IPA identifies and leverages emerging technologies to deliver data insights in support of IPA’s mission to improve the lives of people living in poverty. We apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to enable IPA and our partners to acquire better, cheaper, and faster data insights.

IPA’s Data Science and Engineering (DSE) team provides direct technical support in the design, development, testing, and deployment of data solutions and data products. We create software and analytical solutions for accessing, transforming, and finding patterns in diverse sources of data, such as survey metadata, satellite imagery, and digital trace data. Some of the areas in which the DSE team specializes are:

• Analysis of online experiments (A/B tests)
• Development of Large Language Models (LLMs) for international development applications
• Predictive analytics using machine learning with satellite imagery, mobile phone records, and other digital trace data
• Machine learning models to assist with targeting social protection programs
• Causal machine learning for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects
• Data visualization, dashboards for data insights
• Applications of natural language processing to analyze text data
• Webscraping and other data collection services for research projects
• Data engineering to build analytics from heterogeneous and unstructured data