The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of more than 900 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomised impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty. To date, these researchers have conducted over 1,600 randomised evaluations, which have directly contributed to scale-ups reaching over 600 million people.
Under the What Works Hub for Global Education, J-PAL will engage in two main activities: 1) J-PAL’s cost-effectiveness analysis team, led by J-PAL affiliate Nathan Hendren (MIT), will develop cost-effectiveness analyses of relevant education interventions. The J-PAL CEA team will conduct interviews and strategic site visits with implementers to understand the cost structure and ensure the cost data used as inputs are comprehensive and robust. Once individual programs have undergone a cost-effectiveness analysis, J-PAL will compare cost-effectiveness across interventions, building out our existing library of comparative CEAs. Once final, analyses will be disseminated via the J-PAL website, as a part of presentations to policymakers, included in evidence briefs, and other similar activities. 2) J-PAL will develop an Evidence Application Guides for practitioners and policymakers that will go “beyond the paper” to contain details that implementers and policymakers care about relating to key implementation decisions. This guide will focus on how to replicate and adapt a multidisciplinary, evidence-based approach to numeracy instruction.
