Founded June 2003 Area served Global | Type Academic center | |
Focus Impact Evaluation in areas such as Microfinance, Public Health, and Agriculture; training and capacity building; policy outreach Location Cambridge, MA, United States of America Key people Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Sendhil Mullainathan, Rachel Glennerster, Ben Olken, Iqbal Dhaliwal | ||
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a research center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose members advocate using randomized evaluations to study poverty alleviation. J-PAL collaborates with governments, NGOs and international development organizations to scale-up programs found to be effective and aims to create a "culture of demanding evidence" to back up policy in the developing world.
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History and mission
Founded in 2003 as the “Poverty Action Lab,” J-PAL is currently directed by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin Olken, and Rachel Glennerster. J-PAL was established to support randomized evaluations measuring interventions against poverty, on topics ranging from agriculture and health to governance and education. The Lab was renamed in honor of Abdul Latif Jameel when his son, MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, supported it with three major endowments in 2005. He further endowed its activities in 2009.
A 2010 Business Week story, "The Pragmatic Rebels," termed J-PAL's approach that of "a new breed of skeptical empiricists committed to assiduous testing and tangible results". According to Nicolas Kristof, J-PAL has led a "revolution in evaluation"; its philosophy and methods are part of a larger trend towards "applying behavioral economics to global development." In his review of Banerjee and Duflo's book Poor Economics, Bill Gates wrote: "To me, what’s really great about J-PAL is that it’s producing scientific evidence that can help make our anti-poverty efforts more effective."
Activities
Though J-PAL was founded as a research center, its activities have expanded to encompass three areas: impact evaluations, policy outreach, and capacity building.
To date, a network of over 100 J-PAL affiliated professors has carried out more than 565 evaluations in 56 countries, and J-PAL has trained over 1,500 people in impact evaluation. These evaluations include everything from an analysis of the effectiveness of eyeglasses in China in improving student test scores to a study on the value of deworming to improve student attendance and academic performance in Kenya. This work, by Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, provided the impetus for the Deworm the World initiative, which has since reached over 20 million children. Another J-PAL researcher, Nava Ashraf, recently completed work on innovative channels to ease the load of overburdened health care workers in Zambia. An evaluation in India by J-PAL Directors Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, together with Dhruva Kothari, found that full immunization rates increased dramatically with the introduction of small incentives for parents, coupled with reliable services at convenient mobile clinics.
Structure
J-PAL's headquarters is a center within the Economics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with regional offices in Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia that are hosted by a local university:
J-PAL is organized both by these regional offices and by research themes called programs. Programs are led by members of the organization's board of directors, and cover eight areas:
Partnerships
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a close partner of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). The two organizations share a common mission and take similar methodological approaches to development policy evaluation, though J-PAL works through universities and makes use of academic resources, while IPA, as a nonprofit, operates through country offices. Both organizations have pioneered the use of randomized evaluations to study the effectiveness of development interventions worldwide and have collaborated extensively on field studies involving randomized evaluations. A number of J-PAL Affiliates are also IPA Research Affiliates or IPA Research Network Members. The work of both organizations is featured in the popular press books More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, and in Banerjee and Duflo's 2011 book, Poor Economics, which was chosen as the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Other J-PAL research partners include the Centre for Micro Finance, the Center for International Development's Micro-Development Initiative, the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, Ideas 42, Educate! and the Small Enterprise Finance Center.
Experiments and Findings in India
Awards
The MacArthur Foundation awarded grants to Esther Duflo in 2009, Sendhil Mullainathan in 2002, and Michael Kremer in 1997.