Innovations For Poverty Action

Programs: Community based rangeland management in namibia:many people in northern namibia rely on cattle production for their economic livelihoods, however overuse of the communal grazing areas and suboptimal grazing practices threaten the long-term viability of the land and contribute to persistent poverty. At the moment, there is a collective action or "tragedy of the commons" problem - individual farmers are hesitant to reduce their herd's impact on the rangeland because they are fearful that others will not follow suit which often results in overuse and degradation of the land. The community based rangeland and livestock management (cbrlm) program in namibia is part of a large set of interventions in the agricultural sector designed to reduce poverty among the population of the northern regions of the country. This evaluation is designed to test the impact of the various activities within the cbrlm intervention on household income, cattle productivity, and the condition of the rangeland. The intervention targets both inadequate information about appropriate cattle production practices and the social or other behavioral preferences of farmers.

wash benefits in kenya:diarrheal diseases are a leading cause of death for children in the developing world, killing 760,000 children under the age of five each year. Even when diarrheal episodes are not fatal, illness early in life can have long-term effects on child growth and development. In kenya, researchers are evaluating the individual and combined effects of various wash and nutrition interventions on the health, growth and development of children in their first two years of life. The large-scale randomized evaluation is taking place among over 8,000 women and their newborns in rural areas of western kenya. Outcomes of interest include diarrhea prevalence, indicators of compromised immune systems and gut function, parasitic infections, and physical growth, as well as motor skills, verbal skills, and socio-emotional abilities.

leveraging digitized government transfers to offer low-interest microcredit in dominican republic: despite the initial promise of microcredit, randomized evaluations have found at best modest effects of microloans on poverty. Digitized payments from government cash transfer programs provide a unique opportunity to offer microcredit while addressing some of its shortcomings, potentially reducing interest rates, default risk, and repayment issues. Researchers are partnering with ipa, banco bdh le n, banco adopem, and progresando con solidaridad (or prosoli, the dominican republic's government-to-person transfer program), to test whether loans with automatic repayment through prosoli lead to more productive investments and higher profits and income, leading to higher consumption, wellbeing, and graduation from the transfer program.

cash transfers and mental models in kenya:unconditional cash transfers (ucts) allow poor households the choice and flexibility of allocating resources to meet the needs they find most pressing and they have been shown to have various economic and psychological benefits. This evaluation in kenya tests ways to promoting future orientation among cash transfer recipients. The study seeks to analyze the impact cash transfers and of social psychological interventions (individually and in combination) on psychological and economic outcomes. Several sub-studies are associated with it. Kiufunza ii:despite more than a decade of major reforms and significant new investments in public education, student learning levels across east africa remain extremely low. To help generate rigorous evidence on ways to improve learning, researchers first evaluated the impact of an education intervention that sent grants directly to schools and paid teachers a performance-based bonus. Following weak, yet promising, results from the teacher bonuses, researchers embarked on a second phase of the project to evaluate the impacts of two different types of teacher incentives on student learning. African health market for equity (ahme): sub-saharan africa accounts for 24 percent of the global burden of disease. While private clinics are the first source of care for many africans, the quality of care offered in private facilities is inconsistent and often weak, and the private healthcare sector faces a wide host of challenges. In this study, ipa-affiliated researchers from uc berkeley and ucsf will evaluate the impact of a multi-pronged private healthcare initiative on healthcare utilization, quality of care, clinic financial outcomes, and child health outcomes in kenya. M-akiba- government bonds as a savings tool: traditional savings accounts often have low or negative returns in developing countries, which may explain why many poor households do not use them to boost their savings. In kenya, researchers are investigating the impact of a new product that allows kenyans to invest small amounts of money in a low-risk, high-return infrastructure bond using their mobile phones. The product may help kenyans increase their savings as well as improve their financial literacy, as managing an investment may help investors learn financial concepts. Disseminating innovative resources and technologies to smallholders (dirts):investments in agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, high-yield seeds, and farm equipment is low among smallholder farmers. Farmers underinvest for several possible reasons: they face uncertain rainfall, inputs may not be widely available in local markets, and farmers may not have the cash on hand to purchase them just prior to planting season. Farmers may also lack information on the benefits of these inputs and how to use them. In ghana, researchers are testing whether access to improved-yield agricultural inputs and agricultural extension advice (individually or in combination) leads to more intensive land cultivation and increased earnings among farmers in northern ghana who received access to rainfall insurance. Financial rules of thumb via mobile phones - research preparation:recent evidence suggests financial training programs teaching simple rules of thumb may be more effective than traditional financial training programs. Meanwhile, much work has evaluated the impact of mobile phones on pricing and financial transactions. But what if the two were combined? The research team is developing and piloting a financial rules of thumb training program for coffee farmers in peru. Research preparation funds are being used to finalize the research design needed to evaluate the impact of delivering sms follow-ups to the training program. Community health workers in zambia: employing community health workers may help governments address the shortage of healthcare providers in sub-saharan africa. However, it is unclear how offering incentives such as career advancement opportunities might affect who self-selects into community health worker jobs. Researchers partnered with the government of zambia to test the effect of two incentive strategies on applicants' characteristics and job performance. They found that making career incentives rather than social incentives salient attracted workers who were more qualified and performed better on the job and had similar levels of pro-social preferences. Moreover, they produced better health outcomes: the share of children under age five who were underweight fell by 5 percentage points. All otherinnovations for poverty action (ipa) is a research and policy nonprofit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. In partnership with top researchers in the field, we design and implement randomized evaluations to measure the effectiveness of programs and policies aimed at helping the poor. We specialize in randomized controlled trials (rcts) because this rigorous methodology, considered the gold standard of impact evaluation design, allows us to isolate the effects of a program from other factors. Like in medical trials, researchers assign participants at random to different study groups. One or more groups receive a program (the "treatment groups") and another group serves as the comparison (or "control") group. Ipa evaluations do not simply give a passing or failing grade to programs, but rather seek to uncover and disentangle causal mechanisms and determine which adjustments will make a program more effective. Our well-established partnerships in the countries where we work, and a strong understanding of local contexts, help make our research projects successful. Our teams operating in 20 countries work on the ground to develop new studies with ngos and government institutions interested in conducting rigorous evaluations of their programs and in testing new ideas. Ipa has more than 1,000 research staff who implement the research on the ground. Studies range in time from months, to years, to decades. Once an intervention has proven effective in one context, we work to test it in other contexts. This replication process is an essential step on the path to scaling up effective programs. Ipa has an extensive network of more than 575 researchers from among the top universities in the world who collaborate with us in designing and conducting the evaluations. Many of these academics are pioneers in their fields of research, particularly in development economics. To date, we have designed and evaluated more than 325 potential solutions to poverty problems and have over 300 more evaluations in progress. With this experience, ipa has developed extensive expertise in conducting successful evaluations, from the initial concept stage to the sharing of results.