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. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
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. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
Our affiliated professors are based at over 120 universities and conduct randomized evaluations around the world to design, evaluate, and improve programs and policies aimed at reducing poverty. They set their own research agendas, raise funds to support their evaluations, and work with J-PAL staff on research, policy outreach, and training.
Our research, policy, and training work is fundamentally better when it is informed by a broad range of perspectives.
The governments of Ghana and Sierra Leone have each designed an outcomes fund mechanism to improve student access, retention, and learning. Part of the rationale is to create a ‘market for impact’. The hope is that service providers with good insights into how to drive learning for all children will bid to win contracts and implement their ideas in schools (and with communities). By incentivizing outcomes—rather than inputs, as is typical in many programs in the social sector—implementation is not fixed. Providers can innovate over time in search of improved implementation and better outcomes. The design is a geographic-lot-based, school-level cluster RCT. The unit of randomization is the school. There is one treatment group in each country: ‘included in the project’. Using WWHGFE funding, the study will evaluate impacts on schooling inputs and student academic learning. J-PAL funding will enable the examination of students' holistic skills.