Reflecting on the end of USAID
On February 26, thousands of USAID contracts, including with J-PAL’s affiliated researchers, regional offices, and implementation partners, were canceled. Most staff have been laid off in past weeks.
Over the past two decades, J-PAL and members of our research network worked closely with USAID on many projects to design, pilot, and evaluate innovative solutions; scale up those found to be effective to maximize the impact of development efforts; scale down those that do not work to save valuable resources; and widely share the learnings to accelerate the fight against poverty using science to identify the most effective and cost-effective programs.
USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) played a catalytic role in this effort by providing funding to build evidence of what works and advance the most cost-effective solutions. J-PAL affiliate and Nobel laureate Michael Kremer estimated that because some projects funded by USAID DIV were scaled up by others, DIV’s early social rate of return was 17:1—in other words, each dollar invested by DIV yielded at least $17 in social benefits through improving livelihoods or increasing people’s incomes.
At a talk at USAID in 2020, I traced the journey of Teaching at the Right Level, a pedagogical approach that improves learning for children falling behind in school, from a research project in India to a multi-country scale-up in Africa, thanks to DIV’s critical role in taking compelling ideas to scale and crowding in additional funding.
Details on some of these projects, what we learned, and how those lessons shaped policy decisions are featured below.
Lifesaving nudges: Incentives for immunization
In India, child immunization rates are very low, causing illnesses and deaths from preventable diseases. A study funded in part by USAID found that a combination of non-financial incentives and targeted nudges were the most cost-effective policy combination compared to others, increasing the number of immunizations per dollar by 9.1 percent. The government is now scaling this program across the state of Haryana. Read more.
Improving food security and resilience through a one-time cash boost
An evaluation funded in part by USAID of a cash transfer program implemented by GiveDirectly in Liberia and Malawi found that households that received a one-time cash transfer experienced lasting increases in food security, psychological well-being, and resilience to health shocks, even up to two years following the transfer. The results suggest that a one-time transfer can be an effective way to help people avoid hunger and adapt to changing health circumstances, and provide an important contribution to a growing body of research on the effectiveness of different types of cash transfer programs. Read more.
Scaling down a health provider attendance monitoring technology
In a USAID-funded study, researchers tested whether a monitoring system that recorded employees’ fingerprints at the beginning and end of each day could improve staff attendance and patient health in primary health centers in Karnataka. The monitoring system increased attendance among medical staff, but not doctors, and absence penalties were not widely enforced. Though imperfectly implemented, the system led to a large increase in baby birth weight.
The results of the randomized evaluation informed the government’s decision to end the attendance monitoring program, saving the government millions of dollars and avoiding an added burden and wasted time on the part of civil servants. Read more.
Reducing crime through cognitive behavioral therapy
In Liberia, a study funded in part by USAID DIV found that short-term cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program, a therapeutic approach to improving a wide range of harmful beliefs and behaviors, reduced criminal behavior among high-risk young men. CBT reduced criminal behavior among participants both in the short run, one year following the intervention, and the long run, ten years later. The impacts were even stronger when participants received both CBT and cash grants. Following the study, a grant from USAID DIV supported testing and scaling the program in Nigeria to reach more youth. Read more.
Teaching foundational reading and math skills to help children thrive
A series of randomized evaluations over the past fifteen years have shown that Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), a targeted instruction method developed by the NGO Pratham, consistently improves learning outcomes when implemented well, and has led to some of the largest learning gains among rigorously evaluated education programs.
A USAID DIV grant contributed to adapting the program from India, where it was developed, to Zambia. It was then highly leveraged, bringing in new funding from the Government of Zambia as well as other bilateral and philanthropic donors—all of which led to the government rolling out the program to reach students in more than 1,900 schools. Based on the success of the Zambian pilot, this approach has been implemented in other countries to reach more than five million children in Africa. Read more and watch a talk from Iqbal at USAID outlining TaRL's journey from evidence to scale.
Creating sustainable pathways out of extreme poverty
The Graduation approach, designed by the NGO BRAC, provides households in extreme poverty with a multifaceted “big push,” consisting of a productive asset (like a farm animal, or sewing machine), training, coaching, access to savings, and small cash support, to help them break the poverty trap and lift themselves out of extreme poverty. Rigorous evaluations have found that the model leads to large and lasting improvements in household spending, assets, and savings; better food security, and in some contexts, improved psychosocial well-being.
More than 2.3 million participants have since “graduated” out of extreme poverty in Bangladesh, and the program has been replicated by several organizations across the world. USAID DIV funding was essential to adapting the program to India and Rwanda, a relatively small investment in program design that enabled it to reach millions more households. Read more.
Improving delivery of government benefits
In Indonesia, researchers evaluated how to improve the Government of Indonesia’s rice subsidy program. A study found that providing ID cards to beneficiary households, in combination with community outreach and advertisements improved access to the program. Drawing on this research, the Government of Indonesia scaled up social assistance ID cards to the poorest households across the country, reaching 65.67 million people. USAID DIV worked with the research team to further improve this program by evaluating the effectiveness of an e-voucher that can be accessed using a debit card to purchase rice and eggs at any registered retailers. Read more.
Reducing air pollution without increasing costs for industries
In a study funded in part by USAID, researchers worked with the Gujarat Pollution Control Board to launch and rigorously evaluate the world’s first emissions trading market for particulates air pollution in Surat, Gujarat, and the first ever randomized evaluation of a pollution market. The study found that the emissions market reduced plant pollution by 20–30 percent on average and reduced industries’ average costs associated with pollution abatement. Based on these promising results, the government scaled the market to reach 15 million people and generated $1 billion in health benefits, as estimated by researchers, from decreased pollution. Read more.
Supporting entrepreneurs and improving health
In rural Uganda, researchers evaluated Living Good’s community health worker program based on a micro-franchise business model. They found that the program significantly reduced infant and child mortality, improved health knowledge among clients, and increased household visits by health workers. Based on these promising results and with support from USAID DIV, Living Goods scaled up its operations in Kenya to reach more people. Read more.
Enabling more efficient access to health care
Biometric identification is a potential solution to ensure social services reach the right people, and improve the reliability of administrative data by enabling real-time data entry. In India, USAID helped fund a study evaluating the impact of biometric tracking devices using fingerprints in tuberculosis (TB) care centers on patient adherence to treatment, provider performance, and data quality. Biometric devices increased patient adherence to TB treatment and provider performance. Read more.
