Innovations for Poverty Action

Innovations for Poverty Action, founded in 2002, is a global research and policy nonprofit committed to reducing global poverty with evidence. 

IPA’s experts engage with researchers, implementers and policymakers to identify policy-relevant gaps and develop research projects to address those gaps. IPA has built a robust infrastructure to ensure fieldwork follows rigorous protocols and uses cost-effective methods to get the work done. 

During Covid-19, IPA partnered with Y-RISE faculty director Mushfiq Mobarak and a team of researchers at Yale and Stanford Medical School to conduct a large-scale RCT in Bangladesh. The study was the first randomized evaluation to show that mask-wearing in a real-world setting reduces COVID-19. The study also found a precise combination of encouragement strategies to substantially increase the use of community mask-wearing, now called the NORM model. IPA and a large coalition of partners quickly mobilized to support government and non-government organizations in scaling the model. Additional details can be found in the plain language summary, press release, presentation, and academic paper.

More recently, IPA partnered with Y-RISE to understand the effects of scaling soft-skills training to entrepreneurs in low & middle income countries (LMICs). 

In Bangladesh, IPA has tested policy-relevant questions on sanitation through a study of effective strategies for latrine adoption. The project entailed assigning 380 neighborhoods to 9 unique treatment arms in a double-randomized design.