Conference & Fun stuff.

I just noticed that nothing has been posted since August 2; well over a week ago. The reason is that it has been a busy week. It has also been a great week with as one of its highlights a 2-day workshop we organized in Bukavu.

Workshop

We're working on the evaluation of TUUNGANE - a development project implemented by IRC and Care in almost half of all the villages in Eastern Congo. The evaluation is one of the world’s largest (around 1,120 villages) and daunting (taking place in Eastern Congo). It is also the first of its kind; to get a true behavioral measure we’ll implement a development project in 560 villages. (Yes, much more on all this later).

The evaluation started in 2007 with a baseline, and for the last year we've been working on the final part. While we've been working closely with IRC and Care, we want to do everything to avoid a disconnect between the evaluation and reality on the ground. Thus, last Friday and Saturday we flew in IRC and Care field staff from all four province. We also invited local researchers. During the workshop:

• IRC and Care presented their work
• The Columbia Team presented the evaluation (yes, I gave a presentation in French)
• We all went over the hypotheses
• We discussed the quality (and the feasibility) of the measures to answer these hypotheses
• The Columbia Team provided the timeline (which villages when) and together we discussed its feasibility

It was an extraordinary event. The discussions were of high quality and very open and honest. It was very warming to see how IRC and Care staff - both field and management staff - were engaged and thinking through how to get the best evaluation for TUUNGANE - the program they’ve been working for for the last years.

Macartan explaining the evaluation.

Raul and Grant discussing the pilot that took place a week before the conference.

Fun Stuff

I received this from a friend of mine via email (also saw it later on Chris Blattman's blog). It's really nice.

A PhD in pictures.

Also, I just read a post of a Yale colleague of mine on Facebook. He is busy grading exams and while doing that he noticed how he was thinking of the Infinite Monkey theorem (more here). In brief, the infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Infinite Monkey-theorem.

PS. I received some fantastic comments on my previous post (the one that dealt with churches). I hope to post a follow-up on that soon.