Blog

Phone surveys have long been a part of social science research in higher-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), researchers studying global poverty have historically relied on face-to-face surveys. As mobile phone ownership...

On March 18, Uganda’s President Museveni ordered all schools to close in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Elevate quickly started looking into ways to support schools and share information with other educational actors. Between May and June of...

In Peru, the Ministry of Education, with the support of IPA and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), asked 8,000 families about the socio-emotional health of children, adolescents, and caregivers. This information gives us a first window into...

IPA has spent the last two months carefully considering our eventual, safe return to in-person research, consulting with experts and stakeholders, and drafting and revising policies and procedures. The outcome is a new policy framework on restarting...

This blog post summarizes the key findings and policy implications of the first round of our RECOVR survey in Sierra Leone (more information about the RECOVR survey, a cross-country panel survey that is tracking the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19...

To better understand how people’s lives are being affected by COVID-19 and to enable data-driven policy response, IPA developed a panel survey called the RECOVR Survey which is being run in Ghana and 8 other countries. In Ghana, we have been working...

In May, IPA ran a nationwide RECOVR Survey of 1,500 households in partnership with Colombia’s National Planning Department (DNP), the agency within the national government in charge of defining and recommending public policy, to support the...

By Sarah Kabay, Olga Namen, and Stephanie Wu In response to the coronavirus pandemic, over 188 countries instituted country-wide school closures. As a result, countless education systems and educators are trying to find alternatives to the classroom...

By Lucia Sanchez and Matthieu Teachout Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the International Growth Centre (IGC) have jointly developed the COVID-19 Economic Impact Surveys, a multi-country effort to understand COVID-19’s impacts on economic...

Most schools throughout Latin America have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the school closures, nearly 8 million Peruvian students, from preschool to high school, are stuck at home. Within a few weeks, the Ministry of Education (Minedu)...

Last week, IPA announced that we will observe Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, as a global holiday. We do this in the context of reflection on our own role and history in the fields in which we work. IPA...

By Nessa Kenny and Laura Benrey  Over 70 million people are forcibly displaced as a result of conflict, persecution, or violence—more than ever before in history. Displaced communities, who were already vulnerable before the pandemic hit, are...

In the past months, we have worked with decision-makers from 10 different countries where IPA has a permanent presence to develop panel surveys to answer their most pressing questions. The process has been urgent and chaotic—the statement “let’s not...

For the last three years, Rodrigo Canales, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, has led a project studying police forces in Mexico and testing approaches to building more effective and trusted departments. We asked him what...

IPA is building on existing relationships and responding to dozens of policy partners to ensure that in our case, the answer is “yes.” We are working hard to understand exactly what questions these partners are asking and how data and evidence can...

To help mitigate gaps in the current crisis response, IPA is pivoting an existing research project with Bangladesh’s government on digital payments to respond to COVID-19’s challenges.

By Tom Wein Editor's note: This cross-post originally appeared on Medium.  I had previously noted that the Global South was missing in studies of coronavirus, according to a couple of major databases compiling surveys. In one database, just 1/230...

As women around the globe are increasingly quarantined, they are also exposed to increased risk of intimate partner violence (IPV).