Piles of cash and a town of solutions in Kenya, Nigeria (Summer School)

Planet Money's Summer School visits Kenya and Nigeria to explore radical economic experiments that tackled poverty. The episode highlights how the town of Busia, Kenya, became a real-world laboratory for randomized controlled trials, a methodology that won some economists the Nobel Prize. It also revisits Nigeria's 'You Win!' program, a business plan competition that tested a new way to allocate development grants. Along the way, the show unpacks key concepts like human capital, the 'missing middle' in business financing, and the challenge of translating economic research into large-scale policy.