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An excerpt from Working to Restore on sustainable business.

While most evaluations of education programs in developing countries examine effects one or two years after a program has been introduced, this study does so over an extended duration of a program. Administered in Punjab, Pakistan, the program offers cash benefits to households conditional on girls' regular attendance in secondary grades in government schools. The study evaluates the evolution of the program's effects on girls' secondary school enrollment numbers over roughly a decade of its existence. The program was targeted to districts with low adult literacy rates, a targeting mechanism that provides an observed, numerical program assignment variable and results in a cutoff value. Recent advances in regression discontinuity designs allow the study to appropriately fit key features of the data. The study finds that the program had positive effects on girls’ secondary school enrollment numbers throughout the period and that these effects were stable. This pattern is observed despite a loss of more than 60 percent in the real value of the cash benefit over the period. The findings are consistent with potential behavioral explanations, such as the program making girls' education salient to households or catalyzing a shift in social norms around girls' education.

The international nonprofit Orbis' investments in cutting-edge technologies have revolutionized its telemedicine capabilities by expediting two-way communication between ophthalmologists in the United States and Europe and their counterparts in Asia, Africa, and South America.. A Field Report from the Fall 2019 issue., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 17(4), 13-14

Evening-hour luminosity observed using satellites is a good proxy for economic activity. The strengths of measuring economic activity using nightlight measurements include that the data capture informal activity, are available in near real-time, are cheap to obtain, and can be used to conduct very spatially granular analysis. This paper presents a measure of monthly economic activity at the district level based on cleaned Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite nightlight and rural population. The paper demonstrates that this new method can shed light on recent episodes in South Asia: first, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal; second, demonetization in India; and, third, violent conflict outbreaks in Afghanistan.

Arghyam, a grantmaking foundation, takes a data-driven approach to helping transform India’s water and sanitation systems., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 10-11

Swades Foundation is working to break nonprofit community development efforts out of their silos in India., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 16(1), 15-16

The Aga Khan Development Network is empowering communities., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 4-5

Hindi for “friend,” the Saathi Internet program enables women in rural India to help other women improve their lives and livelihoods., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 14-15

An immense cross-sector partnership is responsible for the immunization success story., Stanford Social Innovation Review, 10(3), 63-64

InVenture enables people in India and Kenya to send their financial data via SMS and get a simple financial overview of their monetary lives.