This document summarizes a study on aspirations and well-being in rural Ethiopia. It presents an aspirations framework that views aspirations as future-oriented goals that motivate investment of time, effort or resources. The study conducted an experiment in rural Ethiopia where mini-documentaries showing local success stories were screened for randomly selected individuals to exogenously impact their aspirations. The experiment found that the documentaries increased individuals' aspirations, expectations, and behaviors like children's schooling expenditures, time allocation, savings, and hypothetical loan demand, both directly and indirectly through social interactions, even six months later. This provided support for the hypothesis that exogenous shocks can impact an "aspiration window" and behaviors. The findings suggest aspirations are

1. ETHIOPIAN DEVELOPMENT
RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Aspirations and Well-being in Rural Ethiopia
Tanguy Bernard1, Stefan Dercon2, Kate Orkin3, and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse1
1International
Food Policy Research Institute, 2 University of Oxford, 3 University of Cambridge
Towards what works in rural development in Ethiopia: Evidence on the impact of
investments and policies
December 13th, 2013
Hilton Hotel, Addis Ababa
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2. Outline
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Motivation
Elements of the aspirations framework
Aspirations project
Field experiment – design and findings
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3. Motivation – why aspirations
 Conceptual – ‘opportunities’
 Empirical – Why do the poor not ‘invest’?
 Ethiopians and fatalism?
 Focus 1 - ‘external circumstances’ and ‘opportunities’.
 Low returns to investments;
 Unexploited opportunities due to lack of information or
knowledge;
 Social constraints;
 Focus 2 - constraints associated with the manifested attributes of
decision makers
 Identity issues: sense of self;
 Psychological issues: impatience, commitment, and psychological
barriers
Aspirations failure perspective
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4. Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
 Aspirations:
 A desire or an ambition to achieve something
 An aim and implied effort to reach it
 A set of future-regarding preferences
 Related concepts
 Economics : Satisficing
 Psychology : Self-efficacy, locus of control
 Anthropology : Aspiration failures
 Common elements
 Goals and aspirations are important determinants of success;
 Evolution through time in response to circumstances;
 Role of social comparisons and learning from relevant others,
An individual-level yet culturally (collectively) determined attribute 
towards exploration of individual-group symbiosis
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5. Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
What are Aspirations?
 Aspirations have two distinctive aspects:
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Future-oriented - are goals that can only be satisfied at
some future time (differ from immediate gratifications);
Motivators - are goals individuals are willing, in principle,
to invest time, effort or money in to attain (different from
idle daydreams and wishes)
Note: the ‘willingness to invest’ is ‘potential’, or
‘conditional’
 Aspirations and expectations – preference vs.
beliefs;
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6. Elements of the Aspirations Perspective
Why are aspirations important/useful?
Aspirations (or the capacity to aspire):
 Reflect bounded rationality;
 Are socially determined (social interaction);
 Are distributed unevenly within communities.
 Condition individual behaviour and well-being
 Useful device in analysing and/or addressing poverty
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7. Conceptual Schema
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8. The “Aspirations” project
Step 1 – correlates of aspiration-related concepts
Step 2 – test and validate a measurement strategy
Step 3 – assess validity of the “aspiration window” hypothesis
 An experiment
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Exogenous shock to aspirations: Mini-documentaries of local
success stories screened to randomly selected individuals.
Placebo: local TV show.
 3 rounds of data
• Baseline pre-treatment (Sept-Dec 2010)
• Aspirations retest immediately after treatment
• Follow-up (Mar-May 2011)
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9. On going experiment
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10. Observations
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"Weak" treatment, but:
 Documentaries affected aspirations, expectations,
expenditure on children’s schooling, time allocation,
savings behaviour, and hypothetical loan demand,
perceptions more than the placebo even 6 months after
treatment;
 Direct and, even more visible, indirect (group) effects are
detected – more of an aspiration window story rather
than a role model one;
 It is not obvious why some effects are direct (savings)
while others are indirect (time allocation);
Further analysis;
Expanding coverage – Malawi, Pakistan via IFPRI;
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