A Chinese researcher has criticised unprofessional third-party evaluators who often lack training and rely on basic questionnaires to assess China's poverty alleviation efforts. Professionals working in the field fear being reviewed unfairly as a result, argues Chen Hui, an associate professor at Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University, in a new piece for yicai.com
As part of China's mammoth poverty alleviation program, local governments often commission universities or research institutes to evaluate their efforts, but they are generally out of touch with life on the ground in rural China, Chen claims. He says poverty alleviation is complex work which cannot be assessed with questionnaires but requires familiarity with grassroots life, rich social experience and a deep policy knowledge – attributes that take more than a short stint of training to build. A further issue is that a useful evaluation takes a great deal of work, which can't be completed by teachers at just one institute or university.
Chen says that provincial-level poverty alleviation evaluations should not be carried out by a single institute. Quantitative judgments should be replaced by qualitative ones where possible, and evaluators should investigate more deeply without merely focusing on results.