J-PAL Africa

Letter from the Executive Director

In my first year as Executive Director of J-PAL Africa, I have been inspired by the tremendous progress we have made in building meaningful research and policy partnerships that have the potential to impact millions of lives. Over the past year, our small but hardworking and quietly determined team has launched new research projects, built policy partnerships, created engaging training courses, and advanced evidence-informed policymaking in meaningful ways across the continent.

2024 marked significant changes in J-PAL Africa's leadership, with the appointment of three scientific directors: Pascaline Dupas and Cally Ardington joining Isaac Mbiti. Our colleague Clare Hofmeyr was promoted to associate director of education and training, and expanded our specialized trainings to Ghana and Tanzania.

I’m particularly excited about our work raising awareness and support for important policy priorities and scaling opportunities. Key achievements included securing grants to scale up chlorine coupon programs for improving water quality across Africa. The establishment of the Water, Air, and Energy (WAE) Lab with the City of Cape Town, launched by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and the city's mayor, was a major milestone. 

Through seed funding, we launched the Jobs and Employment in Africa portfolio to guide policy interventions for continental firm growth. Our Digi-FI initiative continued supporting African scholars researching digital identification and financial inclusion. And J-PAL co-founder Abhijit Banerjee delivered an influential lecture at UCT on Universal Basic Income, sharing insights from the Kenya UBI trial.

Our policy partnerships expanded to new regions and sectors, particularly in West Africa, where our expertise helped governments comply with new legislation that requires evidence-based policy implementation. We also continue to explore new roles in evidence-to-policy initiatives, sharing research findings on electoral violence and vote-buying risks with authorities in South Africa and Ghana. 

Looking ahead to 2025, we plan to expand research into new sectors and build on the strong foundation of rigorous research, policy, and training work launched in 2024. This work offers promising new avenues to addressing poverty in Africa—a challenge that remains critical and urgent.

Vinayak Bhardwaj
Executive Director, J-PAL Africa

J-PAL Africa leadership

J-PAL Africa in Review 

Supporting African researchers

We are invested in creating more opportunities for African researchers to develop and drive the research agenda on the African continent through the use of randomized evaluations. The African Scholars Program provides funding, mentorship, and training opportunities to African researchers.

We continue to see exciting growth in the program, with six J-PAL initiatives participating in the program (DigiFI, JOI, DAISI, LAI, HPI and CVI). To date, we have funded 94 researchers in 13 countries to carry out 52 innovative, policy-relevant research projects, at a total of US $1.6 million. We have also continued to identify new ways to make rigorous research methods more accessible  through expanded online resources and running in-person courses for researchers and students in Tanzania and Ghana.

Driving innovation in digital IDs and payments

The Digital Identification and Payments Initiative (DigiFI) made strides in advancing its objectives, reaffirming the team’s commitment to generating evidence on effective digital identification and payment reforms. To date, the initiative has funded 44 ongoing or completed projects, including six RCTs, highlighting the sustained interest from both policymakers and researchers in digital ID and payment systems across sub-Saharan Africa. 

A central pillar of DigiFI’s mission remains the empowerment of African researchers in driving this research agenda; through our African Scholars Program, we have supported 25 projects led by African scholars, representing over half of the initiative’s portfolio of funded research. 

Building trusted policy partnerships

This year has marked significant growth for J-PAL Africa’s policy team. We continue to support new pilots and scaling initiatives for girls’ education and empowerment in West Africa, and launched two new portfolios and one embedded lab:

• The Scaling Access to Safe Water in Africa portfolio supports sub-Saharan African governments to integrate chlorine subsidies into maternal and child health packages. 
• The Jobs and Entrepreneurship portfolio is designed to identify and scale cost-effective strategies that drive SME growth as a path to job creation on the continent. 
• We launched the Water, Air, and Energy (WAE) Lab, a collaboration between J-PAL Africa and the City of Cape Town to co-generate research and inform the scaling of evidence-based programs and policies that effectively improve access to clean air, water, and reliable energy for Capetonians. The WAE Lab is part of J-PAL’s Air and Water Labs (AWLs), a global initiative founded by J-PAL and Community Jameel to co-generate evidence-based solutions for pressing air and water challenges worldwide.

Finally, the policy team has tripled in size since the start of 2024, and we've expanded our focus to anchor our work in six sectors essential to poverty reduction and economic growth on the continent. We have continued our long-running, productive engagement with key research partners including Harambee, the City of Cape Town, and Youth Employment Service in the labour sector, and the NGO Funda Wande in the education sector. 

In 2024, these projects secured significant new funding, allowing us to considerably expand and extend ongoing research activities. In the case of the Funda Wande project, this allowed the research team to explore exciting questions not envisioned in the original project design, like the use of AI in early grade reading assessments in African languages. 

In addition to new funding for existing research projects, in July we launched a five-year, multi-million dollar partnership with Interactive Research & Design (IRD) to evaluate the construction of “play spaces” centered around early childhood development in KwaZulu-Natal province.

The Year Ahead

• We will continue to test different ways to support capacity strengthening of African students and researchers, including through the active exploration of potential ADEPT university and government partnerships in Ghana and Senegal. 
• We will continue to work to establish new and strengthen existing partnerships with governments engaged in digital ID and payment system reforms in the region to expand this evidence base and fund additional randomized evaluations to assess the effectiveness of digital ID system rollouts and their impact on socioeconomic development. 
• Next year, the policy team will focus on executing the initiatives we've developed this year and in building deeper and broader government partnerships on the continent. 
• We will advance new research that addresses issues of labour/unemployment and access to quality primary education, as well as broadening the scope of our research team to include finding solutions to urgent challenges in the health and climate sectors. 

In case you missed it: Highlights from 2024

• J-PAL Africa Scientific Director Pascaline Dupas spoke with VoxDev about why two billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and shared insights on how policymakers can expand access and usage of water cleaning interventions. Together with Pascaline, J-PAL Africa is working with governments on the continent to integrate vouchers for point of use water treatment into their existing maternal and child health care systems.
• This year we published our Policy Brief on Life Skills: A consolidated overview of the evidence on life skills programming which draws out key mechanisms and insights which lead to impact. The brief also highlights practical considerations for effective life skills program design. 

Lead photo credit: Andy Soloman, Shutterstock.com