The slow but steady erosion of India's civil society · Global Voices globalvoices.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from globalvoices.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This week's links include why solar doesn't scale in Africa, testing for scale at the same time as efficacy, why honest work can still be bad, and more.
Tim Harford considers ‘addition by subtraction’ the idea that removing items is a neglected way of improving things. Anyone who has sent a paper for comments with the note that ‘it’s already too long, so suggestions on what to excise are very welcome’ will know that the vast majority of replies nevertheless suggest additions rather than deletions.
Lead poisoning may be one of the most overlooked challenges in global health, education, and development. Exposure to lead creates a multi-pronged and permanent attack on these children’s health and development during their vulnerable and formative early years, with devastating lifelong effects. Lead exposure is associated with cognitive deficits, lower educational attainment, behavioral disorders, violence, and reduced lifetime earnings. Though data is patchy, estimates suggest that lead exposure may cause 900,000 deaths and 1 trillion dollars in economic losses every year.
A recent, thought-provoking blog by our colleague, Justin Sandefur, titled “How Economists got Africa’s AIDS Epidemic Wrong”, has sparked a debate about the historical role of cost-effectiveness analysis in assessing the investments of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and, implicitly, the value of such analysis in making similar global health decisions.