Co-PI, Democracy Surveys Project (with Daniel Pemstein)
In the 2023 fiscal year, the U.S. federal government provided $2.3 billion in democracy assistance worldwide. On his first day in office, President Trump issued an Executive Order which ordered a 90-day pause on all foreign development assistance disbursements. Shortly thereafter, nearly 500 foreign assistance awards were cancelled. One of the cancelled awards was for the Democracy Surveys Project, an expert survey being conducted quarterly in 60 regions of 30 countries. Democracy practitioners provided granular data on democracy support activities and democratic outcomes, focusing on women’s civic engagement, political party coalition building, and electoral integrity. We completed two rounds of data collection before termination. Now we have secured independent funding to continue the data collection, shifting our focus to documenting the effects of the large-scale cancellation of USAID democracy assistance awards on democratic dynamics in recipient countries.
Co-PI, Understanding the Immediate Health and Governance Impacts of Cuts to Foreign Aid (with Ryan Jablonski and Alex Yeandle)
Recent cuts to US foreign aid will likely increase global annual mortality rates by 2-5 million, and substantially transform public health governance in the world’s poorest and most aid-dependent states. This research seeks to understand the immediate consequences of these cuts, especially with respect to health care, medicine access, inequality and local governance. We plan a representative survey of 3,950 patients and health officials around 174 public health facilities in Southern Malawi. This survey will contact the same individuals sampled in a 2023 study with the Malawi Ministry of Health, allowing us to precisely measure individual trends in public health quality, medicine access and family morbidity and mortality. Additionally, this grant will fund a programmatic data collection effort and two survey experiments designed to evaluate the effects of these cuts on citizen views and demands of donors, governments and other service providers. There is an urgent need for this funding and research. Policy decisions over how to reallocate resources need to happen now. Policymakers and global health providers desperately need reliable statistics and causal analysis in order to most effectively adjust global health infrastructure and prioritize resource reallocation. These policy debates are happening now, and the consequences of today’s reforms will transform the economies and politics of aid-dependent countries for decades to come.
Co-PI, World Bank SIEF Nimble Evaluation and DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Project, Detecting and Deterring Medication Theft: A Field Study in Health Clinics in Malawi (with Ryan Jablonski, Mariana Carvalho, and Clark Gibson)
The theft of medicines costs governments and donors billions of dollars annually. In Malawi, the government loses about 30 percent of the drugs and medical supplies it purchases to theft. Despite years of donor-funded third-party distribution systems, a survey we conducted in 2015 found that 35 percent of private clinics were selling donor-supplied anti-malarial drugs that had been donated for free use. This evaluation aims to precisely measure medicine theft via novel tracking technology and to test the effectiveness of a low-cost monitoring message intervention. Read more about our preliminary findings in this United Nations University working paper. NOTE: Due to the sensitive nature of this project, please contact me for additional research design details.