Persistent poverty has plagued rural Africa for generations and, by some accounts, is becoming more widespread and entrenched. As a consequence, governments and donors have renewed and intensified their commitment to poverty reduction. This is reflected around the continent in poverty reduction...

Impact evaluation based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) offers a powerful tool that has fundamentally reshaped development economics by offering novel solutions to long-standing problems of weak causal identification. Nonetheless, RCTs suffer important and under-appreciated pitfalls, some...