In the June 2016 publication of the EYElliance and World Economic Forum report, "Eyeglasses for Global Development: Bridging the Visual Divide," a case study for REAP's Smart Focus social enterprise was published on page 21. Read the entire report here.

The Rural Education Action Program (REAP), an impact-evaluation organization, aims to inform sound education, health and nutrition policy in China. Since 2011, REAP’s five randomized controlled trials have shown that quality vision care is the most cost-effective intervention for improving child welfare, and leads to large and sustainable increases in learning and school performance, along with positive spillovers to children who don’t have poor vision.

REAP is now establishing a network of for-profit vision centres based at county hospitals through an initiative called Smart Focus. Those centres partner with schools to deliver high-quality vision care. Optometrists administer six hours of training for classroom teachers, enabling the latter to conduct initial vision screenings and refer students needing more advanced care through a highly structured referral system. The teachers are provided free mobile-phone time as an incentive, and the vision centres earn revenue from urban consumers in a cross-subsidization scheme that supports providing care for poorer rural consumers whose unmet need is greatest. To date, REAP has provided access to free or affordable glasses for over 30,000 primary school students and screened an additional 120,000 children.

In addition to screening children and supervising their wearing glasses, teachers play a vital role in communicating with parents. Once a teacher’s screening indicates a child needs glasses, the teacher often spends significant time convincing parents that (a) the child’s condition requires attention, (b) the problem is correctable, and (c) taking the child to the vision centre to get glasses is highly advisable. 

Vision centres dispense “first pair free” or very low-cost glasses to rural elementary- and middle-school students, while providing part of the urban market with refraction and eyewear on a fee-for-service basis. Giving away the first pair of glasses is not “just charity”; rather, it provides access to the huge untapped rural market. To build confidence, vision centres unconditionally guarantee the frames for three months and lenses for six months, something that no private optician does. (A noteworthy challenge arises, however, with parents who believe that low-cost or free services must also be of low quality; usage rates and eyeglass prices have been shown to rise in tandem.)

BBC News reports on REAP's program to train family planning officials, who used to enforce the one child policy, to become experts in early childhood education. To read the original article, click here.

Two-year-old Liu Siqi is curled up on her grandmother's lap, complaining of a tummy ache. A man tries to divert her with a squeaky plastic duck.

Gradually the toddler's mood brightens. She giggles and is persuaded to join him singing a nursery rhyme.

The man she calls Uncle Li belongs to China's army of family planning officers. Stationed in every city, town and village in China, for the past 35 years their job has been to hunt down families suspected of violating the country's draconian rules on how many children couples can have.

But with the end of the one-child policy at the beginning of this year, some, like Li Bo, are being retrained for a different role. Now he could even be mistaken for a Chinese Father Christmas visiting remote villages in the mountains of Shaanxi province with a bag full of toys and picture books.

Along with 68 of his colleagues, Li is part of a pilot programme involving academics from Shaanxi Normal University and Stanford University's Rural Education Action Programme. His new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to develop toddlers' minds by talking, singing and reading to them.

He works in Danfeng County, 700 miles (1,125km) south-west of Beijing, an impoverished area where more than half the adults of working age have left for jobs in the cities.

We meet at a new parenting centre in two-year-old Liu Siqi's village. It's part of the pilot project here in Shaanxi province designed to stimulate deprived rural children and give them the best start in life.

He watches toddlers throwing balls into boxes and playing with wooden shapes.

"This is a golden time for them to develop skills," he says. "I like this new job and I think my work is important, because what I am doing right now will probably influence what sort of people these children will become one day."

"What do I do about the chickens?"

When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.

But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.

"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.

Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.

Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."

Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.

The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.

Laurie Burkitt quotes REAP's director Scott Rozelle on the impact of China cancelling the one-child policy . To read the original article, click here.

Chinese leaders implemented the one-child policy in 1980 in an effort to rein in explosive population growth and help raise living standards. It was rooted in a Mao Zedong-era baby boom. China’s population rose by nearly half to about 807 million people in 1969 from when the Communist Party took over the country 20 years before. That led to fears among the leadership that China faced a population boom it couldn’t feed.

Demographers began to present a united front in 2000, arguing that China was dangerously close to falling below a replacement rate of 2.1 children for every woman. Activists stepped up opposition. Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist who famously escaped home confinement and made his way to the U.S. embassy in 2012, became well-known in China in the 2000s for opposing forced abortion.

China effectively hobbled the one-child policy in 2013, when it allowed couples to have two children if one parent came from a household without other siblings. It has also long allowed exceptions in some parts of the country.

Just like on Thursday, the 2013 move led to a frenzy of anticipation from baby-related businesses and a brief bump in shares of Chinese formula makers and other baby-related companies. It resulted in 1.45 million new birth applications as of the end of May, according to the most recent data from the China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission. But the figures have so far disappointed many demographers.

Even rural residents, many of whom have been exempt of the one-child policy, are reluctant to have bigger families, said Scott Rozelle, co-director of Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program. “Fertility has collapsed in rural and poor areas,” said Mr. Rozelle. “Anyone there can have two or three babies, but no one wants that.”

Sourovi De, an early child development specialist with the education team at Oxford Policy Management, reports on REAP's Perfecting Parenting project in the Guardian. She discusses how Perfecting Parenting fits within the global context of early child development (ECD) research, and how ECD is fundamental to achieving the fourth Sustainable Development Goal: ensuring inclusive, quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning. Read the original article here.