Jeff Bloem has been working with the ICM Marketplace Ministry team as the research assistant in Kitale, Kenya since September of last year. He will be with us until July of this year, after which he will return to the US and enter grad school in September. I have worked with a number of interns over the years, all of whom have been unique in their own way. Jeff, too, is unique and it has been a joy to work with him and get to know him. Jeff lives and breathes economics. Seriously. All the time. It's quite remarkable how much this guy reads and processes, and thinks and processes, and debates and processes, and processes and processes. We almost never have a quiet car ride as we spend hours in the car each week driving from city to city to do this work. It's been great fun and I've learned a lot from him. He wrote the article below about his reflections on his work here and it does a great job of defining the problem and explaining how our work is trying to address it. Enjoy!
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Mary's bakery is bustling. So much so, that Ushindi
Snacks cannot keep up with the demand for it’s fresh baked goods. Her business
has room to grow but seems trapped at its current level.
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| Mary (left) owner of Ushindi Snacks |
Edward manages a consulting and management
business, aptly named Strategic Management Firm LTD. His business grows on a
quarterly basis and his employees are encouraged and equipped to work
creatively and productively.
These are just three of the sixty-three business owners who
signed up for a basic business skills training organized by their church in
Kakamega, an emerging city in Western Kenya. And here lies the inherent problem.
The problem is not that Mary has to turn down sales and
profits on a daily basis. It is not that Beatrice’s tabletop business has been
the same for the last eight years. It is not that Edward is perhaps one of only
three business owners attending the training that may actually be realizing his
or her gifts and expressing traits of entrepreneurship.
While those are all very real issues, they are tangential to
the larger problem at hand. The problem is obvious, almost never understood,
and until recently rarely acted upon. Mary, Beatrice, and Edward are all different
from each other. Half of this seeming banal platitude goes without saying,
while, unfortunately, the other half often goes unsaid.
This problem is only exacerbated by the all too clear fact
that the other sixty-three business owners are all different from each other in
the same way Mary, Beatrice, and Edward are different.
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| Ushindi Snacks in full operations |
Here’s the thing. Those tangential problems discussed above
remain because the larger problem is rarely addressed. Over the past half
century developed countries have spent about $6.5 Trillion to assist the
developing world develop and grow. Most of this money has been guided by loose
fitting macroeconomic trends, fun to read stories containing anecdotal
evidence, and bleeding heart good intentions.
Invariably what happens is some of the loose fitting
macroeconomic trends predict actual growth, some fun to read stories containing
anecdotal evidence are true for whole populations, and some good intentions
lead to beneficial outcomes.
The negative rub is recognized when experts have a hard time
discerning what worked and what didn’t. Today we have experienced remarkable progress
in terms of poverty reduction and development around the world, and very little
knowledge as to why that progress actually
occurred. Until recently, poverty eradication and development have been run
like a business that doesn’t keep accounting records.
This is all changing. In recent years researchers have been
making remarkable advancements to project evaluation. The major innovation:
randomized controlled trials. The methodology is taken almost directly from the
medical profession and drug testing.
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| Jeff interviewing Edward, gathering statistics before the project starts. |
The way to test this is to identify double the number of
schools the program has funds to support. Randomly select half of those schools
to receive free textbooks, while leaving the other half with none. Then compare
the test scores of these two groups of schools to see if the textbooks had any
sort of recognizable impact. [As it turns out, giving textbooks away for free doesn’t
work—at least in Western Kenya, where this four-year study took place. (Read more
about it here.)]
Randomized control trials provide great feedback for governments and organizations looking to solve any sort of social problem. The major roadblock is evaluations of this nature is that they are often expensive and always challenging to execute well. Studying human beings in real life is much more challenging than studying a medical drug in a controlled laboratory environment. Human behavior, achievement, and success are dependent on seemingly endless factors. The best randomized evaluations control for as many of these factors as possible, but to do this completely in a real world setting is extremely challenging. It is impossible to say, “Lets run 2008 over again and this time there is no global economic crisis.”
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| Beatrice's cereal business |
The results of the evaluation will not be complete until
2015, but initial effects seem to be intriguing. During a training session last
week the question was asked, “how many priests or ministers are in this room?”
One hand was raised; it was the actual pastor of the church. After a discussion
on the Biblical foundation for work, a Godly perspective on wealth, and a
missional understanding on God’s intentions for the tasks and responsibilities
of His people from Monday through Saturday, the question was asked again. This
time, with the understanding that their work in their businesses was just as
spiritual as the church’s work on Sunday, everybody in the room raised their
hand. Everybody identified themselves as a priest or minister in their own life and work.
The significance of this monumental attitudinal shift
remains to be seen. Remember, this story is anecdotal; the facts, however true
they may seem, may not necessarily be reliable. The most encouraging aspect of
this whole story is that, in the face of their differences, Mary, Beatrice, Edward and
all the other attendees of the class experienced something similar and behaved
in a uniform manner.
This is the kind of finding the final evaluation aims to discover, a uniform change across a diverse population. We will then know if training business people in a church works better than training them in a financial institution. We will begin to actually know what works and what doesn’t.
The Bible tells the story of His glory. Part of the fulfillment of that story is being told through hundreds of stories in Western Kenya. It lacks charm and rhyme but this is a randomized control trial for His glory.
Jeff Bloem is a Research Assistant working on this evaluation in partnership with International Christian Ministries and Partners Worldwide at the African Theological Seminary in Kitale, Kenya. Follow him on Twitter @JeffBloem or email him at jeffb@partnersworldwide.org.
This is the kind of finding the final evaluation aims to discover, a uniform change across a diverse population. We will then know if training business people in a church works better than training them in a financial institution. We will begin to actually know what works and what doesn’t.
The Bible tells the story of His glory. Part of the fulfillment of that story is being told through hundreds of stories in Western Kenya. It lacks charm and rhyme but this is a randomized control trial for His glory.
Jeff Bloem is a Research Assistant working on this evaluation in partnership with International Christian Ministries and Partners Worldwide at the African Theological Seminary in Kitale, Kenya. Follow him on Twitter @JeffBloem or email him at jeffb@partnersworldwide.org.
