Displacement is at an all-time high and is projected to climb in the coming decades. There is limited rigorous evidence, however, about how to best respond to displacement and strengthen outcomes for displaced and host communities. What is more, even when effective programs and policies are identified and evaluated, decision-makers often struggle to determine how to use that evidence for impact at scale. IPA and J-PAL are actively working to fill these evidence-to-policy-and-practice gaps. Through the Displaced Livelihoods Initiative (DLI), supported by the IKEA Foundation, IPA and J-PAL supports rigorous impact evaluations, pilots, exploratory studies, infrastructure and public goods projects, and scaling work to inform policies and programs on sustainable livelihoods for displaced populations and host communities. DLI’s inaugural Call for Proposals is now closed as of Friday, July 21, 2023. We expect to announce our second round in Fall 2023. If you have any questions, please contact displacement@poverty-action.org.

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.

IPA's Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Initiative seeks to inform global development policy and practice on IPV reduction by expanding knowledge and improving research methods. By building on existing studies, the IPV Initiative aims to generate insights on the development programs that shift IPV outcomes and what factors drive these changes.These include studies of programs that impact household finances, increase women’s empowerment, and improve socio-emotional skills. The IPV Initiative's research fund leverages existing research studies to advance our understanding of the underlying causes and influencing factors of intimate partner violence. For reference, see past funded projects.

IPA's Peace & Recovery Program (P&R) sector supports field experiments and related research in several broad areas: reducing violence and promoting peace; reducing "fragility" (i.e. fostering state capability and institutions of decision-making); and preventing, coping with, and recovering from crises (focusing on conflict, but also including non-conflict humanitarian crises such as COVID-19). Through its competitive fund, P&R supports full randomized evaluations, pilot studies, exploratory and descriptive work, travel grants, and (in rare but deserving cases) quasi-experimental evaluations. For reference, see past funded projects.

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.