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Now 193 nations have agreed to the Sustainable Development Goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. But to end poverty, you first have to be able to measure it.  The Progress out of Poverty Index® (PPI®) is a unique tool developed for that purpose...

By Aaron Dibner-Dunlap and Yumna Rathore Editor's note: This cross-post originally appeared on NextBillion. If a mobile money provider offered a bonus on peer to peer transfers, would that be enough to generate new business? If the provider sent...

By Arthur Sagot-Duvauroux It takes time for an organization to influence policy decisions. It requires rigorous work to be trusted as a professional and high-quality organization. Relationships need to be established and expanded to the point that...

In an ideal world, all children should have access to basic care, regardless of whether they grow up in a poor or rich family. During the last 20 years, mortality rates of children under five years of age worldwide have almost been cut by half. But...

  If you're heading out for a long driving trip, we have some podcast suggestions, along with a hello from our surveyors in Burkina Faso, who also rode out recently during rainy season. IPA Burkina Faso field staff get ready to head out   Chris...

  At IPA, we care deeply about improving the quality of data collected in international development research. Bad data is at best a waste of resources, but may also misinform policies or programs. To begin to address this problem more...

  IPA Colombia and J-PAL Latin America & Caribbean (LAC) are beginning a new collaboration with the Government of Colombia to improve the country's evaluation of public policies. The Division of Monitoring and Evaluation of Public Policies (...

Mobile money and digital payments have opened the door to a new generation of products that have lowered costs and made serving unbanked and underbanked consumers a promising business proposition. But in spite of continuous innovations and a steady...

By Anne Karing and Arthur Baker Note: this posting originally appeared on the BERI blog here. IPA, with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation of Sierra Leone, and CEGA's Behavioral Economics for Reproductive health Initiative,  is implementing a...

  The importance of checking another person’s work is easy to grasp, and is a norm in many domains. For example, good financial systems have audits and mathematicians check each others’ proofs. Likewise, we should expect researchers to...

  Last week a new Science paper (Gilbert, et al.) came out criticizing a previous Science (Nosek, et al.) paper, which had tried to re-run 100 psychology findings and found only about 40 percent replicated. In the new paper, Gilbert, et. al. suggest...

Sometimes love needs a little nudge, so when we saw Bill Easterly making nice I agree with @JeffDSachs! Hillary's bad policy seems to have been to "support every war" https://t.co/ZoXXmTAJvu — William Easterly (@bill_easterly) February 8, 2016 We...

  Next month, a new and improved contraceptive product will be marketed to urban, young adults with some disposable income, using billboards, Facebook, and WhatsApp messages. These millennials are living in Lusaka, Zambia, and right alongside this...

by Marta Garnelo   On December 4, the Ministry of Education of Peru, recognized the efforts and commitment of civil servants in the sector through the awards “Good Practices in Public Management and Anti-Corruption in Education.”   Among other 38 “...

  We'd like to thank IPA's blog readers (as well as our Twitter and Facebook followers) for all the support this year. Here's a roundup of our most popular blog posts: 10. Making research useful, getting it used: A vision for Kenya.  Heidi McAnnally...

By Rebecca Thornton and Ariella Park Voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) is a key component of the HIV prevention strategy recommended by the World Health Organization (PDF) in fourteen priority African countries with high HIV prevalence...

    I am thrilled to announce today the launch of ImpactMatters, an exciting new organization started by our founder, Dean Karlan. ImpactMatters is a new nonprofit organization that conducts "impact audits," short-term engagements with two...

IPA is different from typical non-profits—our impact isn’t just in the people we serve, but how we change the field. Our vision is a world with more evidence and less poverty, and we have seen that rigorous evidence can have outsized impact, by...