by Jennifer Sturdy and Stephanie Wykstra
Editor's note: This appeared originally in the American Psychological Society's magazine APS Observer.
Media Coverage
December 08, 2016
A new study today shows that the expansion of mobile money helped bring hundreds of thousands of Kenyans out poverty, especially those in female-headed households. The study, published in Science, examined how M-PESA, Kenya's text message-based payments system, spread across the country over six years.
November 14, 2016
Matthew Jukes
October 27, 2016
The Health and Literacy Intervention (HALI) project replaced expensive in-person coaching with text messages and found that they effectively supported teachers in improving their pedagogy, helped children learn to read, and reduced dropout by 50 percent (full study summary here, paper...
Media Coverage
October 08, 2016
Getting a microloan is far easier than getting a bank loan. But in east Africa many people have access to an even easier source of credit. It takes just a few taps on a phone to obtain a short-term loan, which will arrive in a mobile-money account almost immediately. It is an exciting, scary development, says Dean Karlan, a development economist at Yale University.
Media Coverage
October 06, 2016
The theme of this year’s Global Handwashing Day on October 15, 2016, is “Make Handwashing a Habit!” In places without access to piped water, new products and technologies are needed to make handwashing with soap convenient enough to become a habit. Handwashing with soap is a powerful weapon against diarrhea and respiratory illness, the leading causes of death among children under 5. It is estimated that handwashing with soap could save 1 million lives annually. Unfortunately, only 19 percent of the global population wash their hands with soap after contact with feces.
Media Coverage
October 05, 2016
For the 2.5 billion people who live on less than $2 per day, shocks such as illness, crop failures, livestock deaths, farming-equipment breakdowns and even wedding or funeral expenses can be enough to tip them, their families, or even an entire community below the poverty line. A major challenge for international development efforts is determining which financial tools provide durable buffers against such setbacks.
Media Coverage
September 12, 2016
Der schnelle und unkomplizierte Geldtransfer mit dem Mobiltelefon ist ein großer Zukunftstrend, auch in Entwicklungsländern. In Kenia hat „Mobile Money“ laut einer Studie schon zahlreichen Menschen aus der Armut geholfen.
Media Coverage
August 10, 2016
Rural demand for electricity connections is significantly lower than the Kenyan government predicted, even when connection costs are highly subsidised, according to economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
Media Coverage
March 01, 2016
The New York Times Fixes column says "Ideas Help No One on a Shelf. Take Them to the World." It looks at what happened to IPA's RCT on HIV prevention for adolescent girls when it was scaled up by the non-profit Young1ove. Click below to read the story.
Media Coverage
February 03, 2016
The multi-billion youth programmes by the government and the private sector have had little impact on growing their income, economic researchers argued yesterday.
The projects, whose roll out started in earnest in the last decade, have nonetheless improved their welfare through increased wages and new enterprises, the researchers said.
The implementation, they added, should be backed by research evidence to create sustainable job opportunities.
Media Coverage
September 30, 2015
Charles Kenny reviews the research on cash transfers for helping the poor in The Atlantic, including IPA's work in Kenya and Uganda.
Media Coverage
September 15, 2015
The World Bank recently announced that between May 2014 and May 2015, Kenya’s national energy utility formally connected 150,000 households in urban slums to the electricity grid, up from just 5,000 previously. This massive jump was largely achieved by subsidising families’ grid connections (connection fees alone are US$400), an approach the NGO Innovations for Poverty Action is now trialling in rural parts of western Kenya.
Media Coverage
August 17, 2015
IPA researchers Ted Miguel, Kenneth Lee, and Catherine Wolfram, with IPA-Kenya's Francis Meyo have an op-ed in Reuters about President Obama's plan to power Africa. Using findings from IPA's Rural Electric Power Project in Kenya they point out that the vast majority of Kenayans are close to an existing power grid, and what's needed is connections to the grid, not small solar generation.
Media Coverage
July 23, 2015
On the ocassion of President Obama's trip to Kenya, NPR speaks with IPA researcher Ted Miguel about our project on providing electriciy to rural areas there, and why the results cast doubt on current policy plans.
July 15, 2015
In June, our Kenya team signed an MOU with the Kenyan government Vision 2030 program to collaborate on research outreach and public policy forums, particularly on themes related to the Sustainable Development Goals.
