On April 26, 2016, IPA Zambia presented study results at the World Bank Zambia office during one of their brown bag lunches.Rachna Nag Chowdhuri, Country Director, and Rachel Levenson, Research Manager, presented results from The Impact of Food and Cash Loans on Smallholder Farmers in Zambia and Temporary Labor Migration as Mitigation: Strategies for Managing Seasonal Famine (Bangladesh).

Despite the global progress made in reducing the number of people living in poverty, more than 1.3 billion people around the world still live in extreme poverty.According to the World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report, extreme poverty rates have actually increased in Sub-Saharan Africa.The percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day in sub-Saharan Africa (41%) is more than twice as high as any other region (such as Southern Asia, with 17%) and the region continues to lag behind in meeting the global commitment on poverty reduction.

On April 19, 2016, the Ministry of Education of Peru (Minedu) launched MineduLAB at Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru.MineduLAB is an innovation lab for education policy housed within the Ministry of Education of Peru.The lab pilots and evaluates the effectiveness of innovations with the ultimate goal of allowing the Ministry to use evidence to improve, among others, education management indicators and children’s learning throughout the country.Critical to this success is the lab’s close ties with academia.