View Blogs

Uganda is often held up as a model for Africa in the fight against HIV and AIDS. Strong government leadership, broad-based partnerships and effective public education campaigns all contributed to a decline in the number of people living with HIV and AIDS in the 1990s.

Although there is a lot to learn from Uganda’s comprehensive and timely campaign against the AIDS epidemic, emphasizing Uganda’s success story must not detract from the huge consequences that AIDS continues to have across the country. The trail of destruction that this pandemic has left in its path is shocking and heartbreaking, there are an estimated 1.2 million people living with HIV in Uganda, which includes 150,000 children. An estimated 64,000 people died from AIDS in 2009 and 1.2 million children have been orphaned by Uganda's devastating epidemic. [more]

A recent book by David Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance discusses this question. Roodman shared the book in pieces on his blog as he wrote it (http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/) which took more than three years.  The book shares discoveries on conducted randomized controlled trials (RCT) since 2009 to mystify the hype around microfinancing helping people out of poverty. The findings are not saying so. [more]

Excel can be a powerful tool for data analysis. This super power is unlocked by following a simple set of rules -- rules that will yield well formed data.