Iqbal Dhaliwal

Iqbal Singh Dhaliwal is the Global Executive Director of J-PAL. In this role, he collaborates closely with the Board of Directors to craft the organization's strategic vision and coordinates global research, policy outreach, capacity building, and operations with leadership from seven regional offices. He also co-directs the J-PAL South Asia regional office with Esther Duflo and the AI for Social Good Initiative with Sendhil Mullainathan, which identifies the most promising avenues for applying AI in development and climate policy and evaluating applications of AI. 

Beyond his work at J-PAL, Iqbal serves on the boards of award-winning social enterprises Noora Health and Rocket Learning and as a member of Unilever’s Sustainability Advisory Council. He has also served as a member of a working group of Mission Karmayogi constituted by the Government of India to strengthen the capacity of government officials at all levels and a 'Group of Experts' convened by the Chief Minister of Punjab, India to develop the post-Covid economic strategy for the state. 

Since becoming Global Executive Director in January 2018, Iqbal has overseen a significant expansion of J-PAL including new sectors like Firms and Social Protection; initiatives in climate, artificial intelligence, and humanitarian protection; regional offices like J-PAL Middle East and North Africa, and country offices including Brazil and Morocco; many new strategic partnerships with governments, NGOs, and private sector partners on research, education, and training; a more than doubling of J-PAL’s resources and researchers in the network. Many new programs evaluated by J-PAL have been scaled up and now reach over 600 million people.

Iqbal joined J-PAL in 2009 to launch our cost effectiveness work. Later that year, he founded the policy and communications group to translate research findings into actionable policy recommendations. For eight years, as its Director, he led a massive growth in J-PAL’s policy outreach, securing substantial funding to establish and greatly expand policy and communications units at Global and across all regional offices; launched numerous J-PAL initiatives to fund over a thousand research and scale-up projects; and set up numerous channels for sharing evidence with stakeholders. 

From 2015 to 2024, Iqbal served as founding co-chair of the Innovation in Government Initiative (IGI) with Abhijit Banerjee to fund technical assistance to governments to adapt, pilot, and scale evidence-informed innovations with a strong potential to improve the lives of millions of people living in poverty. During this time, IGI funded 65 projects across 16 countries and achieved a 17:1 return on investment. He also served as a founding co-chair with Ben Olken and Rohini Pande, of the Governance Initiative from 2010 to 2014, supporting research on strengthening democracy and governance. Iqbal has co-authored a large, five-district randomized evaluation with Rema Hanna on improving health and service delivery in rural India and co-edited the Handbook on Using Administrative Data with Shawn Cole, Anja Sautmann, and Lars Vilhuber. 

Before joining J-PAL, Iqbal worked as a director in the economic analysis practice of Huron Consulting Group in Chicago and Boston, where he managed numerous engagements involving antitrust issues, regulation, and strategy. Before that, he was a strategy analyst at Dean & Company in Washington, D.C. 

Iqbal began his career in public service as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), in which he served as a Deputy Secretary in a state government, director of a statewide welfare department, and CEO of a publicly owned company. As the sub-collector of one of the state’s largest administrative divisions, he led a large bureaucracy that implemented dozens of development programs in the field. He introduced numerous innovations to strengthen the delivery of public services to the citizens, shut down numerous polluting units, and freed dozens of bonded laborers.

Iqbal received the Director’s Gold medal for standing first in the nationwide civil services exam and training at the National Academy of Administration. In 2019, he was awarded the Guru Nanak Devji Achievers Award by the Government of Punjab for his contributions to economics and poverty alleviation. He received the Dean’s Fellowship at Princeton University, and a gold medal for academic excellence in his undergraduate studies. 

Iqbal holds a BA in economics from the University of Delhi, an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and an MPA in international development from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.