NPR's All Things Considered features an IPA study on cash benchmarking in Rwanda. The study compared a standard nutrition and WASH program to cash transfers.
Quartz’s technology and science reporter, Michael Coren, reviews IPA’s cash benchmarking study in Rwanda.
In the New York Times Fixes Column, Marc Gunther writes about an IPA study on cash benchmarking in Rwanda. The study compared how a standard WASH and nutrition program compares to just giving people cash, measuring impacts on indicators of poverty and malnutrition. While that column was released before the results were out, you can read Gunther’s reflections on the implications of the results on his blog, here.
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.
Uganda's New Vision reports on IPA's randomized evaluations of several variations of programs designed to help the ultra poor in Uganda. The article also discusses the use of the Poverty Probability Index (PPI®) as a measure of poverty in a population, as used in the study.
Nature's news section covers an evaluation in Kenya conducted by IPA and GiveDirectly on the effects of a universal basic income (UBI), a type of unconditional cash transfer that is enough to meet basic needs, and delivered to everyone within a community. Researchers are monitoring the short and long-term effects of UBI as well as their effect on factors including economic status, time use, risk-taking, and gender relations.
BBC News highlights an ongoing IPA study, in partnership with GiveDirectly, evaluating the effects of universal basic income (UBI) in rural Kenya.
Dianne Calvi of Village Enterprise writes on NextBillion about their work with IPA to evaluate their ultra-poor graduation programming in Uganda. Nathanael Goldberg, director of IPA’s Social Protection program, explained how studies like these can help inform the development of scalable and streamlined programming.
Mother Jones covers recent discussion on the long term effects of cash transfers, including Chris Blattman's reflections on a study he and other IPA-affiliated researchers conducted with IPA in Uganda.
The Daily Monitor covers the personal impact of Village Enterprise’s graduation-style program in Uganda, which provides poor households with cash transfers, mentorship, training, and support for the formation of businesses and savings groups over a one-year period. Village Enterprise and IPA Uganda partnered with researchers to conduct a randomized evaluation of this program.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, David Leonhardt discusses the findings of IPA's evaluation of a Christian business training program in the Philippines. Leonhardt explores the results' implications with project researcher and IPA founder Dean Karlan, who concludes that the "findings are 'cautiously positive' for the power of religion."
The evaluation found that a program that combined health and livelihood training with sessions on religious values improved participants' incomes while a health and livelihood training alone did not. However, the religious program decreased...
DevEx speaks with IPA's Annie Duflo, Nathanael Golberg, Loïc Watine, and Dean Karlan about when an organization should or shouldn't consider a randomized control trial. They discuss good monitoring and evaluation principles laid out IPA's new Goldilocks Initiative, designed to help organizations find appropriately sized M&E strategies.
The Economist reports on IPA's evaluation of a Christian business training program in the Philippines. Researchers evaluated the program for the poor, which provided health and business training, both with and without the religious messaging component. The evaluation showed that only the version with the religious component raised incomes and increased expressions of religious belief. However, it also reduced paritcipants' perception of their relative economic status in their community.
Devex reports on the new six-arm study of the ultrapoor graudation model in Uganda. Comparing to several other options, the graduation model was effective at helping the poorest of the poor and relatively cost-efficient. The program will be at the center of a new multi-million dollar development impact bond.
In Bloomberg, Noah Smith cites IPA's research on seasonal migration in Bangladesh in an op-ed arguing for policies that encourage worker mobility.
