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Our Mission

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.

News and Announcements

  • IPA Researcher on garment factories changing women's lives
    New York Times - July 2010

    IPA Research Network Member Mushfiq Mobarak was quoted in a recent article on the growing Bangladeshi garment industry. His own research on the impact that garment factory job opportunities have on women in Bangladesh was profiled in a subsequent article. 

    Mr. Mobarak, a Bangladeshi who has advised his country's government, found that the presence of apparel jobs appears to bolster school enrollments of girls, especially for young girls.

    "A doubling of garment jobs causes a 6.71 percent increase in the probability that a 5-year-old girl is in school," Mr. Mobarak writes in a summary of his findings.

  • Save the Dates! Microfinance Impact and Innovation Conference
    July 2010

    Save the dates! The Microfinance Impact and Innovation Conference will be held in New York City from October 21st through 23rd, 2010.  The conference will feature researchers, microfinance practitioners, and industry leaders including:

    • Esther Duflo (MIT)
    • Dean Karlan (Yale)
    • Asad Mahmood (Deutsche Bank)
    • Jonathan Morduch (NYU)
    • Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard)
    • Jody Rasch (Moody's Investors Service)
    • Jonathan Zinman (Dartmouth)

    Fore more information, click here.

  • Helping Liberia's former child soldiers
    BBC - July 2010

    IPA Researcher Chris Blattman's evaluation of an intervention aimed at Street Youth in Liberia is covered by the BBC's The World program. 

    Listen to the audio here, including interviews with Liberia Country Director Tricia Gonwa and Professor Blattman.

    "So you're asking: How does somebody recover from being conscripted and having to kill their family members. And I think recover is the wrong word. You don't... Recovering is not the goal. It's like when people ask me, so, how is alleviating poverty? How's that going? You have to actually narrow it down to something very specific that you want to achieve. For example, today, these kids, they're very poor. But today I want them to be able eat two meals, or I want them to be able to sleep under a roof and I know a way to make that happen."

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Blog

July 27, 2010
Microfinance done different: SafeSave

Over at the Financial Access Initiative, Jonathan Bauchet has an interesting post up on a very different kind of microfinance called SafeSave. Here’s Bauchet:

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July 22, 2010
Commentary
Design with Intent

Boing Boing covers the release of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent Toolkit: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design.  It's not about development per se, but the the applications to good product design and marketing are limitless and reference familiar ideas from behavioral economics, e.g. defaults and framing.

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July 15, 2010
More on Problem Solving Systems

As a quick follow-up to Meredith's post, I wanted to add a few additional thoughts.

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