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PILOT I

Barnardo’s is a national children’s charity which works to help the most disadvantaged children in our society and tackle the problems of child poverty. Since its origins running homes for children, Barnardo’s has grown and now runs hundreds of projects across the country supported both by individual donations and statutory funding.

One of Barnardo’s services is a set of 18 projects to help girls at risk of sexual exploitation. The projects operate individually but to a common standard of documenting and recording data and information about their work. Eleven risk factors are recorded and tracked for individual girls. These data are collected centrally and will form an important part of the project for Pro Bono Economics.

Pro Bono Economics has arranged for an economist from the Bank of England to help Barnardo’s understand more fully and calculate the costs from sexual exploitation. These might include costs to the criminal justice system, the health service, or social services. A better understanding of the costs and the risk factors which contribute to these costs would help Barnardo’s articulate more clearly the benefits from its work. In addition, the project might be able to uncover particular risk factors that the charity should target in order to be as effective as possible.

This project is scheduled to start in February and run through the year. In common with all PBE projects, milestones and checkpoints will be built into the work to ensure it is on track and delivering value to Barnardo’s as well as providing a valuable professional development opportunity for the economist and his employer. The economist working on this project is Gregory Thwaites.

Greg Thwaites joined the Bank of England in 2001 after taking economics degrees at Cambridge and London Universities.  At the Bank he has worked on the housing market, the public finances, South America and, most recently, the UK inflation forecast.  In 2005-7 he took a career break to work at the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, building a model of the Kosovo economy, planning public expenditure and mentoring local economists.

To learn more about this pilot project, send an email toinfo@probonoeconomics.com.