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About the Urban Services Initiative

The Urban Services Initiative (USI), managed by J-PAL and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will identify and evaluate innovative solutions to the problem of inadequate access to urban water, sanitation and hygiene services in cities in Asia and Africa, especially in neighborhoods with concentrations of poor people. The USI will focus on micro-solutions to urban water, sanitation and hygiene (WSH) needs as opposed to large infrastructure investments. Any innovations or interventions that complement WSH service provision are also included in the USI mandate.

The initiative aims to understand and address important barriers to the urban poor’s access to needed services, including collective action failures, politician incentives and other political economy constraints, low willingness to pay for services, and difficulties arising from the presence of a mix of transient and permanent populations.

USI Main Goals

1.    Spur innovative projects that can address the challenge of delivering urban public services, and use randomized evaluations (REs) to test the effectiveness of those innovations in the field. The overarching question will be: “Why has the quality of public services remained critically deficient in urban areas of developing countries, and what are the most promising, cost-effective ways of overcoming those deficiencies?”

2.    Form strong research teams including multidisciplinary teams and increase capacity for some researchers based in developing countries to design and conduct REs which test the effectiveness of their proposed solutions rigorously. Enhance their ability to think about the multi-disciplinary nature of the challenge so that any behavioral, institutional and technological aspects of the problem are addressed simultaneously.

3.    Diffuse knowledge gained to policymakers and donors at local, national, and international levels, so that effective solutions are promoted and spread. Develop capacity for local institutions and researchers to carry this agenda forward beyond the life of USI.

These objectives will be achieved through a set of activities:

• Organizing matchmaking conferences to identify projects and opportunities.
• Identifying, training and supporting local researchers to engage in USI’s work.
• Identifying potential partners, scientists and researchers in complementary fields in order to support a multidisciplinary approach to research.
• Conducting regular calls for proposals for invited researchers, both for full projects and seed grants.
• Sharing results with local governments and NGOs through an array of dissemination activities such as policy documents and an evidence workshop.

USI co-chairs are Professors Esther Duflo (MIT), Sebastian Galiani (Washington University in St. Louis), and A. Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University). USI is funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more details, please email Cristobal Marshall at cmarshal@mit.edu.