Jury Composition and Process

JURY COMPOSITION:

  • Ludovic Comeau Jr, Esq., MBA, Ph.D.: Jury Coordinator. Comeau has been a professor of economics since 2001 (DePaul University, Chicago). Among other assignments, he served as Chief Economist at Haiti’s central bank (1999-2001), and Director of Human Resource at Haiti’s Ministry of Education (1988-1990). He is currently President of GRAHN-USA and Vice-President at GRAHN-World.
  • Maude Toussaint, MA, Ph.D.: Senior Development Idea Reviewer. Toussaint is Senior Business Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She has extensive experience as an economist and a college professor, and has widely published, including a number of significant studies noted and cited nationwide. She is a member of GRAHN-Chicago.
  • Jacky Poteau, MSc, MSW: Development Idea Reviewer. Poteau is Program Coordinator for the Boston-based Haiti Development Institute. In years past he served as Executive Director of FATEM and 1000 Jobs/Haiti. He is a member of GRAHN-New England/Boston and the board of GRAHN-USA.
  • Daniel Dorsainvil, MSc, Ph.D.: Development Idea Reviewer. Dorsainvil served as Haiti’s Minister of the Economy and Finance (2006-2009), and Chief Economist at Haiti’s central bank (1998-1999). Since serving as a Minister, he has consulted for a range of evaluations regarding economic programs and projects. Dr. Dorsainvil does pro bono work at several institutions such as Fonkoze, Centre d’Art, and the Artisan Business Network.

JURY PROCESS:

Mandate: The Jury was tasked with selecting ideas for Haiti’s development that, preferably, fell within the following PADF-suggested areas: private investment capital; economic opportunities for Haitians living outside Port-au-Prince; improving WASH (Water, Sanitation & Health) conditions for Haitians; energy access; strengthening human capital, particularly by improving the quality of education; environment/increasing resilience to climate conditions.

Eliciting ideas: The Jury designed a submission form to help potential applicants flesh out their ideas. 190 submission forms were received between late September and December 15, from Australia, Dominican Republic, Great Britain, Guadeloupe, Moldova, 4 Canada locations, 17 American states, and from throughout Haiti. The Jury Coordinator processed all submissions and labeled them after a coding system. Realizing, while doing this work, that he knew a number of applicants, he decided to recuse himself from directly judging. He then created a new file for each submission, where all identifiers were removed so to ensure that the 3 other judges would work separately and independently on the 190 anonymous files so to perform a blind review.

Reviewing ideas: The Jury designed an Excel Idea Merit Scoring Instrument that ensured the efficient, fair, and objective quantitative assessment of each submission. Scoring was based on 20 criteria distributed among 6 rubrics, grounded in PADF’s area guidelines. Each criterion had a weight, and the sum of the weights of the 20 criteria totaled 100, which was the maximum score any submission could achieve. At the end of the blind review process, statistical analysis revealed a correlation coefficient of 0.75 among the 3 sets of independent scores from the 3 judges. This suggests there was a statistically significant level of agreement among the 3 judges (75%), even though the evaluations were done separately. In other words, submissions that were good were evaluated as being good by each of the 3 judges, and submissions that were not as good were seen as being not as good by each of the 3 judges.

Selecting 10 Best-Development-Ideas: At a first stage, the Jury retained the 19 submissions (or ideas) of the top 10th percentile based on total scores for all 3 judges. At a second stage, the judges’ total scores were adjusted by a computed weighted diversity composite value to ensure the following 6 diversity barometers are not neglected:

  1. A balance between successful, mature projects and new, promising project ideas.
  2. A range of industries is retained.
  3. Gender composition mix variety: Male/Female.
  4. Diversity of language of submission: Kreyòl, Français, English.
  5. Geographical dispersion among idea authors: U.S. locations vs non-U.S. locations.
  6. No participant(s) may win twice in the top-10.

Determining the winners: Once the top-10 ideas were determined out of the top-19 ideas, the winning coded anonymous files were reconciled with the corresponding original files in order to determine the names of the top-10 ideas’ authors.