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News, ideas, and analysis from J-PAL staff and affiliated professors. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly email updates.

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AI for social good: Supporting workers and businesses in LMICs

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Researchers in the J-PAL network have been using randomized evaluations to learn how to help people get jobs and how to help businesses grow for over two decades, drawing out insights to inform policies and programs from Brazil to sub-Saharan Africa and beyond . Researchers have also started testing...
A group of women sit in a circle playing with their young babies

Building on existing systems: Advancing early childhood outcomes in Indonesia through collaboration and evidence

J-PAL Southeast Asia organized a research-to-policy showcase bringing together policymakers, researchers, civil society organizations (CSOs), development partners, and private sector to discuss innovations for strengthening the last-mile delivery of early childhood education and development (ECED)...
A group of people attending RST.

Supporting early career research staff through North America’s Research Staff Training

J-PAL North America hosted an in-person Research Staff Training (RST) in August 2025, welcoming 29 participants to a three-day course on randomized evaluations.
Four children sit in a circle playing the number comparison game

Scaling a playful math curriculum to help children learn: Introducing the Every Child Counts Implementation Toolkit

The world is facing an urgent foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) crisis, worsened by Covid. As organizations and governments around the world mobilize to address this crisis, J-PAL South Asia has been working since 2020 to scale Every Child Counts, a unique curriculum that builds on fifty...
young africa college students learning together online

AI for social good: An evidence-informed agenda

In addition to questions about AI’s big-picture impacts, pressing questions remain about the effects specific use cases will have on outcomes in the real world. History gives us reason to be careful. Over the past two decades, new technologies launched with great promise often fell short when...
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Advancing agricultural transformation through locally-led research

The UM6P-J-PAL Applied Lab for Agirculture (UJALA) announced its first cohort of UJALA African Scholars.
Students before classes at a primary school in the village of El Arr in northern Sudan

Building girls’ agency at scale: Lessons from life skills programs in Africa

Last year, J-PAL published a policy brief and implementation guide synthesizing evidence from sixteen randomized evaluations of life skills programs for adolescent girls. The findings show that such approaches can be particularly effective in boosting self-efficacy (confidence in achieving certain...
Preschool in Brazil

Quality early childhood education: The role of teacher training

With nearly all Brazilian children aged 4 and 5 now enrolled in preschool, new questions are emerging about how to ensure quality in this stage of education. According to Brazil’s National Institute for Educational Studies and Research, 93 percent of children in this age group attend preschool...