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Excellent lesson learned! It's a complete reflection report of your life. I know little about you. This realization and analytical thought will help you discover your hidden potentialities. Go ahead Lindy. All the way best of luck.

Hi Lindy, wow fascinating to read that. I did not realise that you had to cut short your Vanuatu assignment due to pregnancy, how awful. I am a single parent by design - it's always been just me and my son. My first assignment after he was born was to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh (where I met you!) and arriving there on my own with a small baby and trying to set up house, child-care and start a new job all essentially in the same week was the hardest experience of my life. I would not wish it on anyone and I think that the UN can do much better to make landings like that easier. The UN gave me plenty of settling money, but very little actual practical help and no TIME to adjust. However, I do fantastically appreciate being able to have my baby and young toddler in a country where child care is affordable. I don't envy my sisters in Sydney who are faced with waiting lists and stupendous costs for child care if they want to continue work, not to even GO to the high cost of living. I eventually took a year out and bummed around in Thailand with my two year old son. One of the best years of my life. In my line of work (UNHCR), most of the best and most interesting work is in places I just can't go - conflict areas or emergencies where being on duty 24/7 is the expected norm. I can't do it. So I've been 'getting away' with assignments in quiet, family friendly places. Now my son is 6 years old and I further constrained - he needs to go to school in English which pretty much restricts us to capitals. With parents at home who are not getting any younger, the call to come home and be with family (as so many refugees would give anything to do) is getting stronger. Might be seeing more of you in the near future!!! PS: A few months ago, one of my mummy friends posted how proud she was that her six year old boy traveled unaccompanied to visit his grandma in Melbourne. When I read that I was so impressed by the bravery of that boy, but I also realized that I have pretty much never traveled on a plane without my son, forget about my son travelling without me. Travel is the real sticking point for me - I just can't bring myself to leave my son with a nanny for a week while I swan off to Geneva or Bangkok or wherever. So my place in my chosen profession does feel quite precarious. What kind of humanitarian professional can't travel anywhere? But I'm still happy and somehow I manage to keep doing what I love best.

Captivating blog. Thanks Lindy.

Thank you for this honest and inspiring article.

The article pretty much explained the current situation and I believe the expenditure has gone passed the revenue generated in PNG. 'MP fund' is one of the area that experienced relative increase especially during the boom period and I guess is continuing today. What does 'MP fund' mean? I tend to understand that MP fund refer the funds that is discretional to the MP, hence the relative increase has seen more discretional funds to the MPs.

Your reminder that these impact evaluations at best tell us "what worked" rather than "what works" is a good one. We should be looking to draw evidence from a many evaluations rather than a very small number. That is why 18 (plus or minus a few) for PNG and the Pacific isn't going to tell us very much.

At least one paper in that ACIAR series uses the term impact evaluation in a way that does not seem consistent with 3ie's criteria; other papers in the series are about "impact assessments", which also do not seem consistent 3ie's criteria. From limited sampling, it is likely there is an issue with the methodology from a 3ie perspective, although I'm not saying there is any wrong with the methodology based on the objectives of the ACIAR papers. On the other hand, the ACIAR series simply may not meet 3ie's criteria on publication.

it's great this conversation is opened up. i come from background of 25 years of communicating about aid (as a fundraiser).lessons learned: 1. don't talk about aid, talk about people 2. 'hero' is not Australian Government or DFAT or formerly AusAID, it is 'Australia' or 'Australian people' 3. go to where audience is 'at', not where we'd wish they would be 4. simple, emotional, first person 5. show problems 'fixed' 6.. and be patient 🙂

Hi, thank you very much for the information.

The table doesn't seem to capture any of ACIAR's impact evaluations - is there a reason for that? Are they not considered to be methodologically sound? There are quite a few for the Pacific - see <a href="http://aciar.gov.au/publication/term/25" rel="nofollow">here</a>

Ashlee - Your arguments rest on the assumption that DFAT management cares about aid.

It is not for me to tell 3ie how to categorize things, but as an author of several of those 18 papers I wouldn't consider many of them as "impact evaluations". By my definition, perhaps only the financial literacy study, which had explicit investigator-driven randomization. We would hope that all econometric studies that hope to uncover causal effects would be using good research designs that are not (too) prone to omitted variable bias (aka selection effects). Thus, I would think that the work we did on transport access and poverty in PNG using an IV strategy would qualify despite 3ie omitting it. When there is randomization available, as with the migration lotteries, it is good to use it. But it is hardly the silver bullet that too many development people think it is ("what works" should be more properly called "what worked, in that particular context when implemented by those particular people" because absent a theory as to why it worked there is no guarantee that it will work elsewhere - e.g. Rozelle et al Stanford REAP have new results on deworming that show no effect on school performance in rural Western China, contrary to the very publicized effects in Kenya).