Innovations for Poverty Action

History and Mission

IPA was founded in 2002 by Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University, as a non-profit organization dedicated to bridging the gap between academia and development policy. IPA is a 501 (c)(3) organization headquartered in New Haven, CT with over 1000 colleagues working on projects in 51 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America.

IPA is a research and policy non-profit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. IPA brings together researchers and decision-makers to design, rigorously evaluate, and refine these solutions and their applications, ensuring that the evidence created is used to improve the lives of the world’s poor.

Activities

IPA's principal activities center on conducting impact evaluations of development interventions using a randomized controlled trial methodology. These evaluations assess interventions in the areas of small and medium enterprises, financial inclusion, peace and recovery, governance, health, education, agriculture, and social protection.

As of 2016, IPA has designed and conducted more than 600 evaluations in partnership with over 400 leading academics. IPA also works to ensure that decision-makers use and apply evidence by making it useful and accessible. IPA does this through collaborating with decision-makers while creating policy-relevant evidence, proactive sharing of results, and providing technical assistance to applying solutions at scale.

Partners

IPA works with more than 400 nonprofit organizations, governments, academic institutions, and companies to design programs and conduct evaluations.

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a close partner of IPA. The two organizations share a common mission and take similar methodological approaches to development policy evaluation. 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. IPA and J-PAL attempt to bridge the gap between research and the policy world by creating and disseminating knowledge about what works to policymakers and practitioners around the world.

Other partners

IPA has a number of other partners including the World Bank, various agencies of the United Nations, a number of national and regional governments such as the government of Sierra Leone, and a number of charities that collaborate with IPA in the design and evaluation of their programs, such as Save the Children, Population Services International, One Acre Fund, and Pratham.

Funding

IPA seeks funding from both individuals and foundations.

Foundation and organization funding

The IPA has been funded by a number of foundations and other non-profits. These include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, Citi Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Mulago Foundation, Ford Foundation, World Bank, USAID, DFID, and many others. A number of universities and think tanks have also funded IPA and its projects, including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

Research

IPA's research spans eight programs: agriculture, education, financial inclusion, governance, health, peace and recovery, small and medium enterprises, and social protection. The results of IPA studies have been published by IPA research affiliates in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Econometrica, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, World Development, American Economic Review, Journal of Economics Perspectives, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Financial Studies, among others.

Method

IPA uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in its approach to anti-poverty research. RCTs are primarily known for their application in medical research to isolate the impact of a particular pharmaceutical or treatment from other factors. As in these medical trials, researchers assign participants at random to different study groups. One or more groups receive a program (the “treatment groups”) and another group serves as the comparison (or “control”) group. Though there are critiques to the randomized approach, its use in the social sciences is growing. Critics have included notable development economists such as Angus Deaton and Daron Acemoglu.

Microfinance

IPA performs many evaluations of microfinance programs and products, including microcredit, microsavings, and microinsurance. IPA is part of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium launched with the support of a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing knowledge about microfinance and communicating research lessons to a broad spectrum of policy-makers, microfinance institutions, and the public at large.

An example of IPA's research on microfinance includes examinations of the impact of group liability. Many microcredit programs are offered to groups of women who share "group liability," meaning that all members of the group are responsible for repaying the loans if one of the members defaults. Group liability has been promoted by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as the best way to ensure high repayment rates. IPA studies conducted in a variety of countries show that switching existing clients to individual liability does not increase default rates, however. Further, IPA studies demonstrate that microcredit does not have a transformative impact on poverty, but that it can give low-income households more freedom in optimizing the ways they make money, consume, and invest.

Agriculture

IPA's agriculture research evaluates whether interventions aimed at increasing or protecting farm income are effective. This research has included projects that examine the impact of crop prices, rainfall insurance, fertilizer use, and access to export markets.