Social Experiments to Fight Poverty
Poverty is a huge problem and its mostly invisible. More than that, we do not even know if we are doing the right thing in addressing it. We still cannot fully eliminate this problem; however, we can break it down into smaller problems and then find a way to solve this instead and at least make progress to solve the problem.
One of these is immunization which is the cheapest way to save a child’s life but at least 25 million children do not get it. From there, we try to solve this smaller problem through randomized controlled trials. A randomized control trial was made in 134 villages of Udaipur district, Rajasthan, the results showed that making it easy for the people by organizing monthly camp increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. Moreover, if you make it easy and give them a kilo of lentils, the immunization rate is six times bigger compared to districts where there is no intervention.
Another case is the RCT done in Kenya which showed three results about bed nets to prevent malaria, wherein, first, the coverage rate falls down a lot when people must pay for their bed nets. Second, if they have bed nets, they will use them regardless of how they got them. Third, in the long term, people who got free bed nets were more likely to purchase the second one who did not get a free one.
These results will enable governments to know the best approach in solving the immunization problem and preventing malaria which may indirectly affect the incidence of poverty. The results of these randomized control trials may not solve poverty right away, but this solves the smaller problems we know that contributes to poverty and from there, solving poverty would just be a matter of time.
