The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced a $6 million grant that will expand its efforts to forge evidence-to-policy partnerships with innovation-minded governments seeking to use rigorous research to inform their social policies and programs. 

The grant was jointly awarded by 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.

For the vast majority of the world’s poor, governments are the primary providers of essential services. Despite massive investments in reducing poverty and improving human capital, the public sector—at national and subnational levels—faces myriad challenges in effectively reaching, engaging, and supporting people experiencing poverty. J-PAL will use the funding to help policy makers around the world increase their use of data and evidence in decision making to improve the effectiveness of social programs, especially essential services such as education, health, and social assistance. 

Founded in 2003, J-PAL has built longstanding partnerships with governments across nearly 25 countries. The partnerships center on three key pillars: co-creating and catalyzing use of timely, relevant, high-quality evidence and data to inform social policy and program design and implementation; building the capacity of government officials to generate and use evidence and data; and strengthening government systems more broadly to enable and incentivize evidence-informed policy making. 

“The expansion of partnerships enabled by this grant has the potential to change millions of lives on a global scale, and we are grateful to Community Jameel and Co-Impact for their vision and leadership,” said Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and co-founder and faculty director of J-PAL. “We applaud their foresight in investing in the critical early-stage work of partnership building, recognizing the possible social returns—evidence-based programs reaching scale—can be high, but take time to develop and succeed. Alongside Community Jameel and Co-Impact, we share a strong commitment to creating a flexible environment for these partnerships to thrive.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/fizkes)