How much would a personal poverty coach help the poor?

There is a new experiment being run in Haiti:

Would a personal assistant help? An experiment here may answer that.

Half of the commune?s 10,000 households are being assigned a ?household development agent? ? a neighbour who will work as a health educator, vaccinator, epidemiologist, financial analyst, social worker, scheduler and advocate all at the same time. With the agent?s help, a family will assess its needs and come up with a plan to make things better.

?The idea is to forge a relationship from the get-go,? said Maryanne Sharp, an official at the World Bank, which is overseeing the $4 million project. ?We want the family to say, ?Yes, we own the plan and we will work on these objectives on this timetable.? ?

The other 5,000 households will function as a control group, continuing as they have, scrounging out a living in one of Haiti?s poorest and most isolated places.

In two years, the families will be resurveyed and their children and houses re-examined. If those with agents are doing better, then the strategy of coaching people out of poverty may be expanded to the whole country.

I would like to see a third group, which receives cash instead of the assistant or nothing.? By the way, the coaches have received extensive training:

They spent multiple week-long stays in the nearby town of Hinche learning what a vaccine does, how to calculate a dosage and how to give an injection. They learned about ways to purify water and get a micro-finance loan. They learned how to raise consciousness, even as theirs was being raised.

Still, on average they have a 9th grade education.? The coaches also receive bonuses for doing a good job, such as measured by the number of child vaccinations.? Another version of the link is here, with photos.

Source: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/09/how-much-would-a-personal-poverty-coach-help-the-poor.html

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