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.

Primary Objectives

Innovate: Develop innovative solutions to poverty and policy problems worldwide. Use frontier knowledge from economics, psychology and public health.

Evaluate: Conduct randomized controlled trials to evaluate public policies. This provides the highest quality and most reliable answers to what works and what does not. Our evaluations seek to generate insight into why particular strategies work -- not just whether they work -- so as to make the findings useful for scale-up and replication in other settings and countries.

Replicate: Replicate evaluations in multiple settings. We can learn from one evaluation, but we can learn much more about what to do after seeing replications of similar interventions in multiple settings, and learn when ideas work best, and when they do not. 

Communicate: Communicate lessons to donors and implementers.  The ultimate aim of IPA is to help resources be allocated to effective programs and policies. IPA's communication strategy targets both donors, to help guide them to programs and ideas that have been proven effective, as well as to organizations, to help guide their programming decisions towards more effective ideas and implementation strategies. We do this through non-technical communication on individual studies and sets of studies, as well as through synthesis articles and conversations that frame key policy issues and present reliable evidence to help guide development practitioners, policymakers, investors and donors towards better decisions and allocation of resources.

Scale: Scale-up of effective solutions.  This includes hands-on technical assistance or direct implementation if appropriate, as well as extensive communication and advocacy efforts.

Why is IPA needed?

Two voids exist in development policy: insufficient incorporation of results from social science research, and insufficient evaluation (in particular, replication of studies) to learn concretely what works, what does not, and why.

To generate new ideas for solutions to poverty problems, we use new social science research on a range of findings relevant to the issues faced by developing countries. These include insights into how people make financial decisions, adopt new technology, use social networks to help survive crises, respond to incentives, decide how much education to acquire, etc. We employ tools from both economics and psychology, commonly referred to as behavioral economics, to design interventions that adapt to the local context and real behaviors of individuals.

A good evaluation shows whether an idea worked in a particular place and time.  But will it replicate?  Can it be scaled, successfully?  A clear understanding of why something works is necessary to make such predictions, and replication is key to make sure the theory holds, and the idea can and should be scaled. IPA is dedicated to answering the important why question via appropriate designs and data collection, and also to replication of evaluations in order to establish which results hold true and which do not, when and where.  This is imperative for formulating policy and allocating future resources.

What makes IPA unique?

IPA is unique because of its approach to learning what works and what does not, the researchers who lead and manage projects, and our focus on tackling broader policy questions rather than individual projects.  Specifically, the following characteristics set IPA apart:

• We are driven by the creation of ideas and the testing of ideas. We are not driven by evaluation of particular projects, although that is what we do in order to test specific ideas. The integration of similar research (i.e., "replication") is critical for breaking out of the current mold, which is a series of unconnected case studies that fail to establish larger frameworks for understanding what works best, and when and where.
• We are committed to a communication strategy that helps bridge academic and practitioner/policy worlds. Though our research is conducted with technical and scientifically rigorous methods, it must be communicated broadly and accessibly, so that it reaches the policymakers and practitioners who need better evidence to help guide their decisions.
• We are led by development economists from top universities, including M.I.T., Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, LSE, Dartmouth, and many others. Three of our most active researchers have won the Macarthur Foundation "genius" award. Our researchers include some of the most recognized names in development economics today.
• Our focus on randomized evaluations to determine what works and what does not sets us apart from other non-academic firms and organizations engaged in evaluation work. Our lead academic researchers and full-time research staff have extensive experience in operations and management of randomized controlled trials. We have experience in working with a variety of non-profits, governments, for-profits and private-public partnerships throughout the world.

What do we do?

• Design and development of new and innovative solutions to social problems: We often assist with the design and development of new and innovative poverty alleviation strategies with a strong likelihood of producing effective results, based on knowledge of economics and other key social sciences and of effective programs around the world.
• Design and implement evaluations: Develop quantitative measurement tools and experimental designs to monitor the effects and client responses to interventions. These measurement tools will include a randomized or quasi-random evaluation strategy. With in-country staff supervising all projects, we manage critical components of evaluation of innovative projects, such as data management, organizational change and direction, staff training techniques, client and management focus group techniques, and qualitative and quantitative research useful for the product and innovation design phase.
• Synthesis and Dissemination: Synthesize and disseminate results from multiple evaluations in order to provide policymakers and practitioners guidance on how to maximize their impact.
• Scale-up implementation assistance: Provide technical assistance to organizations to learn how to implement proven ideas.
• Implementation: We engage in implementation of development projects at two different phases. First, we sometimes implement an intervention as part of a research and evaluation project. Second, for ideas that have been proven, we sometimes engage in the scale-up activity as well. Such scale-up activity often also includes important organizational research about how to scale up ideas proven effective on a small scale.
• Donor Advisory work: Our ultimate aim is to help resources be allocated optimally. To this end, we have launched a "Proven Impact Fund" which is both a fund for individuals and foundations to support, in which we fund scale-up activities of ideas proven effective, whether implemented by IPA or by other organizations. We also work with donors to advise them on how to choose across competing ideas.