Thanks this is a really interesting initiative. I’ve lived in Uganda for 10 years, and I LOVE this aspect of it here, as it is innovative, realistic, and I think will help students from another context learn about different aspects of working in a context like Germany, helping their future job prospects.
”After the first year of studies, students have to cover their living expenses through part-time jobs (as is typical in Germany).”
My biggest concern with scholarship programs is always who is being selected. These kind of scholarships often favour people from richer families, as it is so hard to complete high school and get a good grade. The counterfactual benefit therefore often becomes far less, as they would have gone to university and done really well regardless. Selection is hard for a number of reasons, but I would be interested to hear exactly how you select your scholarship winners, especially looking at their low-income status. My criteria would be focused almost entirely on objective measures—it is very hard to rely on stories , I used to lean on them a bit but have given up almost completely after too many times when stories let me down. People are smart, and know how to tell a story a donor likes. The best objective measure as an indicator of socioeconomic status I think is where people went to primary school and (to a lesser extent) high school.
- I would be tending towards ruling out anyone who grew up in Kampala the capital, as most people who live there are among the richer cohort of the country, and accurately identifying the minority who really are extremely poor from there would be very difficult - Actively focusing on people from poorer, more neglected areas of the country, IE the North and East of Uganda - (For most) I would focus on people who attended government primary school, with high preference to people who attended most of their primary school in a non-town/village setting. I would say that where a kid is sent to primary school might be among the best single indicators of socioeconomic status of a family.
I’m also a bit interested in the fraud, obviously we can’t avoid fraud completely whilerunning NGOs in these contexts (At OneDay Health we always lose a small percentage of money to theft every year), but I would have thought that educational scholarships would have been one of the easier initiatives to avoid major fraud on, as you will mostly be paying flights and in-country costs in Germany, which I hope have little room for corruption. Not sure if you would be open to DMing me the details, but I might well have something small to offer you in terms of preventing it in future.
Thanks so much Nick, this is really helpful and interesting. We do base eligibility on objective criteria, such as asset ownership, housing situation, consumption, etc. We hesitate to exclude folks based on very broad categories such as location (although we do restrict eligibility by district for research and logistics reasons). So far this has been working reasonably well, as you can see from the data above on income amongst the selected students. Very interesting point about the government schools, we’ll discuss that.
On the fraud, yes I’d be grateful for any advice you have!
That’s interesting Johannes—I would be pretty nervous about income, and consumption questions yielding accurate results. I wouldn’t call family income or consumption measures objective criteria really as it relies on what people tell you—perhaps parental qualification level might be better if you do want to get an objective idea of likely income?
I might be confused but isn’t the data about income just from your own surveys, what is it proving exactly?
I think the example of 7 out of 30 students falsifying or attempting to results, is decent evidence of the lengths people will go to to get their kids or themselves onto a program like this.
If you are going to rely on subjective interviewing, I think the IPA validated poverty scores are pretty good, you might be using them already. Some of the questions are pretty regionally dependant so not super reliable (there’s a silly one about whether you eat rice or not, which of course doesn’t work if you already grow rice as a staple), but at least it is a researched and validated survey https://www.povertyindex.org/country/uganda
On the fraud front sorry I missed the explanation, I would have thought you could just have candidates sit a standard English proficiency exam in the German Embassy? It seems like an easy fix thankfully.
One of your biggest risk as you grow I would say is in student selection. Your people employed in Uganda will have so much incentive to favour family members, take bribes for places etc. This is why in this case I would use as many truly objective poverty measures as possible even if it is not technically the “best” way of assessing poverty. The first thing I would do would be get photos/photocopies of the highest level of education of their parents and their siblings as this will give you a pretty good idea.
I would also seriously consider separating people who identify potential candidates and gather the poverty data, with the people doing the assessing (if you don’t already). I would have people submitting the objective information to a central office, which would then select people based on criteria. I would be interested to see your current criteria as well.
If it was me I would be excluding based on location to make selecting more reliable. I would definitely exclude Kampala, I struggle to see strong arguments against that and perhaps even other major towns as well.
As a side note I would also be interested to see a cost-effectiveness analysis (you may have published one already).
Anyway I’m super interested and think this is super cool.
Thanks this is a really interesting initiative. I’ve lived in Uganda for 10 years, and I LOVE this aspect of it here, as it is innovative, realistic, and I think will help students from another context learn about different aspects of working in a context like Germany, helping their future job prospects.
”After the first year of studies, students have to cover their living expenses through part-time jobs (as is typical in Germany).”
My biggest concern with scholarship programs is always who is being selected. These kind of scholarships often favour people from richer families, as it is so hard to complete high school and get a good grade. The counterfactual benefit therefore often becomes far less, as they would have gone to university and done really well regardless. Selection is hard for a number of reasons, but I would be interested to hear exactly how you select your scholarship winners, especially looking at their low-income status. My criteria would be focused almost entirely on objective measures—it is very hard to rely on stories , I used to lean on them a bit but have given up almost completely after too many times when stories let me down. People are smart, and know how to tell a story a donor likes. The best objective measure as an indicator of socioeconomic status I think is where people went to primary school and (to a lesser extent) high school.
- I would be tending towards ruling out anyone who grew up in Kampala the capital, as most people who live there are among the richer cohort of the country, and accurately identifying the minority who really are extremely poor from there would be very difficult
- Actively focusing on people from poorer, more neglected areas of the country, IE the North and East of Uganda
- (For most) I would focus on people who attended government primary school, with high preference to people who attended most of their primary school in a non-town/village setting. I would say that where a kid is sent to primary school might be among the best single indicators of socioeconomic status of a family.
I’m also a bit interested in the fraud, obviously we can’t avoid fraud completely whilerunning NGOs in these contexts (At OneDay Health we always lose a small percentage of money to theft every year), but I would have thought that educational scholarships would have been one of the easier initiatives to avoid major fraud on, as you will mostly be paying flights and in-country costs in Germany, which I hope have little room for corruption. Not sure if you would be open to DMing me the details, but I might well have something small to offer you in terms of preventing it in future.
Thanks, Nick.
Thanks so much Nick, this is really helpful and interesting. We do base eligibility on objective criteria, such as asset ownership, housing situation, consumption, etc. We hesitate to exclude folks based on very broad categories such as location (although we do restrict eligibility by district for research and logistics reasons). So far this has been working reasonably well, as you can see from the data above on income amongst the selected students. Very interesting point about the government schools, we’ll discuss that.
On the fraud, yes I’d be grateful for any advice you have!
Johannes
That’s interesting Johannes—I would be pretty nervous about income, and consumption questions yielding accurate results. I wouldn’t call family income or consumption measures objective criteria really as it relies on what people tell you—perhaps parental qualification level might be better if you do want to get an objective idea of likely income?
I might be confused but isn’t the data about income just from your own surveys, what is it proving exactly?
I think the example of 7 out of 30 students falsifying or attempting to results, is decent evidence of the lengths people will go to to get their kids or themselves onto a program like this.
If you are going to rely on subjective interviewing, I think the IPA validated poverty scores are pretty good, you might be using them already. Some of the questions are pretty regionally dependant so not super reliable (there’s a silly one about whether you eat rice or not, which of course doesn’t work if you already grow rice as a staple), but at least it is a researched and validated survey
https://www.povertyindex.org/country/uganda
On the fraud front sorry I missed the explanation, I would have thought you could just have candidates sit a standard English proficiency exam in the German Embassy? It seems like an easy fix thankfully.
One of your biggest risk as you grow I would say is in student selection. Your people employed in Uganda will have so much incentive to favour family members, take bribes for places etc. This is why in this case I would use as many truly objective poverty measures as possible even if it is not technically the “best” way of assessing poverty. The first thing I would do would be get photos/photocopies of the highest level of education of their parents and their siblings as this will give you a pretty good idea.
I would also seriously consider separating people who identify potential candidates and gather the poverty data, with the people doing the assessing (if you don’t already). I would have people submitting the objective information to a central office, which would then select people based on criteria. I would be interested to see your current criteria as well.
If it was me I would be excluding based on location to make selecting more reliable. I would definitely exclude Kampala, I struggle to see strong arguments against that and perhaps even other major towns as well.
As a side note I would also be interested to see a cost-effectiveness analysis (you may have published one already).
Anyway I’m super interested and think this is super cool.
Nick.