Want to Change the World? Sponsor a Child
(Christianity Today, June 2013.) “What can an ordinary person like me do for the poor in developing countries?” I have been asked this question casually at parties and social gatherings when people find out that I am a development economist. (Yes, economists occasionally do attend such events.) My response to this question had become habitual: “Perhaps sponsor a child?” I suppose that I gave this answer because I sponsored a child and if I was supposed to know something about how to help the poor, I should encourage people to do something I was doing. After all, child sponsorship made some sense: it provided poor children in the developing world access to education and health services, and in some programs, spiritual mentorship. It worked among the young, trying to nip poverty at the bud. But I became increasingly annoyed with my auto-pilot response. The truth was that I hadn’t the slightest clue about the impact child sponsorship had on the children it tried to help.
The dis-satisfaction with my answer began to influence the research topics I offered to my graduate students. “Have you considered looking at the impact of child sponsorship?” I would ask them. One student was interested, and she followed the topic long enough to find out that no one had ever investigated the question, despite the millions of children that were being sponsored and the billions of dollars that were being channeled into sponsorship programs from ordinary people and families who wanted to do something to help. But we were having trouble finding a sponsorship organization that was willing to work with us. What if the research discovered that it didn’t work? This was the risk that some child sponsorship organization out there had to take.
A couple of years later another graduate student, Joanna Chu, was interested in the topic. Joanna was sponsoring a child with Compassion International. Perhaps this would help Compassion be receptive to partnering with her for her master’s thesis. She put out some feelers with Compassion’s research director, Joel Vanderhart. Joel decided to do what no other member of a child sponsorship organization was willing to do to that point–he took a risk. We were able to carry out the study with one major condition: Compassion reserved the right to remain anonymous; they would be referred to as “a leading child-sponsorship organization” in any academic publication. In the course of talking with Joel, we stumbled upon a vein of gold to a development economist: Joel casually mentioned to us that Compassion had employed an arbitrary age-eligibility rule when they underwent a major world-wide expansion of their program during the 1980s: Only children who were 12 and younger were eligible for sponsorship when one of their programs entered a new village. Our research strategy for identifying the casual impacts of the program became clear. We would obtain early enrollment lists from different village projects when programs were introduced during the 1980s, and track down the families of those who were first sponsored in these projects. Then we would obtain information on the life outcomes of these formerly sponsored children, now grown up adults, and compare them to their adult siblings who were just slightly too old to be sponsored when the program was introduced at the time they were all children. In this way we would be able to control for genetics, family environment, and the host of other factors that these individuals shared in common. The only difference that could significantly affect adult life outcomes across the sample would be the fact that Providence had allowed some of these siblings to be age-eligible for child sponsorship, and others not.
Joanna even found a partner for her research project, Laine Rutledge, now a doctoral student in economics at the University of Washington. Working with Joel, we decided that Joanna and Laine would travel to Uganda. The two graduate students spent the summer of 2008 in Uganda, where they obtained data on 809 individuals, including 188 individuals who were formerly sponsored children. They had a number of adventures in the field, including an encounter with a wild dog that took a bite out of Laney’s leg on a survey visit. A couple of months after they returned, Joanna and Laine came into my office one day.
“Prof, we have some results,” they said. A nervous excitement seemed to fill up my small office. (Read more at ChristianityToday.com)