“Scaling-Up” is one of the biggest challenges in development. Interventions that work well with small populations routinely face challenges in expanding to a larger number of communities. This is particularly true of interventions that have unpredictable trajectories of change such as participatory and community-based interventions. Such projects hinge upon their adaptive capacity —the ability to be nimble, to learn by doing, and to make mid-course corrections in management and design—in order to be effective.The Social Observatory has been working for five years with a $2 billion portfolio of livelihoods projects in India to improve their capacity to adapt. A team of economists, sociologists, behavioral scientists, and management information system specialists has been engaged in a constructive collaboration with operations staff to improve implementation on the front lines.
On May 10, 2016, Vijayendra Rao, Lead Economist, The World Bank, will be in Ottawa to share his work with the Social Observatory. Please join us to hear Dr. Rao discuss this interdisciplinary approach to improve development impact. He will highlight findings from impact evaluations and in-depth long-term qualitative research to show the “how and why” of when livelihoods interventions succeed and fail. He will also demonstrate a new method of Participatory-Tracking that allows communities to generate census data with which they can monitor their own progress, make better allocation decisions, and provide a source of information to engage with the government to improve public services.
This talk was held on May 10th, 2016. A link to the video recording of the event can be found here.
