whether the interventions actually reduced poverty, says Markus Goldstein, an economist with the World Bank in Washington DC.
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