The Evidence Effect: Evidence for action in conflict and crisis
The number of people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance has nearly doubled over the past five years, from almost 170 million in 2020 to more than 300 million today. A combination of factors—including the onset of new and prolonged conflicts and the growing severity of weather-related disasters—have fueled crises that are not only more frequent, but also more complex.
The people caught in these crises are among those hardest hit by cuts to foreign aid. Humanitarian funding is at historic lows, and cuts continue. Just last week, the US House of Representatives approved US$7.9 billion in cuts to foreign aid funding. As a result, many essential services are being scaled back or suspended altogether, leading to preventable deaths and putting millions more lives at risk. Restoring as much humanitarian funding as possible is imperative.
The reality of funding cuts has forced the humanitarian sector to rapidly “reset” to prioritize life-saving activities and find ways to make the most of limited resources. Encouragingly, evidence is emerging to help pinpoint promising solutions and guide investments that can save lives, protect the most vulnerable, and use humanitarian resources most effectively.
Generating evidence even in the hardest places
We already know some things just work. Rapidly mobilizing resources in the wake of crises is critical for ensuring individuals’ most basic human needs are met—including providing timely access to shelter, food, safe drinking water, and healthcare—all of which can prevent emergencies from spiraling into long-term catastrophes.
Still, there’s a lot we don’t know about how to best target and deliver humanitarian aid in rapidly evolving, high-stakes environments in ways that minimize risks and protect civilians from harm. The realities of these settings pose challenges to conducting research safely and ethically. With careful planning and research design, it is possible to conduct impact evaluations of humanitarian assistance that reveal valuable insights even in the most complex environments.
We’ve seen this is possible through a number of our research initiatives. J-PAL’s initiatives on governance and crime and violence have generated impactful insights on effective strategies for building state capacity in fragile settings, responding to and deterring crime and violence, and supporting communities recovering from conflict and disasters. New initiatives are building on this momentum to explore new topics in displacement and humanitarian protection.
And we are not alone in these efforts. A growing number of humanitarian and peacebuilding organizations—including the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, World Food Programme, and others—are investing in randomized evaluations to better understand the impact of their work. Together, these efforts are contributing to a growing global knowledge base that can help shape more effective, evidence-informed humanitarian responses.
What is the evidence telling us?
The power of cash
Getting cash to people quickly, sometimes even before disasters strike, helps families meet basic needs. Humanitarian organizations have long studied how cash and voucher assistance helps households navigate crises, consistently finding it enables families to meet basic needs and improve food security. These findings echo broader research showing that both conditional and unconditional cash transfers can lead to meaningful improvements in well-being, income, and food security for low-income households.
Beyond the lesson that ‘cash works’, how it is delivered also matters. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), both cash and vouchers increased food security and asset ownership, but cash gave households greater flexibility and was more cost-effective. New research is exploring how best to target aid. Early results from a second study in the DRC showed that machine learning and less costly community-based approaches had similar impacts on community acceptance and satisfaction.
Delivering cash to women using digital tools is also proving effective across many settings. In Niger, mobile cash transfers to women were not only more cost-effective than physical cash distribution, but also led to more diverse diets and their children eating more. In Afghanistan, digital payments to female-headed households improved food security and mental wellbeing, with no signs of funds being diverted to unintended groups. Delivering each dollar cost just 6.7 cents—less than half of the World Food Programme’s global average.
Cash is also a powerful tool in responding to increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Rather than reacting after a crisis, offering support in advance, also known as anticipatory action, when weather forecasts suggest an impending climate shock can help families cope. Providing cash transfers ahead of climate shocks in Nepal and Niger improved food security and psychological well-being more than traditional humanitarian aid delivered following the climate shock. Additional research is exploring integrated strategies—such as livelihood interventions, lean season support, and more often delivered in parallel to cash—for boosting community resilience to shocks. Through the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action, partner organizations are also working to improve systems to better identify early warning signs of weather shocks.
Protecting vulnerable people in conflict zones
Cash assistance is a valuable tool in humanitarian response, but it does not address every challenge communities face in crisis. Families still need essential healthcare, education, and, critically, protection from violence, coercion, and abuse.
Addressing these complex issues requires strategies that go beyond cash. J-PAL and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)’s Humanitarian Protection Initiative is supporting some of the first randomized evaluations focused on protection outcomes. For example: in the Central African Republic, the Growing Stronger Together program is testing whether supporting caregivers with parenting tools and tailored family support can prevent child recruitment into armed groups and support those returning home. In Burkina Faso, a pilot project is studying whether training and peer support can protect women entrepreneurs—especially those displaced by conflict—against sexual exploitation.
Early findings from a series of studies we are supporting in the DRC has found that a simple empathy-building program tripled the rate that combatants left an active militia. The program uses weekly perspective-taking exercises that present scenarios prompting combatants to envision themselves in the position of other community members, fostering empathy and reducing civilian abuse.
Supporting long-term recovery and inclusion
Conflict leaves lasting scars–on individuals, communities and institutions. We are therefore also studying ways to improve service delivery after conflict, improve well-being for both displaced and host communities, and foster inclusion between people affected by conflict.
In addition to shifting combatant behaviors in the DRC, perspective-taking programs that encourage people to envision spending a day in another person's shoes are also showing promise for building empathy and more inclusive societies. In Turkey, an interactive classroom program reduced peer violence and improved relationships between Syrian refugees and Turkish students. In Colombia and Hungary, virtual perspective-taking programs similarly improved attitudes and reduced prejudice towards migrants and refugees. These efforts contribute to a broader body of work exploring how to rebuild social cohesion following conflict—including through community reconciliation, mixed sports leagues, and more.
Beyond social integration, we are investigating how to best strengthen livelihoods, self-reliance, and economic inclusion of people experiencing displacement. In Bangladesh, for example, offering Rohingya refugees employment for two months improved psychosocial well-being more than providing cash alone—highlighting that work can have more value than just income. Through our Displaced Livelihoods Initiative with IPA, we are answering a range of additional questions—exploring strategies to boost uptake of mental health services, support refugee business development, and connect displaced people to government services.
Continuing to learn and adapt in crisis settings
The examples above illustrate that randomized evaluations are possible in complex, conflict-affected settings—and are already helping inform more effective humanitarian and development responses. Given how many people’s lives are at stake as humanitarian budgets shrink, this is a critical moment to build on what we’ve learned. Strong partnerships between researchers and implementers are key to ensuring insights are grounded in local realities and translated into action.
Still, there is much more to learn. While the evidence base is expanding—particularly around cash assistance models—important gaps remain. Many humanitarian challenges remain unsolved, and traditional tools may not be enough. First and foremost, funding should be preserved for delivering life-saving services. But even in a constrained funding environment, investing in research and innovation should remain a priority. By generating sharper insights into what works, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost, we can help communities not only weather today’s crises, but also build stronger and more resilient futures.
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The private sector is a fundamental force for driving global prosperity. For corporations and investors, there’s enormous opportunity in low- and middle-income countries’ growing markets and talent. What’s less clear is how to partner most effectively for maximum impact: How can multinationals, local businesses, investors, governments, and catalytic donor capital work together to deliver growth, expand access to higher-income jobs, and scale market-based solutions?
Prior Evidence Effect installments have focused on how to work with governments and nonprofits to scale what works. Of course, the private sector is another fundamental force for driving global prosperity. And for corporations and investors, there’s enormous opportunity in low- and middle-income countries’ growing markets and talent.
What’s less clear is how to partner most effectively for maximum impact: How can multinationals, local businesses, investors, governments, and catalytic donor capital work together to deliver growth, expand access to higher-income jobs, and scale market-based solutions?
Today, a growing body of evidence offers guidance to sharpen the playbook for these partners. But more partnerships between researchers and private sector actors are needed to generate new insights and test what works. At J-PAL, we’re working to foster more partnerships between researchers and private sector implementers to help fill this evidence gap.
For those working at the intersection of development and business innovation, our message is simple: Partnership and learning are essential to maximize both profits and social impact. Together we want to create sustainable solutions that work with markets to improve people’s lives while reducing reliance on traditional aid at a time when those resources are increasingly limited.
Three impactful strategies to get us started: What works to support business growth, better jobs, and market-based solutions
Support small and growing businesses: Small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) create most jobs in LMICs, but face a daunting list of barriers—lack of growth financing, difficulty finding skilled workers and managers, limited access to buyers, and so on. Multinational and domestic firms should consider those strategies that have the highest impact and business returns—for example, improved access to customers has been shown to boost SME profits, productivity, and product quality in different industries. Companies with purchasing power should use such insights to be intentional about buying from places where they actively want to create more growth and impact.
Government agencies like export promotion offices can also apply evidence to improve how they support industry development: Exporting can bring broad benefits beyond short-term growth. When local businesses in low- and middle-income countries connect to export markets, they often create more jobs, pay higher wages, and improve product quality and management practices.
Access to finance and capital is essential for businesses, but doesn’t always lead to transformative growth for the average small and mid-size business. A growing body of research shows that targeting high-potential entrepreneurs with more tailored finance can boost business performance and jobs. Small tweaks to microcredit programs can also improve outcomes across a large client base. Investors and lenders can use such evidence-based insights to refine their product offerings and to incorporate entrepreneur selection methods into their due diligence at low cost, improving impact and reducing risk.
Upskill the workforce: Skills matter, but training outcomes are most successful when tied to actual employers and industry needs, and when they look beyond just technical know-how. In the United States, sectoral employment programs that focus on industries with high pay and/or rising demand for workers have led to lasting income gains and helped firms find talent. Globally, boosting soft skills like communication and teamwork is increasingly proven to make a real difference in lifting the earnings of workers and entrepreneurs by lifting productivity. Business stands to benefit from participating in such programs to access a pool of workforce-ready talent, helping support growth.
Make markets work for people and businesses: Scaling up market-driven solutions has the potential to bring home immense benefits, including helping solve long-standing development challenges—when designed well. Discovering how these programs affect not just the people directly involved, but also the broader community, can help shape more appropriate design choices and avoid unintended harm.
Policymakers and implementers should pilot and test novel market interventions before scaling. In India, emissions markets now improving air quality for 15 million people began with a rigorously tested pilot, showing how evidence-informed market tools can deliver large-scale improvements to people’s lives.
Market tools work best when they reduce risk, build trust, and create incentives for investment across entire supply chains. In agriculture, for example, research is revealing both the benefits and tradeoffs of improving farmers’ access to domestic and international markets, helping decision-makers understand not just who benefits and how these benefits are distributed, but how these programs affect prices, production, and communities.
How can we create the right enablers for evidence-informed private sector impact?
J-PAL is investing in partnerships between researchers and private sector implementers to co-generate new insights and make evidence use more routine in private sector decision-making for impact:
- Our work on private sector engagement helps companies to access J-PAL’s evidence and research in support of their social and environmental goals.
- The UM6P-J-PAL Agricultural Lab for Africa (UJALA) is advancing solutions for small-scale farming and food security on the continent in partnership with OCP Africa, a leading fertilizer company.
- We are partnering with businesses from across industries to meet their impact aims, from decarbonizing aviation to ride-hailing, to improving factory working conditions in the fashion supply chain.
Supporting evidence-informed policy that contributes to long-term growth is also critical. Government-research partnerships helped inform policy decisions like India’s market-based industrial pollution regulation, and are identifying tools to improve public procurement, court systems, and taxation.
Of course, rigorous research on programs, policies, and investments is just one piece of the puzzle. Global trade trends, macroeconomic stability, and social policies to address extreme inequality all shape how much the private sector can contribute to inclusive growth. But evidence on growth and market-shaping policies plays a vital complementary role in these broader conversations. We welcome continued dialogue and collaboration to help keep private sector solutions both innovative and grounded in what delivers real impact.
Governments and local communities are leading the charge on delivering services at scale. When focused on the right things, donor capital—both bilateral and philanthropic—doesn’t have to and generally shouldn’t replace government funding. It should play a catalytic role to spark innovation, spread learning, scale game-changing solutions, and strengthen responsible governments.
Amid climate shocks, conflict, inequality, and fiscal strain, development aid is under scrutiny like never before. Many are asking who will step in to bridge the growing gap in aid. But the best case for foreign assistance is not that aid should do more—it’s that it should do what others can’t.
Governments and local communities are leading the charge on delivering services at scale. When focused on the right things, donor capital—both bilateral and philanthropic—doesn’t have to and generally shouldn’t replace government funding. It should play a catalytic role to spark innovation, spread learning, scale game-changing solutions, and strengthen responsible governments.
We (Alison and Shobhini) have had the privilege of working with many governments, NGOs, social enterprises, and the donors that fund them. Based on this experience, we’re sharing four big ideas for how donors can make investments that catalyze meaningful change.
1. Fund innovations that others can’t.
Foreign assistance and philanthropic funding can act as the risk capital of development innovation—supporting early-stage ideas that governments or the private sector in low- and middle-income countries may be unable or unwilling to fund at early phases. While not all aid is flexible, when donors make room for experimentation and learning, even with the risk of failure, they help uncover solutions that wouldn’t otherwise be found. Without support to surface new ideas, we risk circling back to the same old approaches—while more promising ones never get the chance to prove themselves, let alone reach scale.
In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, increasing farm productivity is key for growth and development, especially for small-scale farmers facing extreme weather that can wipe out an entire season’s worth of crops. Foreign assistance and philanthropic donors supported the development of a flood-tolerant rice variety that boosted yields—but seeds only help if farmers know about them and know how to use them. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Gates Foundation supported evaluations that tested different ways to increase adoption by farmers. These donor investments, from seed development to adoption strategies, turned a lab invention into a real solution for over 35 million farmers.
Pivoting to health, increasing immunization coverage is an extremely cost-effective way to reduce preventable illness and death. We know vaccines work, but making sure people get the vaccines they’re eligible for is the challenge in many countries. The global vaccine alliance, Gavi, recently funded multiple evidence-informed projects to increase the demand for immunizations. J-PAL is working closely with Gavi and their partners on projects to pilot and scale programs in Nigeria, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lesotho. This innovative approach backed by donors creates the space necessary to test new delivery models and scale up the successful ones.
In education, Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) has led to some of the largest learning gains among rigorously evaluated programs worldwide. Developed by the NGO Pratham and government partners, in an iterative process of innovation and evaluation in collaboration with J-PAL, it was refined through repeated testing, retooling, and learning and adaptation through implementation. Several donors joined this journey with trust, provided essential capital, and kept the focus on a shared mission of helping every child master basic skills. TaRL has now reached over 70 million children in India and Africa, improving teacher quality, boosting student learning, and making social spending on education more effective.
2. Invest in learning and public goods for all.
Another unique and catalytic role for donors is in taking a long view by investing in generating knowledge and making it widely available. This can work in a few different ways.
First, donors can invest in portfolios of research to uncover effective approaches to tackle complex development issues. To take a finance analogy, a portfolio approach increases the chances of finding standout solutions while generating broader lessons from many studies across different programs that help advance our understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and why. The UK’s FCDO has long championed this approach, funding portfolios like J-PAL’s Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative and Governance Initiative, among others, that have led to meaningful policy impact.
Second, to generate evidence and make it widely available, donors can shore up knowledge infrastructure, like cost data, research registries, and in-country programs that strengthen research ecosystems. Cost data is essential to comparing the cost-effectiveness of different programs and giving decision-makers the information they need. Research transparency via registries ensures we can weigh any study’s findings against similar research. And building strong research ecosystems enables high-quality research that is shaped by local perspectives.
Third, donors who work on a global or regional level can make lessons widely available and diffuse good ideas. Sharing lessons widely is a key step in turning evidence into action. For instance, J-PAL MENA and UNICEF worked together to share global evidence for Egypt’s policy priorities, and J-PAL South Asia partnered with FCDO to distill evidence-based policy recommendations for India’s federal Ministry of Finance.
3. Bridge the gap from idea to scale.
If we want more bold ideas to reach millions, we must fund the path that gets them there. Many bold ideas reach impact at scale when governments get involved. Their reach and mandate are unmatched—but the journey from pilot to public program is rarely simple. Whether innovations originate inside government or from NGOs or social enterprises, donor funding can play a unique and catalytic role in helping adapt, test, and integrate them into government systems.
One powerful example of donor support enabling government-led scaling is the Graduation approach in India. First pioneered by BRAC, the Graduation approach to tackle extreme poverty was adapted by the Bihar government in partnership with J-PAL South Asia and the NGO Bandhan, reaching thousands of vulnerable families. Donor support made it possible to tailor the program to state systems, build learning loops, provide continuous monitoring to ensure the program was implemented correctly, and troubleshoot implementation challenges. Now the program is set to scale nationwide through India’s Ministry of Rural Development, with ongoing support from ASPIRE at J-PAL South Asia and a large group of partners.
In other contexts, funding partners similarly made major scaling decisions possible. In Indonesia, donor funding was key to rapid evaluation and scaling of improvements to the flagship national rice subsidy program, providing food security for millions. And in Brazil, philanthropy-funded evaluation enabled the broader adoption of an AI writing assistance program for use in public high schools, improving student learning and test scores. In these cases and many more, timely donor investment helped bridge the gap between promising ideas and large-scale, government-led initiatives.
4. Embed in government systems, instead of replacing them.
The most transformative partnerships are co-created with governments. As our colleagues wrote about a few weeks ago, labs or evidence experts embedded in government institutions can serve as centers of innovation that enable continuous experimentation and learning from within the system itself, aligned with national priorities and able to adapt to changes in personnel or administrations.
Embedded models prioritize local leadership, policy alignment, and long-term presence. When donors invest in people, institutions, and trusted relationships—as we’ve seen in J-PAL’s embedded labs from India to Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, and beyond—they help build up governments’ own capabilities to find innovative solutions, deliver, and scale what works.
Foreign assistance and philanthropy are uniquely positioned to support this kind of relatively low-cost, high-impact collaboration. While it’s still important to fund individual programs and support high-quality grassroots organizations, that’s not a substitute for engaging with government systems—especially when aiming for systems change. Working in close partnership in embedded setups takes patience, flexibility, and a tolerance for ambiguity, but the opportunity to influence program design and spending with evidence is worth it.
Our partnership with the Tamil Nadu government in India, now in its tenth year, is a great example of institutionalizing a culture of evidence use through long-term partnerships that sustain political and bureaucratic changes. And SARWA, our Air and Water Lab in India, was launched in 2024 to embed teams within state governments to accelerate evidence-informed solutions to clean air and water.
The call to action is simple and urgent: fund innovation, fund the infrastructure that makes learning possible and locally-driven, fund the bridge from effective idea to scale, and fund the teams working alongside governments to make it happen. Aid can’t and shouldn’t replace what governments do—but it can help them do it more effectively.
The work of government is challenging in high- and low-income countries alike. Today, new problems compound to make the work of government even harder: Governments must tackle poverty and address climate change while many are in the midst of debt and fiscal crises that were compounded by Covid.
The work of government is challenging in high- and low-income countries alike. Delivering the right services at the right time, building a public workforce that is both motivated and capable, deciding how to allocate limited resources, and raising the revenue needed to fund it all—these are the everyday challenges of governance. And yet, how governments meet these challenges has profound consequences for people’s lives.
Today, new problems compound to make the work of government even harder: Governments must tackle poverty and address climate change while many are in the midst of debt and fiscal crises that were compounded by Covid. Many are investing scarce resources in digital infrastructure and new technologies, making rigorous evaluation more important now than ever.
Meanwhile, foreign assistance has become harder to secure for low- and middle-income countries. And trust in government is declining, while many citizens still don’t have access to basic public services like primary health care and social safety nets.
In our work at J-PAL we’ve identified many evidence-informed ways to increase state capacity and help make the hard work of governing more impactful. We share examples below of how to make tax systems more effective and fair, apply technology in smart ways to improve service delivery, and rethink private sector regulation.
This matters not only for governments, but for donors: Over time, governments that excel at funding, planning, and delivering services will require less foreign assistance.
Making tax systems more effective and fair
Governments need to raise resources to be able to deliver essential services, but effective taxation is a challenge. Governments in the world’s lowest-income countries collect only 10 percent of their GDP in taxes, compared to 40 percent in high-income countries.
There are some simple ways to increase revenues. Low-cost interventions like sending reminder messages to taxpayers, evaluated in 32 countries to date, have led to significant improvements in individuals’ and businesses’ tax compliance. Messages that are framed in simple terms and include a credible threat of enforcement are particularly effective, as is targeting messages to taxpayers most likely to evade.
Technology and cutting-edge data methods open new possibilities to make tax administration more effective and progressive—in other words, helping to ensure those with lower incomes or property values pay a lower percentage toward taxes. AI and machine learning hold potential to drive down the costs of tax administration, but should be tested carefully to ensure their effectiveness and reduce potential for inadvertent harm.
Many low-income country governments have reliable information for only a small subset of taxpayers. Some programs that tackle this information gap have shown initial success: For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an evaluation of a simple machine learning algorithm trained on administrative data found that it was able to assess property values accurately and efficiently. A J-PAL-funded evaluation of a similar algorithmic approach in Senegal was more effective than bureaucrats in accurately valuing property taxes and avoiding potential bias.
Smart ways to use technology to improve service delivery
One of the most powerful applications of technology in government lies in monitoring and improving public service delivery. Digital tools can generate data on how services are performing and make it easier to collect, access and visualize this information, enabling supervisors to ensure frontline workers fulfill their responsibilities to citizens.
Evidence from India is particularly compelling. A J-PAL-funded evaluation found that government adoption of a digital app helped officials identify sources of payment delays in a national work program; access to the app significantly reduced wage payment delays to citizen workers, particularly in areas with worse baseline performance. Similarly, an evaluation led in part by J-PAL South Asia found that adoption of a mobile phone-based monitoring system in which a call center contacted farmers to verify whether they had received their government payments led to remarkable, cost-effective results—suggesting that this type of monitoring can be a cheap, simple, and flexible tool for improving last-mile service delivery at a large scale.
These results aren't limited to India. In Paraguay, we funded research that found that GPS-enabled cell phones transformed the effectiveness of agricultural extension agents by allowing supervisors to track where agents were, how long they spent in each location, and their activities with farmers. The result was a significant increase in the share of farmers visited, resulting in the Ministry of Planning advocating for expanded use of monitoring technology across more government ministries.
In Pakistan, replacing paper-based health inspection monitoring with a smartphone app reduced doctors’ absenteeism in clinics, though the effect was strongest where health officials faced less political pressure to protect doctors—a reminder that technology solutions must account for local contexts and politics. This is why rigorous testing through evaluation is essential: A J-PAL-funded evaluation of a similar program in Karnataka found limited impacts due to limitations in the government’s ability or willingness to enforce penalties.
AI and machine learning can transform service quality with tangible impacts for people
Cutting-edge technology has the potential to directly improve the efficiency and quality of essential government services. Take Letrus, a Brazilian AI-based platform that provides personalized feedback on high school students' essays. The platform frees up teachers’ time from grading essays so they can focus on personalized tutoring, helping improve writing skills for public school students preparing for university entrance exams. Based on positive evaluation results, the state of Espírito Santo scaled the AI-only version to all public high school seniors, with over 100,000 students now using the platform.
Technology also holds promise for better targeting and delivery of public benefits and social protection programs, including unconditional cash transfers, conditional cash transfers, food assistance, and “big push” programs like the Graduation approach. In a J-PAL funded project in Togo, for example, the government used machine learning algorithms and data from satellites and mobile phone networks to effectively identify vulnerable households to receive cash transfers during Covid, creating a rapid and cost-effective way to distribute urgent emergency aid.
Technology can give a boost to otherwise straightforward approaches to improving public services, and doesn't always need to be expensive or particularly high-tech. In Mexico City's judicial labor courts, providing information to workers about likely case outcomes calculated from an algorithm, and offering mediation services, helped educate them about the risks of drawn-out court cases and, in some cases, nearly doubled settlement rates before a case went to trial. This not only improved outcomes for workers, but also helped reduce the court's multi-year case backlog. The success of this approach informed a broad reform of Mexican national labor law.
Smart regulation: Making markets work for policy goals
Governments typically regulate industries using “command-and-control” approaches, creating rules that companies must adhere to. But these often fall short, especially when governments are unable to effectively monitor and/or objectively enforce penalties. New evidence shows how governments can harness market mechanisms to make regulation more effective.
Gujarat's pioneering emissions trading scheme is a prime example. Launched by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, this cap-and-trade system allows the regulator to set total pollution limits while giving factories the flexibility to buy and sell permits to stay below the cap. This market-based approach has proven more effective and cost-effective than traditional command-and-control regulation, monitoring, and enforcement in improving air pollution: Participating firms substantially reduced their particulate matter emissions without large increases in abatement costs.
Priorities for development: Invest in building state capacity
The role of technology in governance presents both tremendous opportunities and the need to proceed thoughtfully. For governments to leverage technology effectively, they first need good administrative data. With good data, AI technologies offer new possibilities for reducing constraints in effectiveness and supply of frontline workers, improving targeting of government programs, and avoiding bias in service delivery.
Yet these technologies must be tested and scaled carefully to ensure success and avoid harmful impacts. This is where J-PAL's approach of rigorous evaluation becomes essential—we need to understand not just whether interventions work, but where, why, and under what conditions. Our new Project AI Evidence, launched in collaboration with Google.org and Schmidt Futures, aims to do just that, working with governments and other partners to find the most promising social impact solutions for scale.
Many of the J-PAL funded studies we mention above were supported by our Governance Initiative, which focuses on finding evidence-informed solutions that strengthen state capacity. A consortium of donors have supported dozens of policy-relevant studies and scaling partnerships over the years, led by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)—helping pilot, test, and scale innovative approaches to more effective governance that improves peoples’ lives.
Beyond research, our new Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) aims to build bureaucrats’ skills in data analysis and decision-making through customized courses, knowledge sharing, and academic programs. Through partnerships with governments and other learning institutions, ADEPT aims to empower civil servants and leaders to champion a culture of effective, evidence-informed policymaking that outlasts bureaucratic shifts and changes in administrations.
As my colleagues recently noted, low- and middle-income country governments are at the center of the fight against poverty and invest far more in their own social programs than all foreign aid combined. But multilaterals like the World Bank and IDB, bilaterals like USAID and FCDO, foundations like Gates and Hewlett, philanthropists, and evidence organizations like J-PAL and IPA have played key complementary roles in building state capacity. These organizations help unlock opportunities for evaluations of policy-relevant research like what we’ve shared here, and through formal training programs and informal collaboration and knowledge sharing of global best practices.
Combining low-tech solutions with strategic use of technology and smart market alignment, all of which have been rigorously evaluated to be effective, can help governments build capacity to serve their citizens better. The tools are available. Now we need the will to act on it.