I’m in northern Uganda in part to check in on a post-conflict program evaluation. Two years ago I made some policy recommendations and, to my enduring surprise, someone listened. Soon I found myself evaluating a micro-enterprise program for ultra-poor war-affected women in northern Uganda.

From the start (I must admit) I was just half interested. The program was obviously important, as is understanding the poverty dynamics among the ultra-poor, but as a research project it seemed unpromising. My research collaborators and I wracked our brains for ways to build the contribution. What has emerged is, I hope, a slightly new breed of evaluation.

One difference is that we’re trying to feed into the NGO program in real time. There are multiple phases, and with data collection on handheld computers we can clean and analyze the data as it’s being collected; reports are ready weeks after the first phase to inform the next one. We’re also training the NGO  to collect program data on their own handhelds as they follow up their beneficiaries, for their own interbal monitoring and evaluation.

Another is a focus on the political and social effects of economic assistance. We’ll measure these directly, relating income gains to any empowerment in the household or participation in the community. But we’re also going to see if we can spur collective action in these villages and displacement camps, largely by encouraging half of the participants to form community groups.

We’ve also beefed up our qualitative research. Along with two psychologist colleagues, three Ugandan research assistants will follow 32 women in 8 communities for 12 months, tracing routes out of poverty to empowerment over time. The volume of qualitative data is going to be enormous, but we have amazing budding ethnographers compiling and synthesizing the data from their countrywomen.

Since the project just wasn’t complex enough, last month we decided to add behavioral games to the mix. A colleague from Yale and I are running a day of risk, time preference, public goods, and group cooperation games at baseline. The idea is to link these survey and behavioral experiments to actual business performance and poverty dynamics over time (not to mention the collective action).

I started out a game skeptic, but am finding myself converted. What seemed contrived and absurd is actually the most popular part of our survey.

We always knew the 60-minute baseline survey was tedious. Turns out that playing games for real money is absurdly popular; our experiments team is like a roving casino, the most popular people in northern Uganda.

Reports and photos to follow, internet connmections permitting…