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Stories
A Measured Approach
Illustration by Vahram Muradyan
The mission of Educate Girls, a nongovernmental organization in Mumbai, is to get 3 million out-of-school girls in India into the classroom and to provide remedial education. To do that they first have to find the girls, which is a costly process involving door-to-door censuses across thousands of villages. Enter IDinsight, a nonprofit that helps international development organizations use data and evidence to realize their goals.
IDinsight helped Educate Girls leverage available census, education, and outcome data for 7,796 villages to create a predictive machine learning model, which enabled the organization to locate between 50 and 200 percent more out-of-school children for no additional cost. “That’s the sort of success case that gets us really excited, where we can unlock so much impact by providing the right data-driven insight,” says Paul Wang (MBA/MPA-ID 2011), one of IDinsight’s four founders.
When they met as graduate students at Harvard, the foursome was drawn together by their passion for making a difference in the world through international development. They were also extremely frustrated: The development field had access to sophisticated monitoring and evaluation tools that could make a huge difference in how organizations implement and modify their projects, but they simply weren’t being used by decision-makers on the ground. A big reason they decided to start their own nonprofit “is probably tied to our impatient desire to see the world improve,” says cofounder Esther Hsu Wang (MBA/MPA 2009) from her office in Zambia, which she shares with Paul, her husband. “We see this need, and we’re not willing to wait for someone else to do it. Why not us?”
Paul says that many nonprofits’ monitoring and evaluation efforts happen after the project has ended and never make it back to the teams that implemented the program. IDinsight makes these assessment tools available to the decision-makers and tailors them to the organization’s specific needs, allowing them to make data-informed decisions about their programs while they are still in progress. The idea is “making the most powerful data tools practical and accessible to practitioners,” he says.
To do that effectively, they need to be as close to the process as possible, Paul says. Most of the 160-person organization live in sub-Saharan Africa, India, or Southeast Asia, working out of eight global offices. Clients include the Ghanaian government, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Against Malaria Foundation.
In Ghana, for example, members of IDinsight embedded with the country’s Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation to support the Free Senior High School (FSHS) program, which made tuition-free high school available to all students. Before that, even government-run schools were cost-prohibitive for many families. So students enrolled in significant numbers when FSHS went into effect in 2017, which created an urgent need to evaluate program implementation. Which schools needed more teachers? Where did new buildings and other infrastructure need to be built? And most important, Paul says, “How could learning levels be maintained and enhanced even while the student population is increasing?”
IDinsight helped Ghana’s Ministry of Education mine its existing data around its students, test scores, and teacher allocations. The organization also did site visits to high schools to assess the programs’ overall success. Paul says that they are also helping the new Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation, founded in 2017, build its skills and capabilities.
Dan Levy, a senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School—who taught many of the IDinsight founders in his courses about quantitative methods, policy analysis, and program evaluation—has followed the organization’s growth. “I think the place where IDinsight fits is by saying, look, sometimes decision-makers need to make a relatively quick decision, and they cannot wait one, two, or three years to find out whether a particular program affects that longer-term outcome of interest,” he says.
One of the biggest challenges that IDinsight faces is changing the field of global development itself. When evaluating programs, “We want to be as quick as possible; we want to encourage iterations,” Esther says. But a lot of nonprofits get, say, a five-year grant to deploy a certain amount of money and are not expected to make any changes to the program in that time. “That’s the thing that’s frustrating. We like to ask, what are you going to measure? And then, periodically, when you measure those things again, if you find out it’s not headed in the right direction, let’s change what you’re doing with the rest of the money, rather than just driving through to the end, and then everyone checks the box and thinks about the next big grant,” she says. “We hope that, within our careers, that will change, and people will demand impact and say, we’re not spending a dollar unless a life is improved by this much in this period of time. That’s why we’re doing this.” Sometimes impatience is a virtue.
Click here to learn more about Esther Hsu Wang (MBA 20019) and her work at IDinsight.
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