Founded | 2002 |
---|---|
Founder | Dean Karlan |
Type | Research into poverty alleviation and development programs |
Focus | Program Evaluation in areas such as Microfinance Public Health Agriculture Education |
Location | |
Area served | Global |
Key people | Dean Karlan, Annie Duflo |
Website | poverty-action |
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is an American non-profit research and policy organization founded in 2002 by economist Dean Karlan. [1] Since its foundation, IPA has worked with over 400 leading academics to conduct over 900 evaluations in 52 countries. [2] The organization also manages the Poverty Probability Index.
IPA conducts randomized controlled trials (RCTs), along with other types of quantitative research, to measure the impacts of development programs in sectors including microfinance, education, health, peace & recovery, governance, agriculture, social protection, and small and medium enterprises. [3] Its partner organizations include over 400 governments, nonprofits, academic institutions, foundations, and companies.
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IPA was founded in 2002 by Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University. [4] The organization is dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global poverty and "bridging the gap between academia and development policy". [5] [6]
IPA is headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut, and has offices in New York, Washington, D.C., as well as offices in Africa, Asia and South America. [7] As of 2021, the organization is led by executive director Annie Duflo and has conducted 677 studies in 51 countries throughout the world. [8]
In 2017, IPA and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab received a $16 million grant from the UK Department for International Development to research policies that promote peace and support communities in areas recovering from conflict. [9]
IPA conducts controlled, randomized studies of aid programs. Their studies are conducted in much the same matter as scientific studies to determine the impact of such programs and find effective methods for reducing poverty. [7]
IPA's evaluations assess interventions in the areas of small and medium enterprises, financial inclusion, peace and recovery, governance, health, education, agriculture, and social protection. [10]
As of 2017, IPA had designed and conducted more than 650 evaluations [7] in partnership with over 400 leading academics. IPA also works to ensure that decision-makers use and apply evidence by making it useful and accessible. IPA does this through collaborating with decision-makers while creating policy-relevant evidence, proactive sharing of results, and providing technical assistance to applying solutions at scale. [11]
IPA works with more than 400 nonprofit organizations, governments, academic institutions, and companies to design programs and conduct evaluations. [11]
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a close partner of IPA. [12] [13] The two organizations share a common mission and take similar methodological approaches to development policy evaluation. Both organizations have pioneered the use of randomized evaluations to study the effectiveness of development interventions worldwide and have collaborated extensively on field studies involving randomized evaluations. IPA and J-PAL attempt to bridge the gap between research and the policy world by creating and disseminating knowledge about what works to policymakers and practitioners around the world.
IPA has a number of other partners including the World Bank, various agencies of the United Nations, a number of national and regional governments such as the government of Sierra Leone, and a number of charities that collaborate with IPA in the design and evaluation of their programs, such as Save the Children, Population Services International, One Acre Fund, and Pratham. [14]
IPA seeks funding from both individuals and foundations. IPA has been funded by a number of foundations and other non-profits. These include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, [15] [16] [17] Omidyar Network, Citi Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Mulago Foundation, [18] Ford Foundation, World Bank, USAID, DFID, and others. A number of universities and think tanks have also funded IPA and its projects, including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.
IPA's research spans eight programs: agriculture, education, financial inclusion, governance, health, peace and recovery, small and medium enterprises, and social protection. The results of IPA studies have been published by IPA research affiliates in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Econometrica, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics , American Economic Review , and the Review of Financial Studies , among others. [19]
IPA uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in its approach to anti-poverty research. RCTs are primarily known for their application in medical research to isolate the impact of a particular pharmaceutical or treatment from other factors. As in these medical trials, researchers assign participants at random to different study groups. One or more groups receive a program (the "treatment groups") and another group serves as the comparison (or "control") group. Though there are critiques to the randomized approach, its use in the social sciences is growing. Critics have included notable development economists such as Angus Deaton and Daron Acemoglu. [20]
IPA performs many evaluations of microfinance programs and products, including microcredit, microsavings, and microinsurance. IPA is part of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium launched with the support of a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing knowledge about microfinance and communicating research lessons to a broad spectrum of policy-makers, microfinance institutions, and the public at large.
An example of IPA's research on microfinance includes examinations of the impact of group liability. Many microcredit programs are offered to groups of women who share "group liability", meaning that all members of the group are responsible for repaying the loans if one of the members defaults. Group liability has been promoted by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as the best way to ensure high repayment rates. [21] IPA studies conducted in a variety of countries show that switching existing clients to individual liability does not increase default rates, however. Further, IPA studies demonstrate that microcredit does not have a transformative impact on poverty, but that it can give low-income households more freedom in optimizing the ways they make money, consume, and invest. [22]
IPA's agriculture research evaluates whether interventions aimed at increasing or protecting farm income are effective. This research has included projects that examine the impact of crop prices, [23] [24] rainfall insurance, fertilizer use, [25] and access to export markets. [26] [27]
In November 2011, charity evaluator GiveWell published a review of IPA [28] and listed it among six standout organizations [29] along with GiveDirectly, KIPP (Houston branch), Nyaya Health, Pratham, and Small Enterprise Foundation but below the two top-rated charities Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
The advocacy and education outreach organization The Life You Can Save founded after of the release of the Peter Singer book The Life You Can Save , rates IPA as a trusted charity backed by evidence. [30]
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled US$38 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. The first economist who had invented the idea of micro loans was Jonathan Swift I the 1720’s Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Bangladesh in 1983. Many traditional banks subsequently introduced microcredit despite initial misgivings. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. As of 2012, microcredit is widely used in developing countries and is presented as having "enormous potential as a tool for poverty alleviation." Microcredit is a tool that can possibly be helpful to reduce feminization of poverty in developing countries.
The Hunger Project (THP), founded in 1977 with the stated goal of ending world hunger in 25 years, is an organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. It has ongoing programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where it implements programs aimed at mobilizing rural grassroots communities to achieve sustainable progress in health, education, nutrition, and family income. THP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization incorporated in the state of California.
Opportunity International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization chartered in the United States. Through a network of 47 program and support partners, Opportunity International provides small business loans, savings, insurance and training to more than 14 million people in the developing world. It has clients in more than 20 countries and works with fundraising partners in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Opportunity International has 501(c)(3) status as a tax-exempt charitable organization in the United States under the US Internal Revenue Code.
Pratham is one of the largest non-governmental organisations in India. It was co-founded by Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay. It works towards the provision of quality education to the underprivileged children in India. Established in Mumbai in 1995 to provide pre-school education to children in slums, Pratham today has interventions spread across 23 states and union territories of India and has supporting chapters in the United States, UK, Germany, Sweden, and Australia.
The Financial Access Initiative (FAI) is an American consortium, established in 2006, of researchers at New York University (NYU), Yale University, Harvard University and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) focused on finding answers to how financial sectors can better meet the needs of poor households.
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty, and builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, donors, and others to generate new research, share knowledge, and scale up effective programs.
Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Chief Economist of USAID and Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with economists Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, Karlan served as director of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium of researchers focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals.
Jonathan Zinman is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a research affiliate at the New Haven-based research outfit Innovations for Poverty Action and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Formerly an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Zinman is currently a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Center for Financial Research. Zinman is also a member of the Behavioral Finance Forum and a Research Advisory Board member of stickK, a web-based start-up that enables users to make commitment contracts in order to reach their personal goals.
The Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty (CFSP) is a private economic research consortium dedicated to studying the interaction of financial systems and poverty, using a variety of economic approaches in a range of developing countries.
Rachel Glennerster is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Glennerster served as chief economist for the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, formerly the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK's ministry for international development cooperation, after formerly serving on DFID's Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact. She is an education sector academic co-chair at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She was the executive director of J-PAL until 2017 and the lead academic for Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre, a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. She helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide.
ACORN International is a federation of member-based community organizations that is active in Cameroon, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, France, Honduras, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Peru, Scotland, Tunisia, the United States, and Wales. The group's global membership numbers are currently at approximately 250,000 members.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) is a non-fiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
The Mulago Foundation is a private foundation focused on high impact philanthropy: investing in charities and philanthropic opportunities that have the highest impact. The foundation was originally envisioned by Rainer Arnhold, a San Francisco pediatrician and philanthropist, who taught at Mulago Hospital, Uganda. The foundation was officially created by his brother Henry Arnhold after Rainer Arnhold's death in 1993.
The impact of microcredit is the study of microcredit and its impact on poverty reduction which is a subject of much controversy. Proponents state that it reduces poverty through higher employment and higher incomes. This is expected to lead to improved nutrition and improved education of the borrowers' children. Some argue that microcredit empowers women. In the US and Canada, it is argued that microcredit helps recipients to graduate from welfare programs. Critics say that microcredit has not increased incomes, but has driven poor households into a debt trap, in some cases even leading to suicide. They add that the money from loans is often used for durable consumer goods or consumption instead of being used for productive investments, that it fails to empower women, and that it has not improved health or education.
Hassan Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel is a Saudi businessman and philanthropist. He is Deputy President and Vice Chairman of Saudi Arabia operations of the family-owned international conglomerate business Abdul Latif Jameel, which, among numerous business operations, has distribution rights to Toyota vehicles in Saudi Arabia and other countries. His philanthropy work promotes health and safety, and assists job-seekers and those in need in Saudi Arabia.
Marcella Alsan is an American physician and economist at Harvard University. She is known for her works in the field of health inequality and development economics. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
The Research in Color Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that looks to enhance the recruitment and retention of economists of colour. It was founded by Chinemelu Okafor in 2019.
Tavneet Suri is a Kenyan development economist currently serving as the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is a member of the executive committee of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on technology adoption and usage in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Emily Louise Breza is an American development economist currently serving as the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a board member at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the International Growth Centre and National Bureau of Economic Research. Breza's primary research interests are in development economics, in particular the interplay between social networks and household finance. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.
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