The actual randomization reminded me of the children’s game Duck, Duck, Goose. The local leaders and several AVSI employees walked in a circle, plucking pieces of paper from a large wastebasket and dropping them into the “Phase I” and “Phase II” cans. People chuckled when their turn came, slightly self-conscious at the simplicity of their task.

That is Dwyer Gunn of the Freakonomics blog reporting on our latest field experiment in Uganda: tracing the determinants of entrepreneurship and post-war recovery with women in Uganda.

Dwyer joined me and colleagues for a week of behavioral games and frantic program planning in June. Her first day in Africa was highly appropriate: broken down roadside for eight hours as we struggled to get her up north.

Being tailed by a reporter was a first for me. After each inadvertant inappropriate comment (of which there were many) I wheeled around to see whether she was poised with pen in hand. Fortunately none of the disparaging remrks I made about unnamed NGOs made it into the New York Times’ blog…

The full article is here.