I Do What I Do

by Raghuram G. Rajan

We know that providing services to the poor isn’t just about money. One can build spanking new schools and pay teachers a good wage, yet they may not come in to teach. One can provide free drugs to the hospitals, intended for the poor, but the druggist may simply sell them on the black market. This is not to say that schools and hospitals aren’t necessary, but bricks and mortar are often the easy part. Policy makers also need to create the right incentives for the service provider and the poor client, as well as the right allocation of power and information between them to ensure that reasonable quality services are provided.And we know that the law of unintended consequences is always at work. This means that few programmes ever operate as the designers intended, so we need abundant experimentation, frequent monitoring and evaluation, and a sharing of best practices so that these targeted interventions can have their intended effect.