Author: ekfletch

Or, all the things I learned about the right, social media, influencers, and the world in the past two weeks.

About two weeks ago, I decided to start a new instagram account. I was feeling like I wanted to do some more public speaking and writing and as my professional world was crumbling around me, it felt important to talk about it. I’ve used this space and similar ones to write publicly for more than twenty years and it seemed like short-form video was getting more traction than blogs or written content. I started the account, @drerinkfletcher, left it open to the public, told people I know they could find me there if they wanted to hear my some of my opinions, and I started posting.

In the preceding months, one of the organizations I work closely with had started working with content creators (folks on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. with medium to large followings) to promote some of the findings of the research we had done and to amplify its influence. After speaking with many of them, I wanted to better understand what they were doing, their processes, what drove them to do what they did and how they saw the value of the content they were producing, particularly as it came to promoting progressive causes. Like any good researcher, I wanted to know how much time it took up, what challenges one encountered doing it, what choices you had to make, what skills needed to be learned.

Alongside, I kept seeing comments about how the right was winning on content. One statistic (which I cannot verify), said that for every one social media post or piece of content promoting a progressive cause, 500 posts promoted right-wing causes. While much of the left spent the last fifteen years trying to defend traditional media from the accusations of bias and ‘fake news,’ the right was creating their own ecosystem of ‘alternate facts’ that ran rampant through social channels, amplifying misinformation and disinformation, and ultimately, likely, swinging the election in favor of the current administration. Part of me wanted to know if I could do it, too. Could I be part of the group providing balance in that space, bringing my voice and expertise to conversations that needed to happen? Had I been sitting on the sidelines too long since I decided to largely stop posting on social media and blogging? I wanted to feel this out.

I did not really mean for the account to blow up into a save-USAID type account. I also posted about taxes and filmed countless drafts about unemployment and the general dismantling of the federal government. I had plans for re-upping explaining economic concepts for pareto efficiency and sunk costs. I thought, and talked with my friends, about what my value add could be. How could I offer my experience and expertise in a way that didn’t feel reactionary, that filled a gap, that was useful?

On the first day of the new administration, an executive order came out stopping all work related to foreign assistance, leading to the layoff of thousands of my colleagues and friends around the world. Disease monitoring, medicine distribution, food distribution, school-building, important research, all ground to a halt overnight, endangering lives and livelihoods around the world. Foreign assistance from the United States had directly and indirectly been a significant part of my work and livelihood over the years and I knew that it was not a space that was well-known to the American public, so it also felt like a space that needed to be covered. As I had one contract canceled and heard from more and more of my colleagues that they were losing their jobs and being furloughed, I felt helpless. I couldn’t sue the federal government due to language in my contract and it felt like we were all being railroaded and no one was stepping up to counteract the very clearly wrong messaging.

The first couple of posts were viewed by my friends and then five days in, one started to get some traction outside of that group. I watched the numbers go up, from 100 views to 200, from 200 to 500. When I posted a follow-up mentioning I could not respond to all of the comments, a friend laughed at me, saying how could there possibly so many in an account that was barely five days old. I started working on different angles, thinking about how to promote a more nuanced view of the situation, not because I was scared, but because I did not want the backlash to back me into a corner, because I wanted to make sure that I talked about what we needed to do better, as well, even as foreign assistance was being dismantled.

I never got the chance.

The last time I checked, the post had over 13,000 views and hundreds of comments. The comments ranged from repeating lies that had been amplified on other platforms about corruption, fake programming, waste, and abuse, to personal attacks on my appearance and voice, to telling me to get over it and to suck it up and to call a “w@mmmbulance” (which I guess is thing like right-wingers calling liberals snowflakes?), to wildly unrelated claims about immigration and citizenship (clearly did not watch the whole video, but I digress). The comments were angry and I honestly found many of them silly. The fact that strangers had decided to spend time engaging with my post in this way struck me as a bit ridiculous, but here I was, learning about the influencer life and what you’re up against. I thought I had prepared myself for the worst of it, but I did not really know what was out there.

On the prodding of a friend, I stopped reading the comments. I noticed that despite outwardly saying they were silly and meaningless, they were starting to get to me. I was spending so much time on social media that I had worked really hard to protect and decrease. I needed to stop and I knew it.

Today, standing in the check-out line after having been hit over the head over and over again by the price of groceries (since when is frozen spinach $3? And the egg shelf had less than twenty cartons of eggs, leaving me to pay $10 for a 18), it was stopped for me. I opened instagram to find that my brand new account had been suspended under the community guidelines.

I screenshot the notice, sent it to a friend, posted it as a story on my now very old and private instagram account, started the appeals process, and started to think. What could I possibly have said that violated community guidelines? Did I say something wrong? After looking at them the answer is none at all. I did not do any of the below things, though I imagine that somehow, enough people had reported me under one of the below to get not just a single post censored, but the whole account.

The internet is nearly impossible to know. For years, I had twitter constantly open on my computer, monitoring dozes of conversations, taking stock of new research and wildfires, and statistical methodologies. A friend recently told me he thought twitter had only been for porn. In spite of every hour of the thousands I spent on that platform, I had had no idea that people used it that way. Naive, maybe, but there is so much hiding, so much we do not see from our little bubbles. The full extent of the power of social media and the extent to which mis- and disinformation fills our ears was only mildly known to me before this. There are whole corners of the internet where conversations grow from evil little seeds and take over the dominant narrative, regardless of the facts. They grow into vines, strangling dissent and reason, infecting angry readers and taking over the truth, shutting down voices that do not fit their narrative.

The internet is a wild place. And I know we have to keep talking over it, trying to get in a little space to let the sun shine through the weeds and vines to reveal the truth. I am not done talking. But I am going to take a little break.

From Meta: “What do our Community Guidelines cover?

• Intellectual Property – Making sure you have the rights to post the content you share.
• Appropriate Imagery – We don’t allow nudity on Instagram, with some exceptions, like photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too.
• Spam – This is not allowed on Instagram (creating or submitting unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications).
• Illegal Content – We don’t allow support or praise of terrorism, organized crime or hate groups on Instagram. Offering sexual services and selling firearms and drugs are also prohibited.
• Hate Speech, Bullying and Abuse – We remove credible threats of violence, hate speech and the targeting of private individuals. We do not allow attacks or abuse based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, disability or disease.
• Self-Injury – We do not allow glorification or encouragement of self-injury, including eating disorders. We do allow content that references self-injury and eating disorders if it is for the purpose of creating awareness or signposting support.
• Graphic Violence – Graphic violence is not allowed and we may remove videos or images of intense, graphic violence to make sure that Instagram stays appropriate for everyone. If shared in relation to important and newsworthy events, and this imagery is shared to condemn or raise awareness and educate, it may be allowed.”

One of the nice things about having a real job was a dedicated platform for sharing blog posts and accomplishments, such as papers published and studies finished. As a now very happily self-employed, independent consultant with many diverse projects, I no longer have that institutional backing for all my research (though there is for some of it, for sure), but I still have that desire to share with basically everyone when I publish a paper. I admit I am still floundering a bit without twitter. I mean, I know it’s still there and many of my friends and colleagues are still there. I had largely disconnected from it for my own sanity a year or so before new management arrived, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel its absence so strongly, but I don’t know where to share anymore. Mastodon feels empty despite an early burst of energy. Threads is, well, whatever it is. Short of texting or sending a slack message to everyone I know kind of have here, this website, anymore. And I don’t even use it that much.

So here we are! With me sharing a very long and very important paper I wrote with colleagues at the World Bank about achieving gender equality in Haiti. You might know that Haiti is having a pretty rough time right now in terms of governance, public health, violence, the aftermath of various natural disasters, and more. It felt both heart-wrenching and profoundly necessary to write about gender in Haiti because we know that as the country comes out of this crisis and rebuilds, that taking into account women’s voices, putting in place goals for gender equality, and acknowledging the pre-existing conditions that lead to rampant gender inequality and gender-based violence is necessary to build back better.

We don’t address the current crisis in this paper and the data we used are quite old because of how difficult it is to collect information right now, but I think it’s quite informative and hopefully will support policymakers as they move through this difficult time.

It’s officially been ten years since I graduated with my PhD in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I had already been teaching for a semester at Gettysburg College, having defended my doctoral thesis after sending it to my committee five months earlier from a friend’s apartment while he packed our rafts in the parking lot for a week-long trip on the Green River.

But honestly, that’s a story for another time. As I think about the ten years I have spent working in education and international development since earning those letters, and especially the last two years of upheaval/new normal/uncertainty that has marked our professional and personal lives, and what it means to be a leader in all of that.

I led a team at a very young age, likely before I was ready for it, and definitely before I had any skills to do it. I don’t mean the Head Lifeguard and Pool Manager job, though that was certainly formative in other ways. I mean when I inadvertently ran a newsroom at 23.

I left my job from straight out of college for Venezuela after a year. I had learned a ton about about econometrics and pricing and data and as the phone books started to roll around again, I said I was bored with the repetition. I was really just heartbroken and too agitated to see what else I could have learned, but nonetheless, Caracas was where my friends were. It was where I had turned 21, where I could go out dancing all night, where I could write, where I could go to the beach every weekend, where I could not constantly run into the ghosts of my ex-boyfriend.

I was running away.

So I stumbled into a newsroom on the recommendation of my former editor with the confidence of a new college grad who’d been told she could write and whose journalism experience you could count on one hand–in months. I was expecting a job as a cub reporter with mentoring, and a new boss, and a chance to write about crumbling roads and oil prices and to watch Alo, Presidente all day on Sundays waiting for the President to say something of note that we could splash across the front page. The writing was in store for me. The mentoring, not so much.

On my first day, the Nation Editor announced she was leaving. And I would be taking over, as the other native English speaker on staff was only interested in writing the crime reports–a sad, macabre necessity in Caracas that he truly excelled at. As the seasoned reporter scanned crime news for inclusion in his colorful daily column, a woman whose journalism experience exceeded the years I had been alive was leaving me in charge of a newsroom, layout, story choices, leafing through press releases, and more. I wasn’t the final word, at least in theory, but the relative absence of the editor until the late hours of the night meant I was to make a lot of decisions.

I have been thinking this week about how many mistakes I made in that role, about how truly awful I was at it, I’m sure. I trusted people I shouldn’t have. I didn’t trust others I should have, others with far more experience than I had. I thought I was responsible for every little decision, overextended myself, and overstepped. I hired folks out of desperation, only to have them fall severely short of expectations. I did not ask enough questions. I did not pay enough attention to detail. I mixed up Spanish cognates and definitely printed at least one story that where the main figure should have been billions and I said it was millions. Or was it vice versa? I didn’t get to do all the fun cub reporter things I had imagined doing.

I also learned where my ethics and morality lay when it came to my writing and politics. Turning a story about International Women’s Day into a story about how women were turning out for Chavez proved to be the straw; I am sure no reader is surprised there.

I also put out a paper, every day, for six months or so, with the help of a lot of talented journalists and layout folks and copy editors and editors and sources who answered my phone calls and provided press releases.

And I learned a ton about leading a team, about managing expectations, about people, about my limitations, about managing up, about keeping folks motivated, about problem-solving when expectations fall short, about pivoting at the last minute, about taking in new information and reacting to it, about planning and camaraderie, about taking care of each other, about listening.

When I left Caracas, I knew that working in a newsroom was not for me. I tried moonlighting as a freelancer, did some fixing for visiting journalists, even started researching a book. I don’t know if I would have been better at those things had I had a more typical cub reporter experience. Would I still be a journalist? Would I write more? I don’t know. But I do know that the responsibility made me into a better leader and a better listener. Those six months shaped my post-PhD years, offering skills to take outside academia, and perspective to lead new teams.

As we head into our second coronavirus winter here in the northern hemisphere with the looming threat of climate change and the indefinite change in how we work, I’m grateful for that experience, and am keeping it close at hand as navigate these weird waters.

When I started at R4D two and a half years ago, one of the programs I was working on asked if I could help take a recent engagement and turn it into a scholarly paper. I’ve worked on lots of papers and enjoy it and so both enthusiastically assented and optimistically asserted we could have a draft out for review in 6 months. I thought I was being pessimistic, if I’m being honest. Surely an idea this far along wouldn’t need that much ushering.

I severely underestimated the effort that it takes to get a bunch of busy professionals to comment on a write-up of old work, to make sure I understood the sampling strategy they’d used and how it might affect my econometrics, and the sheer logistical effort that it is to get 10 people in four countries to agree to a publication strategy.

But by April 2020, we were ready to go!

Only in April 2020, if you weren’t writing about coronavirus, no one wanted to read your public health paper. After a few quick rejections (they literally said they were only focusing on COVID19 papers right now), we landed on a review process at BMJ Open.

The world of public health scholarly work was a new one to me. It was like being in grad school again, learning which papers to cite and in which order, how to write a structured abstract, being told (for probably the fifth time) that sample size went into results–not methods–and other things I’ll probably never understand.

And here we are, a year later, I have my first public health journal publication and honestly, it’s a doozy!

Using a unique combination of an observational and clinical protocol, we show how childhood pneumonia goes severely underdiagnosed at public health facilities in Tanzania. On the order of only 18% of cases are correctly diagnosed. Now, normally, you’d anticipate that this means some 72% of cases go untreated. But they don’t. Half of these cases actually receive the correct antibiotics to treat the condition, even if they aren’t correctly diagnosed.

The corollary, of course, is that antibiotics are also being prescribed to children who don’t have pneumonia, and may not need antibiotics. So we are both underdiagnosing and overtreating the problem. Tanzania has one of the world’s highest burdens of childhood pneumonia, so both of these have huge implications for children affected.

I think we did some neat work, looking at correlates of correct diagnosis and bounding of the effect using simulation. Check it out at BMJ Open.

Many thanks to my R4D co-authors: Taylor Salisbury, Jean Arkedis, Cammie Lee; IDInsight co-authors: Alice Redfern and Allison Connor; and Government of Tanzanian co-authors: Ntuli A Kapologwe, Julius Massaga, Naibu Mkongwa, and Balowa Musa.

The texts started rolling in around 4pm MDT. I got out of the pool and chatted with my coach and made my way, soaking wet and hair freezing stiff, back to the car. I glanced at my phone before heading home and my only thought was, I can’t. I don’t want to know.

You might think, well, she must be thinking if she doesn’t know about it, it won’t be real. She can delude herself into believing a situation is truly non-existent if the details are fuzzy enough. But it wasn’t that. I knew what had happened, even though I didn’t open twitter or the news app, even though no text message mentioned the actual event. You just know.

My adult life has been punctuated by these alerts. First in the form of an interrupted business economics class–why we were watching basketball during class on April 20th will never be quite clear to me, but that our world had dramatically changed was crystal–then in this form, text messages.

Are you safe?

Is your family okay?

Please tell me your parents weren’t grocery shopping this afternoon.

Because you know where someone’s parents grocery shop. It’s the same grocery store you shopped at when you lived down the street from them. It’s where you bought yourself a package of peanut M&Ms once a week to try to forget for five minutes about how difficult grad school was. It’s next to Neptune’s where you had your teles mounted after too many years of them sitting in a closet. It’s next to the Sun, where you played hours and hours of Scrabble and celebrated Stout Month every February and met that one boyfriend who later married your friend’s labmate and grabbed a beer with your roommates after learning to fly fish. It’s where you carpooled with your roommates to grab groceries and to debate Colorado’s then-archaic blue laws.

Because it’s a small town, Boulder, and for me, it was home, for a long time. Boulder is the place I lived longer than any other besides my childhood home. It’s home for me in all the ways a home is, and so many more, because it’s where I made my own way as an adult, as an economist, as a feminist, as a scholar, as a friend, as a lover.

But I couldn’t be the one to send those text messages yesterday. I could barely read the ones I received. I texted some friends to tell them I loved them, but not anyone who I knew would have been in harm’s way. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t ask whether my stich n’ bitch crew was okay. I couldn’t check in with folks who I knew were still there. I couldn’t even read the news, waiting until this morning to know how many died, waiting until I’d gotten through a difficult conversation with my CEO to know their names.

Because we’ve done this so many times before. Because I’ve gotten these text messages while skiing, upon arriving to a hotel in Kolkata for a wedding, leaving classes and meetings and doctor’s appointments. Because so many moments in my adult life have been shadowed by this dread of not knowing whether someone I loved, or was part of my community, or I just had been at drivers’ ed with had been wantonly gunned down by someone who had encountered no trouble accessing weapons.

So, yes, I am safe, as I posted on twitter yesterday in the only form of outreach I could muster. But I am not okay.

I had an early morning meeting this weekend with a colleague at a data collection firm we’ve been working with. He said he was taking next week off and was headed to Costa del Couch. We all laughed, but I noted internally that I’ve had conversations with several colleagues this week about taking time off or leave during these weird times–from childcare or our jobs or searching for jobs–and while it may seem counterintuitive to take a break when we can’t escape the way we normally do, I wanted to share with the world that it’s really important to take time away right now.

I was talking with a psychologist friend recently about pulling our pneumonia survey and delaying our Nigeria intervention and my concerns about our partners and staff and he stopped me and said, “Erin, are you talking to anyone about this?” He went on to say, “what you’re feeling is grief.”

It struck me in that moment that while I have been saying for many weeks now that our world will not be the same after this, saying it is not the same as feeling it and acknowledging it. We’re all experiencing huge changes in the way we’re able to live our lives right now. With or without family, with or without friends, all of us without our normal level of travel and cultural and personal connections and sense of purpose that comes with our work, a decreased ability to do work, a decreased ability to support our partners and staff in other countries, a need to engage more deeply with being alone or being intimately with a small group of people, and sometimes both. There’s a good chance we might not be able to travel internationally again this year. There’s a good chance we may see our offices and friends for only a few weeks at a time before having to go back to lockdown again and again. Our favorite restaurants and gyms and daycares and museums are closed and some may never re-open. There’s a good chance that by the time you read this, our projections of what the next few weeks or months will look like will change dramatically (now my standard COVID caveat).

I want to acknowledge that there is a profound loss associated with all of these changes, and it’s perfectly okay to feel that, however you’re experiencing it.

To anyone who is struggling to articulate their feelings these days, anyone who is feeling particularly agitated or lethargic or sad or frustrated or confused (I really think I covered the gamut here), it’s worth reading the following article in Harvard Business Review. I found it helpful to have someone tease out the contours of grief during these weird times and as encouragement to take a step back and a break, where possible. I would encourage everyone to take some time to feel things right now, because we are indeed grieving, even if we haven’t lost anyone to this disease yet—though some of us are experiencing that, too.

And with that, wishing everyone a Chag Sameach, Happy Easter, or good rest tonight and this weekend. Sending all the comfort and hugs I can muster across the interwebs. Please do reach out if there’s anything I can do for you.

Let’s face it, social distancing is sad. #CancelEverything is sad. Isolation and quarantine are sad. But as long as we’re testing the capabilities of zoom and other videoconferencing software and agreeing to stay at least 6 feet away from people, we might as well see and hear beautiful things. The world’s symphonies, museums, aquariums, and artists are providing access to their joy online. This is a running list, please let me know if you hear of others and I will update.

While these are all free, please consider making donations to your favorite museums and arts spaces, and artists and musicians to lessen the burden on all in this difficult time.*

FILL OUT YOUR CENSUS FORM!

1. You’ll get a form in the mail this week. Fill it online before April 1 with some really basic information on you and your family. This helps in so many ways.
   1. We get quick, accurate information to better assess how to allocate public services and political representation.
   2. It means a stranger doesn’t have to go knocking on your door in a month looking for you and possibly spreading this virus further.

MUSIC

1. Berlin Philharmonic is offering free access to its online concerts. Use the code BERLINPHIL when you check out.
2. The Metropolitan Opera will be HD streaming a recorded opera every evening at 7:30pm ET on their website starting March 16.
3. The Seattle Symphony will be sharing videos, live-streams, and other broadcasts every evening at 7:30pm PDT.
4. The Vienna State Opera has opened its video archives and will be playing ballets and operas online at 7pm or 5pm CET (registration required).
5. Yo-Yo Ma is occasionally posting #SongsofComfort on twitter. This man is a national treasure. If you’ve never had the opportunity to hear him play, do try. I bawled like a baby when I got to see him at Tanglewood a few years ago.

MUSEUMS

1. The National Gallery of Art has several exhibitions online and also has kid activities for download.
2. Here’s a list of 11 other museums from around the world that you can visit online.

ANIMALS

1. The Monterrey Bay Aquarium has webcams available of its many different sea environments.
2. Two baby eagles were born at Chincoteague National Park last month and they have a webcam! They post occasional videos and the eaglets are adorable.
3. The Denver Zoo has a baby rhino and the videos they are posting are amazing.
4. Big Bear Valley Eagle Nest Cam

BOOKS and STORIES

1. LibriVox offers a ton of free audiobooks for a range of books whose copyrights have expired, read by volunteers. I’ve been listening to Evangeline and it’s great
2. Kindle and Apple Books also offer books for free whose copyrights have expired.
3. If you have a library card, you can get Kindle Books through Overdrive. Here are instructions on how to set it up.
4. You can download 300,000 books from the NYPL for free.
5. Reach, Incorporated, a DC-based literacy non-profit, has its teen authors reading their books on their youtube channel and keeps updating with new content.
6. Audible has a free 30-day trial for audiobooks and has made some titles free.

EXERCISE

1. Down Dog App is an at-home yoga and barre app that’s free to download and use through April 1.
2. The Ballet Physique streaming studio is a Denver, CO-based barre studio with great instructors and has a 14-day free trial.
3. Les Mills has a bunch of free HIIT workouts on their website for quick, hard cardio workouts.

COURSES

1. Scholastic has a bunch of kid activities for download while schools are closed, from pre-K to Grade 6+.
2. FreeCode Camp has 450 online courses you can take for free.
3. National Geographic also has a lot of kids’ homeschooling resources, Pre-K to 12.

RELIGIOUS SERVICES

1. St. John’s Episcopal Church in DC is live-streaming church services

*Edited and restructured as the list gets longer. Keep sending them!

A few years ago, a colleague at Towson got in touch and asked if I had any data from that refugee project I had worked on. He had an honors student with a lot of promise, he said, and wouldn’t it be cool to work on a paper together? I, having little time or incentive (as a then-independent consultant/researcher/quasi-academic/whatever) to publish, loved the idea of getting some of that hard work into the public sphere. When that student graduated and we had one paper published, we kept going, writing another paper with the refugee data, and then cajoled another student into working with us, too, on an idea about terrorism and women’s employment in Afghanistan.

As if I couldn’t be happier to work with this crew, the wins keep coming. I’m very excited to announce that this paper with Seth and Lauren Cahalan came to fruition and has been accepted at Oxford Development Studies! In light of a heavily publicized paper on time to publication in economics, it’s worth noting this paper saw its fair share of rejection, but ultimately was about 2.5 years from idea to paper acceptance. We’re very excited.

We ask two main research questions in the paper:

1. Is the number of terrorist attacks and casualties associated with women’s employment?
2. Is that relationship different for men?

Theoretically, we hypothesized it could go either way. If terrorist attacks are more likely to directly affect male mortality, then perhaps women need to enter the workforce to provide for their families. On the other hand, if more attacks make the perceived security situation worse, male decision makers may be less likely to permit women to work.

Overall, both men’s and women’s employment go down at about the same rate (though disproportionate against the baseline) when the number of attacks goes up, supporting the fear and security hypothesis. But women’s employment actually goes up when there are more casualties, supporting the replacement hypothesis. Ultimately this increase is small, and only holds up in rural areas for women in non-agricultural work

I love this paper for lots of reasons besides stellar coauthors. It was so neat to watch Lauren build her Stata skills through the careful matching of datasets and then really dig into the econometrics. Topically, it continues a really fun strand of my work on women in the labor force with the added context of conflict-affected space.

The abstract is below, but I think there are few important things to come out of this paper.

The first is that causality is hard here. We look at lagged variables to try to show how changes in number of events and casualties changes labor force participation down the line, but it’s likely that attacks aren’t random and may even be related to the number of women in the workforce.

The second is that there are some really interesting rural/urban differences, much of which appears to be driven by which sectors are already accepting of women, but could be driven by underreporting of agricultural work by women as we see in other parts of the world.

Seth, Lauren and I had lunch on Saturday at an Afghani restaurant in DC and it was a reminder of how much fun these have been for me. Seth has turned these initial two projects with students into a veritable researcher training ground, with Slack groups and lab meetings and a steady stream of excellent students who are asking interesting questions, learning the ins and outs of econometric analysis, and generally killing it. If you have the desire to do research with undergrads–including and especially practitioners–check out the work Seth has done to create lessons learned from this group. Or! Bring him a research idea and ask him who the next Savannah or Lauren is; I’m sure you’ll get a good one!

Some of my favorite problems to tackle are those of measurement. For instance, how do we think about social norms, but in a quantitative way? And, is it even possible to create a universal (or even multiple-country) indicator for women’s empowerment (been thinking about this one A LOT lately). Over the past year, I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how to measure skills, and specifically, how USAID should measure changes in skills as the causal effect of its workforce development programs all over the world.

Turns out, this question is not even remotely trivial, but I’m very excited to share some recently released guidance on exactly how USAID plans to incorporate some of the latest and greatest advances in measuring many (but not all) types of skills in its youth programming around the world. This is officially joint work with Catherine Honeyman of World Learning (a delightful collaborator if I do say so myself), but also benefited enormously from a wide consultative process with stakeholders across USAID in DC and around the world as well as implementing partners and peer research organizations working on issues of skills development for youth.

As background, USAID works with youth programming in 60 countries and workforce development programs in 30 countries. All of these programs are working to impart technical, vocational, social-emotional, digital, reading, and mathematics skills (and more) to various program participants. And all of them (yes ALL of them) are required to report back to USAID on their project in various ways.

Alongside, there has been a ton of work recently on how to measure various skill development. As we learn more about the importance of “skills” to labor market outcomes like perseverance or grit and hard-working or dependable, the more necessary it becomes important to measure them in a way that has meaning across different spaces. After lengthy reading and consultation, we identified two skills or groups of skills that were selected to be “standard foreign assistance indicators”–percent individuals with improved soft skills and improved reading skills–and three that have been designated “supplemental indicators,” percent of individuals with improved math skills, percent with digital literacy skills, and percent passing a context-relevant technical skills assessment. More precise wording is in the table, with a much longer justification in the how-to note itself.

In short, though, it’s really tough to standardize measures across all those countries and all those contexts.

I won’t lie to you; we did not find all the answers. However, I think the note provides an excellent jumping off point for ongoing conversations on how to measure important workforce development programming outcomes and highlights important gaps in our understanding of how to measure these outcomes in a consistent and useful way. Please reach out if you have ideas!

We also put together a fun (measurement is FUN, I SAY!) FAQ that you can read here.