Yeah, hence the caveat with roughly. I actually don’t think they’re much better off—the former group are unemployed and thus have basically no income! - but I feel pretty sanguine about generating $50 or $100 in income per $1 spent if your intervention operates at scale, just because the unit costs of solving an information friction seem trivially small. (Also, business operators are better off but the potential to multiply business income is way higher.)
The easiest way to get this would be through agricultural livelihood interventions. Farmers are the extreme poor, and they have tons of frictions to market transactions, so you are targeting the right population and also getting market-based leverage.
I am not an GHD expert but I would expect someone who has a high school diploma in the richest country in Africa to be a lot better off than the typical GD recipient which seems to be from the poorest strata of the poorest countries.
And so, yeah, I agree one would probably a 50-100x expected multiplier to make this work. I am not saying this is not possible, I just thought the bar stated here was significantly too optimistic.
I picked South Africa because Harambee works there, but the same issue—employers don’t know who is good to hire so job seekers struggle to find jobs—is true across Africa and for much poorer populations than high school educated workers.
But the point would have been better demonstrated with livelihood interventions for farmers.
Yeah, hence the caveat with roughly. I actually don’t think they’re much better off—the former group are unemployed and thus have basically no income! - but I feel pretty sanguine about generating $50 or $100 in income per $1 spent if your intervention operates at scale, just because the unit costs of solving an information friction seem trivially small. (Also, business operators are better off but the potential to multiply business income is way higher.)
The easiest way to get this would be through agricultural livelihood interventions. Farmers are the extreme poor, and they have tons of frictions to market transactions, so you are targeting the right population and also getting market-based leverage.
I am not an GHD expert but I would expect someone who has a high school diploma in the richest country in Africa to be a lot better off than the typical GD recipient which seems to be from the poorest strata of the poorest countries.
And so, yeah, I agree one would probably a 50-100x expected multiplier to make this work. I am not saying this is not possible, I just thought the bar stated here was significantly too optimistic.
I picked South Africa because Harambee works there, but the same issue—employers don’t know who is good to hire so job seekers struggle to find jobs—is true across Africa and for much poorer populations than high school educated workers.
But the point would have been better demonstrated with livelihood interventions for farmers.
Thanks, and sorry if I was too nitpicky then.