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Category: ICT

#SWEDOW on Steroids

The One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages — simply dropping off tablet computers with pre-loaded programs and seeing what happens.

The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.

Impact Evaluation in Africa

The Journal of African Economies has just published its November issue, which is a special issue on impact evaluation.

Here is the table of contents. Here is the introductory essay by Marcel Fafchamps and Andrew Zeitlin, who write:

Two features are evident from the collection of papers presented here. First, as illustrated by the diversity of topics covered in this volume, evaluation methods can be applied to a broad range of policy questions. Such questions range from microeconomic and localized policies, such as in health and education, to policies with potential for general equilibrium and market-wide effects, such as migration and entrepreneurship.

Mobile Phones: Does the Intrahousehold Allocation of Technology Matter?

There are good reasons to believe it does.

At least, that is the answer my coauthor Ken Lee and I come up with in a new article titled “Look Who’s Talking: The Impacts of the Intrahousehold Allocation of Mobile Phones on Agricultural Prices,” forthcoming in the Journal of Development Studies.

More specifically, in a sample of onion farmers in the Philippines, we look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether anyone in a household owns a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.

Failing to find any statistically significant association between the two, we then look at whether there is a statistically significant relationship between whether (i) the household head owns a mobile phone, (ii) the household head’s spouse owns a mobile phone, or (iii) any of the children in the household own a mobile phone and the price received by that household for its onions.