By swiftly enacting a national lockdown and sticking with it until a slow and partial reopening in June, Colombia has so far been spared the high COVID-19 infection rate and the related death toll of some of its neighbors like Brazil and Peru. While the restrictions to movement and gatherings protected the health system and saved lives, the economic impact of these restrictions has been felt across Colombian households. One in four Colombian workers (roughly 5.5 million people) lost their job in April, with women and those under the age of 30 among the hardest hit, and by May the...
Media Coverage
July 27, 2020
Colombia's La Silla Vacía interviews IPA Peace & Recovery Director Sebastian Chaskel on the economic impact of COVID-19. Chaskel shares results from the RECOVR survey in Colombia. The podcast also features several first-person accounts of unemployment in the country. To learn more about the survey results, see our blog post here.
Note: Podcast in Spanish.
Media Coverage
June 29, 2020
In a piece discussing COVID-19 and the risks of violent conflict, The Economist cites IPA research with Mushfiq Mobarak, C. Austin Davis, and Paula Lopez Peña in the Cox's Bazar region of Bangladesh, which found that COVID-19 symptoms were prevalent among Rohingya refugees. More information about the study is available here.
June 18, 2020
By Nessa Kenny and Laura Benrey
Photo: Sebastian Chaskel
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 particularly at risk now: they fall outside of traditional social safety nets, many live off of earnings made or food purchased that day, and many live in densely populated refugee camps where social distancing and handwashing are difficult, if not impossible. Last month, for example, our Cox’s Bazar Panel...
Rodrigo Canales
June 12, 2020
Editor's note: This is a cross-posting of an interview with researcher Rodrigo Canales that originally appeared on the Yale School of Management's Yale Insights blog about his ongoing work with IPA Mexico.
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 the research says about how to prevent racist and violent policing in the United States.
Photo courtesy of Rodrigo...
Media Coverage
May 27, 2020
Yale News covers Professor Mushfiq Mobarak's work with IPA and others to measure and prevent the spread of COVID-19 among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
December 19, 2019
A long-time supporter of IPA recently gave me the gift of a very open-ended question—something along the lines of “So, how did things go this year?” As we close a very eventful 2019, it was refreshing to be able to recollect some highlights of IPA’s policy engagement around the world and reflect on what we’ve learned and where we’re going next on the second pillar of our strategic ambition: sharing evidence strategically.
(Since it’s just possible that you don’t have IPA’s strategic plan memorized as I do, I’ll just link you to Annie Duflo’s great post from last year, explaining how...
Media Coverage
December 18, 2019
PBS' Nova special The Violence Paradox, with Steven Pinker, explores evidence-based methods of reducing violence. They interview Political Scientist Salma Mousa and show her RCT in Iraq encouraging social contact between Christians and Muslims in post-ISIS Iraq with interfaith soccer teams. The study is one of several supported by IPA's Peace and Recovery Program.
Click below for the program. Note, the interview and segment on this research starts an hour and 35 minutes into the program
Media Coverage
December 16, 2019
United News of Bangladesh recaps an event in Bangladesh, where IPA, the International Growth Centre, and Y-RISE released a new study on the trauma experienced by Rohingya refugees in the Cox's Bazar camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Mushfiq Mobarak, Jeannie Annan
December 16, 2019
Hakimpara refugee camp in Bangladesh. Photo: Jared Kalow
The world now has over 70 million forcibly displaced people. This is the highest absolute number in history, and the proportion of displaced people has risen by a dramatic 48 percent in recent years—from about 1 in every 160 people in 2009 to 1 in every 108 people today, according to UN data. Yet there is very little evidence on what works for forcibly displaced and host community populations. IPA is responding to this gap by launching a new Humanitarian and Forced Displacement Initiative, under the academic leadership...
Rodrigo Canales, Mushfiq Mobarak
November 20, 2019
Partnering with governments on research projects is a great way to ensure buy-in to rigorous research from policymakers, but it comes with a unique challenge: those policymakers can change due to political transition or staff turnover in the middle of a study. When that happens, what does that mean for the research? Months of organizational planning typically go into a research project, and the prospect of blowing it up and doing something new can be daunting. In this blog post, we discuss IPA Mexico’s experience working through a political transition and what it’s taught us about how to...
Media Coverage
July 25, 2019
The Dhaka Tribune recaps a roundtable in which IPA Bangladesh Country Director, Dr. Mohammad Ashraful Haque, presented baseline findings of a survey on adolescent well-being, assessing mental, physical, and sexual/reproductive health as well as educational and economic development. The survey also noted the role of violence in the everyday lives of Dhaka adolescents, finding: 68% of married adolescents experience intimate partner violence, 82% of adolescents report experiencing corporal punishment at school, and 62% of female caregivers use physical punishment to discipline underage family...
June 18, 2019
“Our obsession is our citizens’ lives,” said Jairo García, Secretary of Security of Bogotá, at a recent panel I moderated on citizen security policy in Latin America sponsored by IPA’s Peace and Recovery Program and J-PAL’s Crime and Violence Sector at the America Latina Crime and Policy Network (AL CAPONE) annual meeting at EAFIT University in Medellín last month. “But citizens’ obsession is with muggings,” Secretary García went on, as he explained that while Bogotá’s citizens rank security as a top concern, whether they feel safe is more closely related to their perception of...
Media Coverage
May 28, 2019
The Economist reports on an experimental program aiming to reduce Chicago's murder rate by providing high-risk men with job training and therapy on de-escalating and avoiding violence. The program applies findings from an IPA study in Liberia on the impacts of cognitive behavioral therapy and cash grants to combat violence and crime among street youth.
[Note: article may be gated].
Media Coverage
September 18, 2018
While many cash transfer studies report outcomes over the first several years, Vox reports on IPA returning to study how Ugandan cash beneficiaries fared nine years later. Christopher Blattman describes, how he, with Nathan Fiala and Sebastian Martinez, found that their conclusions changed when discovering the comparison group caught up to the cash recipients in the long run.
