San Francisco was a few days into sheltering in place in March 2020 when Dr. Maya Petersen got a surprising and urgent request: Health officials wanted to know whether she could put together a model that would help them forecast what was shaping up to be a horrifying pandemic.

Seeking innovative ideas for revamping the United States' foreign aid programs, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted an A/B test in rural areas of Rwanda to compare the public welfare results of traditional interventions with simple cash transfers. A control group received no assistance. To conduct the study, they recruited a number of external partners, including Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action. The agency released the results Thursday, and -- essentially -- the cash transfers worked, with larger cash transfers boosting household's assets, savings, and ability to buy more varied food. The children in those houses were "taller, weighed more, and were less likely to die early," according to the reporter.

Even in the richest countries in the world, the pandemic has devastated millions. Developing countries have faced the same challenges with far fewer resources to absorb them with. How have their people fared? A new paper aims to solve that problem in the most direct way possible — by surveying tens of thousands of people in developing countries about what COVID-19 has been like for them. The paper, co-authored by UC Berkeley's Edward Miguel gives us a new window into what it has been like to live through 2020 in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.

In low-income countries, identifying people who have fallen on hard times due to the pandemic is no easy task. Governments don't have good data about who is poor. Togo turned to artificial intelligence: a computer program that dives into data to pinpoint pockets of poverty. The government partnered with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. charity GiveDirectly to use satellite imagery and mobile phone data to find citizens most in need. The program used mobile phone technology to quickly distribute $22 million in three monthly mobile phone payments to 600,000 citizens in urban parts of Togo: $20 for men and $22 for women.

A UC Berkeley study has found several surprising insights on how COVID-19 is affecting India, a country of 1.3 billion people. The median hospital stay before death from the virus was five days, compared with two weeks in the United States, possibly because of limited access to health care. The trend in increasing deaths with age seemed to drop off after age 65, perhaps because Indians who live past that age tend to be relatively wealthy and have access to good health care. The study also found that children of all ages can become infected and spread the virus to others. An overwhelming majority of coronavirus cases globally have occurred in resource-poor countries, noted Joseph Lewnard, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. But most of the data has come from high-income countries. "It still surprises me that it took until this point for a lot of data to come out of a low- or middle-income country about the epidemiology of Covid," he said.

Twenty years after a mass effort in Kenyan schools to treat children for common intestinal parasites, researchers including UC Berkeley's Edward Miguel returned to the original Kenyan sample where they'd first discovered the potentially life-changing impacts of mass deworming campaigns. Following up with the original participants 20 years later, they wanted to answer the question: Are the benefits they initially discovered from childhood deworming treatment - which included more time in school and higher adult incomes - still showing up? For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News.