Around the Halls: Human Capital Initiative Summer 2022 Fieldwork

By Mahesh Karra

Over the summer, Boston University student researchers from the Human Capital Initiative returned to Africa after nearly two years to resume field projects, reconnect with colleagues and research partners, discuss research findings with local communities and policymakers and propose new initiatives with field teams. I led the BU team that launched and supported three projects in Ethiopia and Malawi. 

In Ethiopia, Anastasiia Arbuzova worked with researchers at the EconInsight Center for Development Research to launch a new study on gendered mobility and the demand for transport in Addis Ababa. Meanwhile, Laura Aquino and Yunus Kurt traveled to Malawi, where they met with field teams at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) to oversee the implementation of two projects in Lilongwe. With a team of IPA enumerators, Laura conducted a study with print shops to examine the impact of introducing different types of contracts on the printing process and print order quality. Yunus worked with a second IPA field team in Lilongwe to implement a follow-up survey with married women who had previously participated in a family planning counseling program. 

The student researchers met with policymakers, practitioners and stakeholders to discuss the broader implications of their projects. Over the Fall 2022 semester, the team will continue to analyze the data and will produce several outputs, including working papers and policy briefs, which will be shared with local partners and communities where we have worked. 

Below, Anastasiia, Laura and Yunus share insights and reflections on their fieldwork this summer:

Implementing Contracting Mechanisms in Malawi – Laura Aquino, Research Assistant

Contracts have many purposes. For example, contracts can serve as a primary source of relationship building between businesses and clients that also hold each party to their original agreement, limit the uncertainty of transaction outcomes, settle disputes over transactions and mitigate unforeseen contingencies. 

While the role of contracts in the economy is clear, how to implement them is not. For instance, in many low- and middle-income countries, contracts are verbal. While this has advantages, like being flexible and relying on relationships, disagreements can be difficult to solve without written proof of the original agreement. Unfortunately, empirical research studying the costs and benefits of writing a complete contract or, more generally, having a written contract is scarce. Moreover, knowing if a written contract system is indispensable or if the same or even better outcomes can be realizable through verbal contracting mechanisms is not straightforward. 

To investigate this, we conducted a study with 160 print shops in Lilongwe, Malawi. Working with this number of print shops allowed us to test different ways of contracting them, such as verbal contracts, written contracts (specifying the number of copies to be made and other details) and written arrangements that established a penalty in case the print shop does not follow the agreement. Though written agreements in these contexts could improve transparency and efficiency, the costs associated with implementation and enforcement may not outweigh their benefits. 

The forthcoming research will shed light on the best way to implement contracting mechanisms to improve contract compliance, sellers’ efforts and service quality. Read more.

Fieldwork on User-Centered Family Planning Counseling – Yunus Kurt, Research Assistant

Family planning service provision aims to help women to make informed choices on their reproductive health in low- and middle-income countries. The need for these services is important since a greater share of women lack the agency to make reproductive health decisions in low- and middle-income countries. Counseling sessions plays a major role in this context as it aims to help women make family planning choices based on reliable and medically accurate information. However, typical family planning counseling sessions in many low-and middle-income countries are not woman-centered.  

How will a woman-centered counseling approach help women better realize their contraceptive preferences and impact their family planning behavior in the long-run? This summer, I traveled to Lilongwe, Malawi with a team of Boston University researchers to investigate this question as part of the ongoing Malawi Behavioral Bias Study (MBBS). It was my first fieldwork experience, and I spent around two weeks in Lilongwe between late May and early June to setup and administer a follow-up survey and launch a new round of data collection. The data analysis is in the pipeline now, and I hope we will be able to provide new evidence and insights on the effects of women-centered family planning counseling sessions on women’s changes and discontinuation in contraceptive methods in the long-run.

To give some background, Mahesh Karra and Kexin Zhang studied this question in the short-run. They conducted a randomized controlled trial in Lilongwe, Malawi in late 2019 with a sample of 782 women, and compared how user-centered family planning counseling, which is tailored to women’s baseline preferences performs compared to standard, long, and non-women-focused counseling. They also explored the impact of male involvement in counseling sessions. Results seem to suggest that the women who were treated with targeted counseling are more likely to change their contraceptive preferences but are not more likely to act on their stated preferences.

Now, we are revisiting Karra and Zhang’s original sample in Lilongwe, Malawi to examine the longer-term effects of user-centered counseling on reproductive health outcomes. This is an important question because method switch or discontinuation is very common in sub-Saharan Africa, and that might imply that the effects of user-centered counseling might vary over time. Read more.

Understanding Latent Demand for Urban Travel – Anastasiia Arbuzova, Research Assistant

Despite being an essential part of everyday life, the context of transportation in low- and middle-income countries is relatively understudied. The project I spent this summer working on in Ethiopia is one of the first attempts to explore urban mobility in a developing country.

My first month in the field was spent preparing the team of interviewers to collect baseline information from participating households. Apart from the socio-economic characteristics section that is largely present in surveys, we sought to understand individuals’ travel experiences and how they move in general, asking questions about engagement with transportation, their travel experiences, and thoughts about the existing transportation environment in Addis Ababa. 

I learned that it would be impossible to construct this survey without experiencing Addis itself: using Google Maps as well as addresses or GPS coordinates is much less common there, so during the training, we practiced transportation-related types of questions with the team. Administering the training itself, navigating enumerators and assisting with any arising issues was tough, time-consuming but very rewarding. Practices of fieldwork remained unknown to me until this summer, even though fieldwork constitutes a major part of publishing a paper. Read more.

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