| Type | Non-profit |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | New Haven, CT |
| Key people | Dean Karlan, Delia Welsh, Annie Duflo |
| Website | http://www.poverty-action.org |
Innovations for Poverty Action is an American non-profit organization founded in 2002 by Yale economist Dean Karlan. IPA conducts randomized controlled trials (RCTs), along with other types of quantitative research, to measure the impacts of development programs in sectors including microfinance, education, health, governance, agriculture, charitable giving and community development.
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IPA was founded in 2002 by Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University.[1] originally under the name Development Innovations. It is currently headquartered in New Haven, CT and has 278 employees working on projects in 30 countries.[2]
IPA's website states its mission as follows: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a nonprofit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems, and works to scale up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors, and donors.
IPA's principal activities center on conducting impact evaluations of development interventions using a randomized controlled methodology. These evaluations, designed by academics at universities such as Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, London School of Economics, MIT, Northwestern University, University of California system, University of Michigan, and Yale, evaluate interventions in the areas of microfinance and enterprise, health, education, agriculture, community development, and charitable giving. The organization also undertakes activities to communicate its research findings in order to influence policymaker and donor decisions. Additionally, IPA participates in efforts to scale up interventions that its research has proven effective.
IPA works with other research organizations, for-profit businesses, and nonprofit institutions to design programs and run evaluations.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a close partner of IPA. The two organizations share a common mission and take similar methodological approaches to development policy evaluation. Both organizations have pioneered the use of randomized evaluations to study the effectiveness of development interventions worldwide and have collaborated extensively on field studies involving randomized evaluations. A number of J-PAL Affiliates are also IPA Research Affiliates or IPA Research Network Members. Innovations for Poverty Action and J-PAL attempt to bridge the gap between research and the policy world by creating and disseminating knowledge about what works to policymakers and practitioners around the world.
IPA's research spans six sectors: microfinance, health, agriculture, education, charitable giving and community development. The results of IPA studies have been published by IPA Research Affiliates in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, World Development, American Economic Review, Journal of Economics Perspectives, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Review of Financial Studies, among others.
IPA uses randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in its approach to anti-poverty research. RCTs are primarily known for their application in medical research to isolate the impact of a particular pharmaceutical or treatment from other factors. Though there are critiques to the randomized approach, its use in the social sciences is growing. Critics have included notable development economists such as Angus Deaton and Daron Acemoglu.[3]
IPA performs many evaluations of microfinance programs and products, including microcredit, microsavings, and microinsurance. IPA is part of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium launched with the support of a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing knowledge about microfinance and communicating research lessons to a broad spectrum of policy makers, microfinance institutions, and the public at large.
Some examples of IPA's research on microfinance include examinations of the impact of group liability and commitment savings. Many microcredit programs are offered to groups of women who share "group liability," meaning that all members of the group are responsible for repaying the loans if one of the members defaults. Group liability has been promoted by Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as the best way to ensure high repayment rates.[4] IPA studies conducted in a variety of countries show that switching existing clients to individual liability does not increase default rates, however. Other studies addressing effective ways to promote savings among the poor show promise for commitment savings accounts that limit the owner's access to the funds. [5]
A majority of poor people in the global south rely on agriculture for income. IPA's agriculture research evaluates whether interventions aimed at increasing or protecting farm income are effective. This research has included projects that examine the impact of crop price[6] [7] and rainfall insurance, fertilizer use [8], and access to export markets.[9][10]