Evidence based policy or policy based evidence? Supply and demand for data in a donor dominant world, by Morten Jerven | People, Spaces, Deliberation
▻http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/evidence-based-policy-or-policy-based-evidence-supply-and-demand-da
Comment l’INSEE zambienne a perdu son dernier statisticien… un exemple des effets de l’#ONG-isation des États “en développement”.
I was sitting in the Central Statistical Office in Lusaka, talking to the then only remaining member of the economic statistics division. In 2007, this division was manned by three statisticians, but when I returned in 2010, there was only one person there. The other two had been pulled from economic statistics to social and demographic statistics where there was more donor money for per diem payments. The phone rang. DfID Lusaka was on the other end. They had a problem. They had financed a report on social statistics, but the office statistician tasked with completing the report had recently travelled to Japan to participate in a generously funded training course, leaving the report incomplete. Could someone help out? And so it was that the last remaining economic statistician for the Zambian government temporarily left the office to come to the rescue.
(...) Hand in hand with the demand for a data revolution comes the idea that the development community should not only embrace evidence-based policy, but also move towards paying for results. This would be a great idea if poor countries were closely-observed labs where you could make objective observations, and the Hawthorne effects – where the act of observation affect the facts – were not profound. It may be a terrible idea if this is not the case. What you get instead is policy-driven evidence, the opposite of what we need. When we falsely assume that a child is vaccinated, has escaped the poverty line, goes to school and has enough food, it is not just a statistical error but a real tragedy.
Morten Jerven est l’auteur de Poor Numbers, How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It
▻http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?gcoi=80140100939320