6 False Narratives to Change in Educational Technology Research
If you’ve spent any time in the technology in education world, particularly in developing country donor-funded work, you probably know the general lament about...
What Happened When Liberia Outsourced Education to Private Sector Educators?
The Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program is a public-private partnership for school management between the Government of Liberia and nine education contractors:...
Three SMS Program Learnings that Will Surprise You
In early 2017, USAID’s StopPalu malaria control project in Guinea started implementing an SMS program to motivate pregnant women to seek antenatal care visits...
Using Indirect Data for Direct MERL Impact
The above example shows how secondary data across 100 hypothetical villages can be integrated so that signals appear within the noise of data, highlighting the...
Randomized Control Trials Feed Our Fetish for Single-Focus Interventions
I am Ed Gaible of Natoma Group and I am here to report that RCT fetishism is alive and well in development.
Sometime in the early part of this millennium, Randomized...
Why Do RCT in ICT4D When You Can A/B Test for Faster Results?
Recently, D. Jerome Martin tweeted that he was happy that 50% of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures grantees were conducting randomized control trials...
Women Gain When You Give Poor People Cash via Mobile Money
That’s the basic question asked by GiveDirectly in their overall business model to give unconditional cash transfers to poor Kenyans via M-Pesa. Based on a...
What Does OLPC Peru Teach Us About ICT in Education?
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has been a part of a larger ICT4E discussion, which has included ongoing debate over the effectiveness of the XO and its various...
What do Randomized Control Trial Results from OLPC Peru Mean for ICT4E?
In 2007, Peru announced it would distribute tens of thousands of XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child to children in rural schools across the country, and expanded...