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Want to Change the World? Sponsor
a Child
Friday, February 21, 2014 Jeff Lampl
"Love
bears
all things, believes all things,
endures all things”
1
Corinthians 13:7
On
Sunday we hear from a man whose life was broken and then repaired.
In the process he was given the gift of being used by God to repair other
lives as well. The following
article is not his but I was moved so much by it that I want to share it with
you. Jeff
Bruce
Wydick, a top economist shares the
astounding news about that little picture hanging on our refrigerator.
What
can an ordinary person like me do to help the poor?" When people find out
at parties and social gatherings that I am a development economist (and yes, we
economists do attend such events), often they ask me this question. For a long
time my response was the same: "Perhaps sponsor a child?"
I
suppose I gave this answer because I myself sponsored a child, and if I was
supposed to know something about helping the poor, I should encourage people to
do what I was doing. After all, child sponsorship makes sense: By focusing on
youth instead of adults, it aims to nip poverty in the bud, providing children
in the developing world access to education, health services, and, in some
programs, spiritual guidance. But over time my autopilot response started to
annoy me. The truth was that I hadn't the slightest clue about the effect
child-sponsorship programs had on children.
Dissatisfaction
with my pat answer began to inform conversations with my graduate students.
"Have you considered researching the impact of child sponsorship?" I
would ask. One student was interested, and she followed the topic long enough to
find out that no one had ever investigated the topic, despite 9 million children
sponsored worldwide, and the more than $5 billion per year being channeled into
sponsorship programs from ordinary people wanting to help. But we were having
trouble finding a sponsorship organization willing to work with us. What if the
research discovered that sponsorship didn't work? This was the risk that some
organization out there had to take.
A
couple years later, another graduate student, Joanna Chu, became interested in
the topic, in part because she was sponsoring a child with Compassion
International. Chu put out some feelers with Compassion's research director,
Joel Vanderhart, who decided to risk what no other child-sponsorship
organization was willing to risk at that point: to allow its program to be
scrutinized. We were able to carry out the study with one major condition:
Compassion would remain anonymous. They would be referred to as "a leading
child-sponsorship organization" in any academic publication.
In
the course of talking with Vanderhart, we stumbled upon a vein of gold for any
development economist: He casually mentioned that Compassion had used an
arbitrary age-eligibility rule when they underwent a major worldwide expansion
during the 1980s. When one of Compassion's programs entered a new village,
typically only children who were 12 and younger were eligible for sponsorship.
With
that, our strategy for identifying the causal impacts of the program became
clear. We would obtain early enrollment lists from different village projects
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 adults—and compare them to
their adult siblings who had been slightly too old to be sponsored when the
program arrived in their village. In this way we would be able to control for
genetics, family environment, and a host of other factors that the siblings held
in common. The only difference that could affect adult life outcomes across the
sample would be the fact that Providence had allowed some of these siblings and
not others to be age-eligible for child sponsorship.
The
Results
Chu
found a partner for her research project: Laine Rutledge, now a doctoral student
in economics at the University of Washington. The two graduate students spent
the summer of 2008 in Uganda, where they obtained data on 809 individuals,
including 188 who were sponsored as children. The students had a number of
adventures in the field, including a run-in with a wild dog that took a bite out
of Rutledge's leg. A couple of months after they returned, Chu and Rutledge
stopped by to share the results. A nervous excitement quickly filled my small
office.
You
could beat this data senseless, and it was incapable of showing anything other
than extremely large and statistically significant impacts on educational
outcomes for sponsored children.
We
loaded the data onto my computer from Rutledge's flash drive, and I rattled off
some code to replicate their estimations. I was looking at the results of
Compassion's impact on educational outcomes in Uganda—I stared at the
statistics on my screen to make sure I was seeing correctly.
"This
is . . . amazing," was all I could mumble. We tried slicing the data
different ways, but each showed significant educational improvements. You could
beat this data senseless, and it was incapable of showing anything other than
extremely large and statistically significant impacts on educational outcomes
for sponsored children.
A
few months later, I presented the Uganda findings in the weekly development
economics seminar at UC–Berkeley. The Berkeley seminar was familiar turf, but
not a place to suffer fools gladly. We received a number of constructive
comments, but the consensus was that the underlying methodology was sound. What
was obvious was that the study needed external validity. Uganda was one country.
Compassion was one organization. We would try to expand the study to multiple
organizations and countries.
Vanderhart
flew out to San Francisco to talk about expanding the study. This was our first
in-person meeting. Vanderhart is a big, conservative man with a lumberjack beard
who instantly reminded me of Merlin Olsen from Little House on the Prairie
reruns I watch with my kids. I wondered how he felt about trusting a bunch of
San Francisco academics with the public credibility of his organization. We
strategized about expanding the study to include other major child-sponsorship
organizations. But those organizations weren't interested. So with Compassion
remaining as the only organization amenable to the project, we drew up a plan to
carry out the study in six countries: Uganda, Guatemala, the Philippines, India,
Kenya, and Bolivia—two countries on each of the three continents that make up
the developing world. They represented Compassion's work worldwide.
But
to expand the project, we needed grant money. Based on the preliminary results
in Uganda, we were able to obtain usaid funding through basis, a development
economics research network based at the University of California at Davis.
Rutledge coordinated the fieldwork in the remaining five countries. By August
2010, we had obtained data on 10,144 individuals over an array of variables:
primary, secondary, and tertiary education; type and quality of adult
employment; community leadership; church leadership; assets owned as adults; and
a number of other variables that would measure that slippery word that
economists love, development.
We
presented the results at a number of universities and research institutions:
Stanford, the World Bank, UC–Davis, Georgia Tech, the University of Southern
California, the University of Washington, and Cornell, among others. I had asked
Paul Glewwe, an expert on the economics of schooling and children's issues in
developing countries, to join the project. I had met Glewwe, a professor at the
University of Minnesota and former economist at the World Bank, through the
Association of Christian Economists. I knew he would bring additional expertise
in program analysis and econometrics (a branch of statistics for testing
economic hypotheses) to the larger research project.
The
results in our other five countries confirm the positive impact of Compassion's
child-sponsorship program in Uganda. In all six countries, we find that
sponsorship results in better educational outcomes for children. Overall,
sponsorship makes children 27 to 40 percent more likely to complete secondary
school, and 50 to 80 percent more likely to complete a university education.
Child sponsorship also appears to be the great equalizer in education: In areas
where outcomes are worse, such as sub-Saharan Africa, impacts are bigger. In
countries where existing outcomes aren't as bad, like in India and the
Philippines, impacts are significant but smaller. In countries where existing
outcomes are higher among boys, the impact on girls is larger; in countries
where the existing educational outcomes are higher for girls, the impact on boys
is larger. We even find some evidence for spillover effects on the unsponsored
younger siblings of sponsored children.
To
put it simply, these educational impacts of sponsorship are large—roughly
equal to the substantial effects of the Rosenwald Schools program that from
1913–31 educated blacks in the Jim Crow South. They are roughly double those
of Oportunidades, the celebrated conditional-cash-transfer program that
gives cash to mothers in Mexico for keeping their children in school. It's so
successful, it has been replicated in dozens of developing countries around the
world with financial incentives from the World Bank.
Compassion's
results extend beyond school attendance. We found that child sponsorship means
that when the child grows up, he is 14–18 percent more likely to obtain a
salaried job, and 35 percent more likely to obtain a white-collar job. Many of
the Compassion-sponsored children become teachers as adults instead of remaining
jobless or working in menial agricultural labor. We found some evidence that
they are more likely to grow up to be both community leaders and church leaders.
The
academic paper containing the full methodology and results of our study appears
in the current issue of the Journal of Political Economy. Edited by the
department of economics at the University of Chicago, the JPE is
comparable to, say, The New England Journal of Medicine for medical
researchers, accepting only a small fraction of submitted papers whose results
are often pertinent to the general population.
Compassion
inquired politely: Do you think we could remove the anonymity clause?
The
Hope Hypothesis
Compassion
asked me to visit Colorado Springs to present the results of our research. I had
an appointment with Wess Stafford, then president of Compassion, a man I had
always respected from a distance but now had a chance to meet. His secretary
ushered me into his office, where a large wooden skipper's wheel was mounted on
the rear wall. It was a big ship to pilot: Compassion sponsors 1.3 million
children in 26 countries.
Stafford
greeted me with a warm handshake and ushered me into a comfortable chair in
front of his desk.
"Your
program works," I said.
"I
know," he smiled.
"But
I am analyzing this data as a dispassionate scientist, not as an advocate of
Compassion like yourself," I replied. "We're not just finding positive
correlations, but substantial causal effects from the program—in every
country—especially Africa. I'm wondering what is happening here. You're a
former academic. I think there is something deeper going on in the program that
would interest the greater development community. I need some leads."
"Try
hope," he said.
I
raised my eyebrows. "Hope?"
Hope
is a fuzzy concept for economists. I squinted my eyes. He explained:
For
my dissertation, I asked a bunch of kids what they wanted to be when they grew
up. Some were Compassion kids, some were unsponsored. There was a little bit of
a difference between the two groups. But then I asked them later what they
realistically expected to be when they grew up. Here, there was a big difference
between the sponsored kids and the other kids. You see, poverty causes children
to have very low self-esteem, low aspirations. The big difference that
sponsorship makes is that it expands children's views about their own
possibilities. Many of these children don't think they are capable of much. We
help them realize that they are each given special gifts from God to benefit
their communities, and we try to help them develop aspirations for their future.
Portraits
of Change
Stafford's
story brought to mind another one I had heard in the field from Compassion
workers in Kenya. A pilot from Kenya Airways had visited a number of Compassion
projects to talk about his job. The children were fascinated to meet someone who
flew the planes they saw zooming across the sky. They had never met such an
amazing and interesting person, and after his visit, most of them wanted to be
pilots.
Whatever
it was, something that Compassion was doing was working, and we wanted to
explore the mysterious black box of poverty and child psychology. To test the
hope hypothesis, we carried out a follow-up study on currently sponsored
children. Did sponsored children have higher aspirations than non-sponsored
children who were just like them in other ways? If there were no statistical
differences in aspirations between sponsored and non-sponsored children, we
could rule out the hope hypothesis and explore something else.
We
carried out three studies—in Bolivia, Kenya, and Indonesia—with 1,320
children. The sample included sponsored children, their unsponsored siblings,
and other unsponsored children from the same communities. In each of the
studies, we found that sponsored children consistently had significantly higher
expectations for their own schooling than unsponsored children, even when
controlling for family and other factors. They also generally had higher
expectations for adult employment. (Years later, a disproportionate number of
Kenyan kids still wanted to be pilots.) Many of these findings came close to
mirroring the adult differences we measured between formerly sponsored children
and non-sponsored children.
The
puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place: the patient nurturing of
self-worth, self-expectations, dreams, and aspirations may be a critical part of
helping children escape poverty.
In
Indonesia, my graduate students carried out a unique experiment with 540
children living in the slums in Jakarta. Of these 540 children, 288 were
sponsored and the rest were either siblings of sponsored children, children on
the waitlist to be sponsored, or siblings of children on the waitlist. We sat
each child at a desk with a blank piece of paper and a fresh box of 24 colored
pencils. We asked each to "draw a picture of yourself in the rain."
Child
psychologists have demonstrated that self-portrait drawings reveal a cornucopia
of information about the psychological health of children. Different facets of
children's drawings have been empirically correlated with various emotional
disorders: missing facial features correlate with shyness; a tiny figure, with
insecurity; big teeth and monster figures, with aggression; choice of dark
colors over light colors, with depression. In self-portraits set in the rain,
drawing yourself holding an umbrella could indicate an enhanced view of
self-efficacy—dealing with a challenging situation proactively rather than
being a victim of it.
One
of my graduate students, Teddi Auker, spent dozens of hours coding these
drawings with 1s and 0s to account for 20 different features for each drawing.
What the self-portraits revealed was remarkable. Compassion children were 12
percentage points more likely to choose light colors to draw pictures of
themselves than non-sponsored children. They were 13 percentage points less
likely to draw themselves as a tiny figure, 6 percentage points less likely to
draw themselves as a monster, and 9 percentage points more likely to draw
themselves holding an umbrella. Overall, when we combined these characteristics
into aggregated psychometric indices, controlling for other factors, we found
that Compassion children's drawings displayed significantly lower levels of
hopelessness, higher levels of optimism and self-efficacy, and higher levels of
overall happiness.
We
can't yet establish a clear causal link between the increased levels of
hopefulness and aspirations among sponsored children and their improved adult
lives. But the puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place: the patient
nurturing of self-worth, self-expectations, dreams, and aspirations may be a
critical part of helping children escape poverty. It is a holistic approach that
secular antipoverty initiatives have largely downplayed, but an approach that
Christian development groups have championed for decades.
Creating
Givers
The
traditional approach to development work has been to provide things for people.
If people lack education, we build them schools. If they are unhealthy, we build
them hospitals and provide doctors, or we drill a freshwater well. If their
small businesses are stagnant, we provide microcredit so they can borrow. While
each of these interventions can be helpful in the right context, mere provision
fails to address the root of poverty: the behaviors, social systems, and mindset
that are created by poverty. The key to ending poverty resides in the capacity
of human beings—and their view of their own capacity—to facilitate
positive change.
Indeed,
every time we provide something for someone else in need, we send a subtle
message to them that we believe they are incapable of providing for themselves.
While some interventions are necessary, especially in the area of health, they
come at a cost of reinforcing an inferiority complex among the poor. Good
development organizations understand this. Along with providing some basic
resources that allow children to progress farther in school, the
child-development approach advocated by Compassion appears to get under the hood
of human beings to instill aspirations, character formation, and spiritual
direction. In short, it trains people to be givers instead of receivers.
When
someone asks me what an ordinary person can do to help the poor in developing
countries, I tell them about our research. The most common response is,
"That's good to know. I always wondered if all that was a scam." At
this point we can confidently state that it is not.
Bruce
Wydick is professor of economics and international studies at the University of
San Francisco. His novel about coffee growers in Guatemala is forthcoming from
Thomas Nelson.
For more:
follow on Twitter @jefflampl
