The PEF works. I wrote about it on my blog. Click my name for the link. It is one of the most fundamentally awesome programs the Church has going today. In fact, it’s one of the most awesome programs in the world, and in my opinion doesn’t get as much pub as it deserves.

The website has a lot of good info. I still wish there were some actual numbers somewhere. Without any numbers at all, how can I evaluate whether the PEF is a good place for my marginal charitable dollar to go?

Frank, if you wanted to study the PEF, do you think you could get some data?

Unfortunately, there is often very little incentive for microfinance groups to do well-designed tests of their own quality, as most of the biases are in their favor in the badly done studies. Murdoch or Khandker and Pitt are guys who have done some microcredit evaluations in a more or less rigorous fashion and found reasonably good outcomes, not nearly as good as the propaganda, but still probably better than a lot of other third world poverty alleviation programs.

To my knowledge the Church has not done anything comparable to that kind of research for the PEF, although it would be really interesting to see the results if someone did.

Obviously the PEF website linked in comment #18 is the good place to start. Although it harks back to the 19C Perpetual Emigration Fund, the modern Perpetual Education Fund is really a variation on the worldwide anti-poverty strategy of microcredit. The microcredit movement received considerable publicity last year when Muhammed Yunus, one of its founders, received the Nobel Peace Prize. A quick summary can be found at:

http://www.enterprise-mentors.org/Resources/Onpovertymicroenterprise/tabid/643/Default.aspx

The wikipedia article isn’t bad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcredit

The Church has a long history with the modern microcredit movement. The Journal of Microfinance (recently renamed the ESR Review), the leading academic journal in the field is published at BYU, (http://marriottschool.byu.edu/esrreview/), the Insitutute for Self-Reliance at the Marriott School of Management is a major center for microcredit studies and many BYU graduates have pursued careers in microcredit.

For many years the Church has partnered with a number of well-established microcredit organizations to provide traditional microloans to Church members in LDCs. President Hinckley referenced these prior efforts in describing the PEF in this speech: http://www.ldskc.org/NPC.html President Hinckley and the First Presidency have met personally with Muhammed Yunus and other microcredit leaders over the years.

Microcredit is a great fit with LDS teachings. It is helping the poor by enabling them to become self-reliant and self-supporting through work. The Church struggled for a long time to figure out how to offer this kind of support more directly to members in LDCs. The problem with implementing it directly through regular priesthood channels is that that would turn bishops into loan collectors, which would be highly problematic. The PEF is what they finally came up with. It uses well-developed microcredit principles but with the interesting variation of using them for eduction loans rather than microenterpise loans. This makes them useful for a wider range of people (those seeking salaried employment as well as the self-employed or small businesspeople) and offloads the administration to the Institute program, which is at least a little bit removed from the pastoral priesthood line of authority.

The PEF meets a huge need in the Church. It is very difficult to be an active Church member when you have to work 7 days a week just to barely feed your family, or have to decide which family members will attend Church because you can’t afford public transportation for the whole family on Sunday. And it starts us toward fulfilling our sacred Gospel obligations. Jospeh F. Smith famously once wrote that “a religion which can not save its people temporally can not be expected to save them spiritually.”

The PEF is still relatively new, and I am not aware of any comprehensive long-term studies. However, the Church launched the PEF with a lot of know-how and experience in microcredit behind it. Just as donating money to supply missionaries with Book of Mormons doesn’t guarantee that those particular BoMs will lead someone into the Church, so there is no guarantee that donating to the PEF will supply a Church member in an LDC with a successful education. However, it does give them at least something of an equal chance, which is a part of establishing Zion. See D&C 78:6 — “For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things.”

More power to you in your quest for info. I’ll note that I knew almost nothing about Book of Mormon scholarship or about the disputes about the translation process when I got my testimony of the Book of Mormon, and I had read the book itself pretty superficially. Ditto with the Bible.

Does anyone know about any sources of solid information about how the PEF is running? What is its size and scope? What are its limitations? Anybody know?