Millennium Villages Project Needs Proper Evaluation (The Guardian)

Senior fellow Michael Clemens's article on the need for evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project was featured in The Guardian.

From the Article

Advocates for the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) have described it as a "solution to extreme poverty" that can spark "self-sustaining economic growth" (pdf) in small, impoverished areas of rural Africa. It is a centrepiece of UN anti-poverty efforts.

We conducted an independent, peer-reviewed study of how the project evaluates its impacts. Our study was based on published MVP documents and analysis of publicly available data, and our assessment of that evidence was informed by eyewitness comparison of a project site with a nearby non-project site.

We argue that weaknesses in the MVP's evaluation methods will make it impossible for anyone to know if the project is achieving its goals. We also argue that the published evidence does not provide a basis for advocates' claims that the project "has been shown to work powerfully" and is "enormously successful".

Among the five weaknesses we document in the MVP's impact evaluation, the most important is the failure to properly compare outcomes at the project sites to what would have happened in the absence of the project. In two reports (pdf), the MVP has presented before-and-after comparisons of living conditions at its sites, describing the differences as "impacts" and "results" of the project. These reports give no consideration to the possibility that some or all of these changes might have occurred even if the MVP had never been implemented at those sites.

Read it here.