IPA's Consumer Protection Research Initiative is a four-year research initiative, which partners with policymakers, financial institutions, and civil society to develop new consumer protection solutions in digital financial services. The Initiative focuses on key consumer protection themes relevant to digital financial services.

Despite the gravity and prevalence of human trafficking, there is a notable lack of evidence on what programs work to reduce trafficking and support victims. To support research on this critical and understudied topic, IPA has established the Human Trafficking Research Initiative in partnership with the Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS) at the U.S. Department of State, with the guidance and support of co-scientific advisors Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania) and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo (University of California, Berkeley). HTRI's recent call for proposals for seed grants for partnership building, pilots, and data analysis is closed as of Friday, March 31, 2023. Thank you to all who submitted proposals. If you have any questions, please reach out to ipa_htri@poverty-action.org.

Globally, violence against women is a leading cause of premature death and morbidity. Almost one-third of women report experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) or sexual violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives, and nearly 40 percent of all homicides of women are committed by an intimate partner. IPA has been a leader in the recent expansion of high-quality IPV research to identify how we can substantially reduce IPV.

The Research Methods Initiative is a collaboration between IPA and the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University.The initiative supports systematic studies into how to improve the methods and measurement of key outcomes in global poverty research. The initiative was created to examine sources of measurement error in research studies including in questionnaire design, sampling, fieldwork implementation, and validation of key indicators. It is organized around three themes: (1) research design, (2) questionnaire design, and (3) fieldwork implementation and data quality.