What USAID Impact Study Says about CentAm Community Crime Prevention
In this article, Eric Olson is quoted on crime prevention in Central America. This article also references a Wilson Center Assessment and past event titled "Are Crime and Violence Prevention Programs Working in Central America?"
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In a Wilson Center event discussing the LAPOP findings, Vanderbilt staff said a key element of the study was that it measured results of USAID’s work as the actual perceived impact on local communities, rather than based on the number of activities they were engaged in, using a rigorous methodology (see illustration). The researchers chose communities that were non-adjacent, and randomly selected which would receive the "treatments." They then developed a baseline and examined how this changed over time in both the control and treatment communities, measuring impact as the difference between the end results in the treatment communities and the predicted results if no intervention had occurred...
Until now, though, there was a lack of quantitative proof these strategies were effective. Eric Olson, the Associate Director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program, told InSight Crime: “Many of us have assumed that prevention is a good thing, an important element of any strategy, but there really hasn’t been any sort of systematic impact evaluation of that before.”
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The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action. Read more
