Jon Thiele
Gender and economic development
Enterprise development and agribusiness
Credit in economic development
International Development
Transformative learning
This is a paper I prepared for USAID, and I think it is important. In it, I review reserch and evaluations from programs in a couple dozen countries to see what they reveal about improving results. The reserch shows that increasing individual agency and self-efficacy imroves results in every type of development program activity. Every development project should do this.
About a very large, holistic project
Another learning document I wrote for USAID, this describes the largest Food for Peace project in the world and how it achieved its great results. Implemented by CARE, the Shouhardo program delivered a broad range of services, all of them through local organizations, and all coordinated and integrated. Tremendous results for people in great need.
On a major agribusiness project
This is a variation on a paper I prepared for USAID. The original was intended as an overview of a large agribusiness and export promotion project I led in Bosnia as a model to follow. The audience for that piece was primarily USAID offices and others who read such official publications. I have a copy if you would like to see it. The essay here is intended more for practitioners and has a more hands-on feel to it. I deal a bit more plainly with some of the issues and real lessons learned. As an economic development piece it is interesting, I think.
Here is an official piece. We launched a major effort to teach basic business skills to very poor women in four African countries. About 38% of the women could not count to ten and more than half could not read. We designed what we thought was a good set of classes, tried it for a year, and then gathered the team to review what we had learned. This paper presents our findings.
I wrote a few columns a Kiev newspaper the first time I lived in Ukraine, and they generated a bit of comment. A couple of them are posted here: "When Decency Takes Holiday" and "The Third Serfdom".
This was just for fun. I like a lot of PG Wodehouse's work, and after reading a collection of his short stories, I tried to produce one in his style. I thought it was a just bit of fluff, but a lot of people really like it so here it is.