On March 31, IPA Country Director Nasreena Sampaco-Baddiri and Deputy Country Director Peter Srouji presented the role of randomized controlled trials in innovating and scaling development programs to the World Health Organization (WHO)'s Western Pacific Region as part of the former's Innovators Webinar Series.
On December 14-15, IPA Philippines conducted a two-day virtual capacity building workshop with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). IPA led sessions on Data Management and Protocols, Coding Best Practices, and Merging Administrative Datasets. Participants include research and evaluation focal persons from the DSWD Field and Central Office.
On November 12, IPA hosted a parallel session at the 59th Philippine Economics Society Conference (virtual) at 8:30-10 AM PHT. This session, titled "Can Digital G2P Payments be the Future of Cash Transfer Programming?" was organized and moderated by IPA Philippines Country Director Nasserena Sampaco-Baddiri and included three presentations:
For the last few months, The GovLab, the Asia Foundation, BRAC Institute of Governance & Development Bangladesh, and The Centre for Strategic and International Studies Indonesia have sought to source the questions that data could answer toward transforming the way different societies govern themselves. On October 25, IPA presented at "Better Governance Strategies across Asia's Digital Divide: A 100 Governance Questions Initiative," an event hosted by The Asia Foundation to reflect on the questions identified and how to operationalize them leveraging new and traditional datasets.
Social media data is emerging as a tool for consumer protection market monitoring in financial services (see IPA’s multi-country analysis of social media data here).
On October 14, IPA Philippines hosted a policy dialogue session about Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) with the Department of Education (DepEd).
On August 25, IPA Philippines presented the results of the pre-pilot study of the mEducation program at the virtual Research O’clock 2021: Evidence on Learning Continuity. The session focused on research presenting evidence on pedagogical practices in distance education. Rene Marlon Panti (Senior Research Associate, IPA Philippines) gave a presentation of the mEducation project, a mobile-phone-based intervention implemented in partnership with Young1ove and DepEd.
On June 28, IPA Philippines conducted a virtual design workshop with key stakeholders and implementing partners to assess and refine treatment prototypes for the Nimble Experimentation on Digital Financial Inclusion project. This exercise helped ensure that the experiment designs are relevant and feasible to implement under a short-term proof-of-concept project.
On June 21, IPA Philippines presented to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Philippines Research Reference Group (RRG) meeting on Research and Experimentation on Digital Financial Inclusion. The RRG is composed of the research teams of UNDP-funded digital financial inclusion experimentation projects, which includes IPA and KindMind, and key stakeholders such as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
On June 14, IPA presented the results from the Digital Cash Transfer Monitoring Study to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and the Social Amelioration Program (SAP—emergency subsidy) Small Working Group. IPA, in collaboration with the DSWD and the World Bank, conducted a phone survey of SAP beneficiaries to understand beneficiary experience with digital G2P payment delivery through financial service providers. This second presentation to DSWD includes undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and directors of the Department.
From June 1-2, IPA Philippines conducted a two-day virtual capacity building workshop with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). The workshop is part of the ongoing partnership between IPA and the DSWD to provide technical expertise and build the in-house capacity of government staff to conduct research and evaluation projects and to improve monitoring capabilities for the different programs and projects of the Department. IPA led sessions on Introduction to Theory of Change & M&E Frameworks, Measurement and Survey Design, and Remote Data Collection.

On May 31, IPA presented the findings from the Digital Cash Transfers Monitoring Survey to the Policy and Plans Cluster of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). The study seeks to understand the beneficiary experience with the digitized system of payment transfers of the government’s Social Amelioration Program (SAP)—an emergency cash subsidy program to help low-income households affected by the pandemic.
On March 5, IPA Philippines together with researcher Emily Beam (University of Vermont) presented the comprehensive results of the Teacher Needs Assessment Study to the Department of Education (DepEd) officials. The presentation contained the results from the first and second round of data collection activities (Round 1: online survey; Round 2: online survey, phone survey, and qualitative interviews).
Since 2014, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the Philippines’ National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), with support from the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), have helped build capacity and demand among government departments for impact evaluations to inform decision-making on key policies and programs in the Philippines. As part of the program, they have supported evaluations of interventions implemented by the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, and a series of...