What It Takes To Lift Families Out Of Poverty
May 15, 2015 4:51 AM ET More than 1 million people in Peru earn less than the equivalent of about $450 each year. Courtesy of Michael Rizzo/CGAP Eighteen years ago, Dean Karlan was a fresh, bright-eyed graduate student in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wanted to answer what seemed like a simple question: "Does global aid work?" Karlan says. He was reading a bunch of studies on the topic. But none of them actually answered the question. "We were tearing our hair out reading these papers because it was frustrating," he says. "[We] never really felt like the papers were really satisfactory." One problem was that no one was actually testing global aid programs — methodically — to see if they really changed people's lives permanently. "They haven't been taking the scientific method to problems of
