J-PAL is undertaking a significant expansion of its efforts to forge evidence-to-policy partnerships with innovative-minded governments in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia seeking to use rigorous research to inform their social policies and programs.
Community Jameel, the international organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world, and Co-Impact, a global organization focused on building just and equitable systems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are founding partners in this expansion effort.
About the Grant
Through this work, J-PAL is partnering with governments to advance our shared goals of improving lives of people living in poverty through catalyzing governments’ adoption at scale of specific evidence-based policies and programs, and institutionalizing a broader culture of evidence- and data-driven policymaking in government systems. To achieve this impact, we work across three key areas.
Facilitate the co-creation, and catalyze the use, of timely, relevant, high-quality evidence and data to understand local challenges and to inform the design and implementation of locally-grounded policies and programs to address them.
Build the capacity of government officials at all levels to generate and use evidence and to leverage administrative data to improve program and policy design and implementation.
Support governments in strengthening processes, structures, policies, and systems to enable and incentivize evidence- and data-driven policymaking throughout their institutions.
Evidence Co-creation and Use
We facilitate the co-creation, and catalyze the use, of timely, relevant, high-quality evidence and data to understand local challenges and to inform the design and implementation of locally-grounded policies and programs to address them.
Growing network of researchers
J-PAL’s growing research network—over 600 affiliated researchers—anchors the production and application of policy-relevant evidence. Members of this network support E2P Partnerships in a variety of important ways—engaging in dialogues with policymakers to determine how existing evidence may help them solve their policy challenges and brainstorming new evidence-informed policy innovations; collaborating with government partners to co-create evidence; and providing scientific advice to governments as they plan for and adopt an evidence-based intervention at scale.
Evidence summaries and syntheses across 10 sectors
We develop digestible, policymaker-friendly summaries and syntheses, such as our Evaluation Summaries; our Policy Insights that highlight lessons emerging across multiple evaluations and the mechanisms that help explain the results.
Government of Punjab partners with Breakthrough and J-PAL South Asia to implement gender sensitization curriculum in all government schools
The Government of Punjab’s Department of School Education launched a partnership today with Breakthrough and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia to
Global Evidence for Egypt Conference: Using Evidence to Inform Decision-Making
Government of Odisha partners with Breakthrough and J-PAL South Asia to introduce gender equity program in 23,000 government schools in the state
The Government of Odisha’s Department of School and Mass Education today announced its partnership with Breakthrough and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South
Capacity Building
We build the capacity of government officials at all levels to generate and use evidence and to leverage administrative data to improve program and policy design and implementation.
Flagship training programs
Evaluating Social Programs (ESP) and a variety of customized trainings and live and self-paced online courses on topics, such as Measuring Health Outcomes in Field Surveys. Although several of our trainings are offered globally, we adapt them regionally by creating new case studies that can speak to the concerns of policymakers in specific regions, translate materials into local languages to reach a wider audience of trainees, and adjust the timing, delivery, and location of the course to the partner’s needs.
Broader suite of capacity-building approaches through partnerships
Our partnership in Morocco with Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) leverages EPoD’s Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) approach. Likewise, our partnership with the CLEAR Initiative in India engages in broader capacity-building on monitoring and evaluation.
Egypt Impact Lab: An embedded lab in the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development
The Egypt Impact Lab seeks to strengthen evidence-informed policy and improve development outcomes for Egyptians.
Tailoring training modules to strengthen evaluation partnerships: J-PAL’s custom courses
This is the second blog in a series illustrating stories of how J-PAL’s training courses have built new policy and research partnerships and strengthened existing ones to advance
Building skills to advance impact evaluation: J-PAL’s Evaluating Social Programs course
In this blog, we highlight two notable examples of how Evaluating Social Programs courses led to high-impact research and policy partnerships, while recognizing the impressive
Systems Strengthening
We support governments in strengthening processes, structures, policies, and systems to enable and incentivize evidence- and data-driven policymaking throughout their institutions. Learn more about institutionalizing evidence use.
Institutionalizing a culture of evidence-informed policymaking in Tamil Nadu
A long-standing partnership between the Government of Tamil Nadu and J-PAL in India has helped institutionalize the use of evidence in decision making and build a culture of
A government innovation lab to improve education
With support from J-PAL and IPA, the Ministry of Education in Peru created a dedicated unit to identify, test, and scale low-cost interventions to improve educational outcomes.
Evidence to Policy Partnerships Worldwide
We are expanding our Evidence to Policy partnerships with governments in seven countries across four regions: South Asia (India), Southeast Asia (Indonesia), Latin America and the Caribbean (Mexico, Brazil), and the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan).