An estimated 8.4 million payroll jobs were lost during the recession. Photo: wools (flickr)

What's most effective in helping people climb out of poverty? Jobs and education, according to New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who cites several recent studies by economists.

Quality youth education programs targeting youth pay off immediately and in the long run — especially those that focus on ninth-grade students, considered a critical juncture for at-risk youth. And jobs are important because they boost entire families.

But as Kristof points out, both employment and school funding have been severely affected by the economic crisis, "harming the two most effective stairways out of poverty." In response, Kristof is calling for a greater commitment.

This wave of research suggests that there’s no magic bullet, that helping people is hard, and that even when pilot programs succeed they can be difficult to scale up. But evidence also suggests that we increasingly have the tools to chip away at poverty. We know what to do if we just can summon the political will.

This Gapminder chart graphs the number of children per woman against the percentage of the population with access to clean water.

Have you ever wondered if the quality of a child's teeth is related to the GDP per capita of his or her country?

Thanks to a Swedish website called Gapminder, you now have the chance to find out — and to discover stranger correlations yet. The site gives users the chance to create graphs of everything from fertility to the number of broadband Internet subscribers in a given country. That way, they can explore the ways that these indicators may or may not be connected. The resulting charts make dealing with statistics not only easier than usual, but also a little bit addictive and fun.

Aside from the fun factor, the site is meant to be a serious tool: It aims to support the UN Millennium Development Goals by making relevant statistics more accessible, with data sets drawn from international organizations and corporations ranging from UNESCO to the British oil company BP.

I'm interested in women's issues, for example, and Gapminder makes it enjoyable for me to get an idea of how the average age of a woman when she first marries correlates with the life expectancy in her country. Watching the dots fly across to the screen in a good approximation of a slanted line tells me that the two factors do, in fact, correlate very well. Of course, the golden rule of statistics — that correlation doesn't equal causation — still applies, so I don't know if one of these factors actually caused the other. Did women get married later because they were living longer, or did getting married later contribute to population longevity when fewer women died young in childbirth, for example? Or — as seems more likely — does a population live longer and get married later because it's getting wealthier or more educated? My graph is sworn to silence on such questions, but Gapminder does make it easy for me to investigate further with a new chart and a different measurement, like GDP or education levels.

There are more caveats, too. Data isn't available for all years on all topics in all countries, partly because the data sets come from such disparate organizations and partly because these organizations weren't always around to do the counting. If you want to know how GDP per capita correlated with infant mortality in the early 1800s, you'll only have two countries to compare — Sweden and Austria. And any data set is only as good as the government or organization that collects it: a notice on the website points out that their population numbers for the U.S. before 1900 include neither African Americans nor Native Americans.

By providing open access to a tool that makes analyzing statistics easier, Gapminder is helping make such data more democratic, more transparent, and, perhaps, a little more honest.

Storms in Madagascar provide an added opportunity for embezzlement in education. Photo: lefthandrotation (flickr)

Mismanagement and corruption continue to hinder the progress of education in Africa, suggests a recent Transparency International report on primary education in several African countries. The report cites several examples where local officials wasted the funds of school systems, which raised the costs that parents were forced to pay.

One of more outrageous examples of such corruption came from Madagascar, where school officials use the annual cyclone season as an opportunity to embezzle funds. A Space for Transparency blog explained how they do it:

Every year the coastal areas, mainly in the north eastern part of the island, face an onslaught from seasonal cyclones. First warnings usually start airing on TV and radio a few days before the cyclone hits, which gives people time to put their corruption scams into action. It works like this: when the cyclone is confirmed, the person in charge of school procurements pays a local merchant to fabricate an invoice for school supplies. The wind and rains come and lo and behold the school storage room is inundated with water and all the supplies are damaged. The school then submits a reimbursement claim to the central emergency fund for school materials. It explains how the storage room roof leaked and the supplies were ruined. The fake invoice is included in the claim.

As the World Bank points out, It is particularly important to address such practices in primary schools because education is the key to achieving other development goals. If poor kids are to have a chance at getting the education that could help them lift themselves out of poverty, a strong start in primary school is imperative.

Esther Duflo speaking at Pop!Tech in 2009. Photo: kk + (flickr)

Ever wonder why some development projects succeed while others fail?

Esther Duflo and her colleagues at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab are working on the answer. Duflo is one of the newest recipients of the MacArthur Genius Grant because of her commitment to investigating what causes poverty to persist in some developing countries and what works to alleviate it.

She does this by setting up controlled field experiments in some of the poorest countries in Africa and South Asia. These experiments set out to prove how social and economic forces fuel the cycle of poverty in these areas. They also test how effective foreign aid projects are at lifting people out of poverty.

Duflo conducts her experiments using a method that mimics how drug companies conduct randomized medical trials. One group participates in a development project while the other does not. The differences between them are then measured to see if the project worked, and exactly how well.

Some of Duflo’s best known work is on HIV prevention in Kenya. Her research shows it’s more effective to teach girls specific ways to reduce their risk — like avoiding sexual relations with older men — than teaching basic medical facts about HIV and emphasizing abstinence as the best method of prevention. As she explains in her recent article for VoxEU.org, girls who were given risk-reduction information now use condoms more often, stay in school longer, and become pregnant less often.

“Economics is about the best way to allocate resources, and finding out what works is important to understanding how to allocate these resources,” Duflo told Philanthropy Action. Too few development strategies are vigorously tested. Proving what works can help.

(For more information on the Poverty Action Lab, check out Sarah Standish’s post "Researching Better Ways to End Poverty.")

China's attitude towards Africa was apparent in a slogan at a summit on Africa in Beijing. Photo: stephenrwalli (flickr)

Deborah Brautigan doesn't argue with critics who call China's interest in Africa self-serving. But she may be one of the first American academics to declare that China's deeds will be good for Africa, too.

It's an argument she expands in The Dragon's Gift, a new book analyzing the development of China's Africa policies over the last few decades.

Brautigan asserts that China's investments are integrating African countries into the global economy more quickly because, unlike Western countries, the nation invests in an array of industries. In Angola, for example, China has built roads, schools, hospitals, and irrigation systems in the country's interior — even though its oil wealth is far offshore. Brautigan also cites a telling remark by a Nigerian diplomat: "The Chinese are trying to get involved in every sector of our economy. If you look at the West, it's oil, oil, oil and nothing else."

And on a continent rife with corruption, China's style of development actually leaves less room for embezzlement than does the World Bank model, points out a book review in The Morning Star. Rather than funneling money through potentially corrupt government officials, China pays Chinese companies to head up infrastructure projects.

Brautigan acknowledges that China's behavior in Africa is sometimes far from saintly. Some have complained that Chinese companies do not respect local labor laws, as happened at a mine in Congo, and others worry that Chinese companies will have a negative environmental impact on the continent.

While not negligible, Brautigan sees these violations as small in comparison to what China's investments could mean for Africa, and in comparison to the failed promise of other foreign aid there. As an AidWatchers review noted, this "book seeks to compare Chinese aid to Western aid as it really is, not as we wish it were."