As of 2022, approximately 100 million children in India remain under-immunized. National data shows that over 90% of children are partially immunized in both rural and urban areas, suggesting no strong opposition to immunizations. However, significant drop...

The Government of Karnataka’s “Ganitha Ganaka” program was launched based on evidence supporting tailored instruction approaches that use phones to connect high-quality instruction and tutoring with students and parents. Within the 2024-25 academic year, the...

In collaboration with Tamil Nadu’s Department of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj, J-PAL South Asia is implementing a large-scale RCT to evaluate interventions aimed at improving the well-being of elderly women in rural Tamil Nadu. The two interventions...

West Bengal Accelerated Development of Minor Irrigation Project (WBADMIP) and Precision Development (PxD) propose to collaborate in piloting successful interventions in promoting the adoption of flood-tolerant rice seeds (FTS). The interventions could enhance...

Together with the Kenyan judiciary and the World Bank, we want to scale an innovation that was implemented in a nationwide randomized experiment including all the courts in Kenya, and that increased the speed of courts and had downstream economic effects on...

Medellín, Colombia is undertaking an ambitious initiative to reduce youth violence through evidence-based interventions, under the name Parceros. In collaboration with the Mayor’s Office and several important municipal secretariats, the team will develop and...

Policymakers are increasingly interested in complementing cash transfer programs with interventions that can help poor households create sustainable livelihoods. When added to cash transfers, productive inclusion interventions—including savings groups...

A team of Oxford and University of Cape Town researchers will collaborate with the South African Presidency, Social Security Agency (SASSA) and Social Development Department (DSD) to design and pilot modifications to an existing unconditional monthly cash...

BRAC’s flagship model for youth empowerment in Africa is Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents (ELA), a program that has been in operation for more than 15 years. Focused on creating safe spaces for youth and delivering mentor-led, multifaceted...

This partnership between the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE) and J-PAL affiliated researchers will support the development of effective materials to be scaled by a large World Bank funded ICT-based continuous professional development program in secondary...

Through a collaboration with the bank Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (BCI), the project team previously conducted a randomized evaluation to evaluate the effect of government-backed loans offered through the Chilean government’s FOGAPE program, which offers...

Côte d’Ivoire’s government is investing in early childhood development (ECD), considering a wide range of possible interventions for which evidence on cost-effectiveness is scarce. The project team is working with four government partners to implement and...

School closures and distance learning have led to large learning losses and increased dropout rates, especially among the most vulnerable. In the absence of compensatory actions, the pandemic poses the risk of exacerbating low learning levels and increasing...

The Tamil Nadu Health Systems Reforms Program (TNHSRP) has requested assistance to examine ways to improve the effectiveness of the state’s health insurance scheme. Although coverage is near universal among eligible (lower-income) households, not all eligible...

A recent paper, titled “Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn”, with funding from J-PAL's Post-Primary Education initiative, provides evidence for a transformative and cost-effective general skills teacher training program in Uganda. The National Planning...

Given the challenges in education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippines’s Department of Education is seeking innovative distance learning interventions by drawing lessons from other countries. Recent research conducted by the project team and funded by...

India faces rising gender-based violence (GBV), much of which is staggeringly under-reported. In response, the Madhya Pradesh Police (MPP) department introduced Women’s Help Desks (WHDs): dedicated spaces for women in local police stations, staffed by trained...

In collaboration with the Kenyan Ministry of Health (MoH), the program will implement a coupon program for free dilute chlorine embedded in the government health system. The program builds on evidence generated by previous randomized evaluations that estimated...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public schools in the Dominican Republic (DR) have been closed since early March. Ongoing school closures are expected to lead to learning losses and increased dropout rates, especially among the most vulnerable. In the absence of...

J-PAL Africa and J-PAL affiliated professor Manisha Shah will work together with the Katsina State Government in Nigeria to develop and pilot a life skills programme, as part of the World Bank’s Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, with...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippines Department of Education (DepEd) implemented distance learning modalities to ensure learning continuity. DepEd, however, recognizes the challenges in delivering alternative learning modalities to 27.7...

Although conflicting recommendations have been issued, recent evidence suggests that face masks may significantly reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. However, questions remain on how to effectively promote mask adoption. Despite masks being mandatory, recent...

There has been little research on the effectiveness of government interventions that aim to reduce and prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) at scale, despite the fact that IPV affects one in three women worldwide. Leaders in Action (LIA), the flagship...

Ongoing school closures in Chile due to the COVID-19 pandemic are threatening the education of millions of students in the country and increasing the probability of dropout cases, especially among the most vulnerable population. Leveraging an ongoing...

Through a partnership between Innovations for Poverty Action, the International Growth Center, and the Rwanda Education Board, this project seeks to pilot a phased scale up of pay-for-performance (P4P) teacher contracts in Rwanda. Through enhancing new...

The Western Cape Government, in partnership with J-PAL Africa, will pilot an evidence-backed, scalable, school-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) program to address pervasive violence in the Western Cape that contributes to high dropout rates and low...

Government cash transfer programs — such as Indonesia’s flagship Program Keluarga Harapan (PHK), which serves 10 million of Indonesia’s poorest individuals — are critical to the wellbeing of poor families and communities as employment dwindles and usual supply...

In collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP), this project will co-create and evaluate the impact of an intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaign delivered remotely that is specifically targeted to men at risk...

The Government of Togo has launched an ambitious cash transfer program to provide immediate cash support to poor households that are impacted by COVID-19. The project will assist the government response by improving geographic targeting by building high...

The project will study the effects of monthly old age pension receipt on elderly individuals’ ability to cope with the COVID crisis in Tamil Nadu, India. The team will conduct two phone surveys, the first of which will generate information on elderly...

In partnership with the state of Chhattisgarh, India the research team developed an interactive voice response system called Mor Awaaz (“My Voice” in the local language of Chhattisgarh) which has been delivering personalized health information to over 10,000...

Different and often contradicting messages occur in social media about COVID-19. Developing trustworthy communication strategies is critical to reduce the negative impact of COVID-19, yet measuring outcomes fast is a challenge. In partnership with the...

Governments around the world are developing and implementing policies that slow the spread of COVID-19. One such policy is rapidly providing health-related information to people in order to promote healthy behaviors. Ex-ante, it is unclear which messages will...

Social distancing is one of the most important means to limit the spread of COVID-19. While public health messaging seeks to rapidly change norms to make social distancing more acceptable, norms do not shift instantaneously. Moreover, individuals are likely to...

Currently, there are over 1 million Syrian children of age 5-17 in Turkey. Since 2016, the Turkish Ministry of Education has been developing policies to facilitate the integration of Syrian refugee children into the Turkish education system. Project PICTES...

Around 50 percent of children completing primary education in India can barely read or do arithmetic pitched at Grade 2 competencies. Though there are successful remedial programs focusing on children in Grades 3 to 5, intervening with children who are poised...

Immunization is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve child health in developing countries. However, in 2017, an estimated 19.9 million infants worldwide were not reached with routine immunization services. Approximately 10.3 million of these children...

Despite almost universal primary school enrollment in Zambia, many students fail to learn basic skills. In 2016, the Zambia Ministry of Education collaborated with J-PAL Africa to launch a pilot of the Zambia Catch Up Program in 80 schools, which was modeled...

In order to address a huge backlog of cases and low settlement rates, the President of Mexico City’s Labor Court asked researchers to construct a calculator that provides statistical information to parties and lawyers attending hearings during the course of...

Low administrative capacity and pervasive corruption constrain the performance of social programs in many developing countries. The increasing promise of e-governance for delivering public services makes it possible to design mechanisms with fewer agents...

Informal providers in the private sector with little or no formal medical training represent majority of India’s rural primary healthcare workforce. Given their strong community ties and presence where few alternatives exist, one potential solution to abate...