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In Peru, the average recipient of a conditional cash transfer payment has to travel five hours to get to the nearest bank branch or ATM, spending 10% of the payment in transportation costs along the way.   As of the first quarter of 2014, there were...

In the past couple of decades, the world has experienced a radical shift in the way information is accessed and delivered. The technological revolution has made it possible for most people in rich countries and a significant number in poor countries...

  Development policy should be redesigned to reflect new insights about human behavior, according to a new World Bank report. The report calls on the development community to shift its agenda based on new insights in behavioral economics, and...

Since first appearing in March 2014 in rural Guinea, the Ebola virus has infected at least 17,800 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and killed more than 6,300, according to figures from the Center for Disease Control from early December...

  Watanic Jabateh, an enumerator for IPA in Liberia, died on October 9, 2014. She was 25.   Jabateh began working as an enumerator for IPA-Liberia in July 2013. She helped gather data from some 3,000 out-of school youth in urban Monrovia on a...

Now Accepting Proposals: Competitive Research Fund on Entrepreneurship and Small and Medium Enterprise Growth IPA's Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Initiative is excited to announce that it is now accepting applications to the 8th round of the...

  Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Heather Lanthorn, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the SMS reminders for malaria study. After the data collection was complete, she conducted a qualitative follow-up...

    Uganda has one of the highest primary school drop-out rates in the world. Though the country abolished most primary school fees in 1997, a recent UNICEF report found that 81% of parents cited financial constraints as the reason why their...

  In Uganda, nearly half of surveyed adults were unable to correctly answer a question about interest rates according to a recent Finscope study. When asked “If you were offered a loan with 5% monthly interest rate and a loan with 20% annual...

  Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in The Broker Business training programs are a popular tool used by policy-makers to promote SME growth. However, recent evidence suggests that these programs rarely lead to firm growth or job creation...

  The discussion around microcredit has become more nuanced of late; praise has given way to a more cautious examination of its challenges and opportunities. The June launch of Resilience: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, 2014 ...

  IPA has been evaluating livelihood programs for the extreme poor for the past seven years. We’ve even run one ourselves. The CGAP-Ford graduation pilots were all adaptations of BRAC’s Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction-Targeting the...

  (Para español, ver abajo)   Following conversations between J-PAL's Peru-based Policy team and theViceministry of Small and Medium Enterprise and Industry of the Ministry of Production of Peru a training program is being implemented by J-PAL...

  Enter almost any market in Uganda, Nepal, or Peru and you are likely to find streets filled with shops all selling the same items, whether it be rows of tire shops, stores selling the same wooden furniture, or shoe shop after shoe shop. It seems...

  In an op-ed in MINT, one of India’s leading business newspapers, economist and consultant Ruchira Bhattamishra discusses Prime Minister Modi’s announcement of an ambitious new plan for financial inclusion for all Indians, but targeting in...

  Yesterday an expert committee convened by the World Health Organization released a statement about the ethics of making experimental treatments for Ebola available to patients during the current West African outbreak. The panel unanimously...

  Editor's Note: This entry is cross-posted with the Georgetown School of Foreign Service's blog.   My favorite part of the day in Ghana is the shared taxi ride home at the end of the day. Contentment in this case is not derived from the excitement...

  J-PAL Europe, the Ministry of Basic Education and Literacy of Burkina Faso, and IPA Burkina Faso co-hosted an international conference on education on July 10-11 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, featuring the presence of Mrs. Koumba Boly, Minister of...