Before you know if you are doing a good job, you have to know what a good job is.

For an international development organization with a private sector approach to development, what constitutes success? And if it is profitability, does that include measures beyond the profit and loss of the company that received funding, for example lost income to potential competitors, learning-by-doing and demonstration effects, or consumer surplus? If so, how do you measure those things?

These are some of the questions I am considering this summer. Working in a place that is new to anything other than investing, I’ve been learning a lot trying to hammer out what these issues are as well as demonstrating numerically how different approaches would change predicted outcomes, and, hence, whether or not a project is undertaken at all.

I did have the opportunity to attend a presentation by an external consultant who had a unique and startling idea of a good evaluation which went something like this: “We interviewed people who had been members of the MFI for three years and people who had not, and the people who had been members were wealthier than those that had not. So I think overall we can conclude that the program has had very positive impacts…the control group was chosen randomly. We went to the market and interviewed people at random. And, you know, randomization is the gold standard of evaluation.” Fortunately, none of my coworkers were buying it either.

While I am not pondering any of the aforementioned issues, I have been a) running by the president’s house with no threats or weapons pointed at me, b) watching soccer in the lively cafeterias of my workplace, and c) touring Andalucia with Miguel, which I did last week. I’m including a photo from a roman amphitheater in Mérida as a little reminder that sometimes developed countries don’t have happy endings, either.