I’m a Project Associate for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). IPA is a non-profit that evaluates anti-poverty programs and policies in the developing world and then disseminates these research findings to governments, policymakers, NGO’s, and donors around the world. IPA has designed and evaluated a diverse range of anti-poverty programs, including microfinance programs, education inititatives, health interventions, anti-corruption programs and many more.
IPA mainly (although not exclusively) uses Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT’s) in its evalutions. In RCT’s, individuals, schools, households, or even whole communities are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. Then, the treatment grousp receive the program or intervention, while the control groups are left un-treated. This method ensures (given certain assumptions and provided everything goes correctly) that treatment and control groups differ only in that they received the given treatment or program. Recently, there has been a fascinating debate about the proper role of RCT’s in development economics and social science research in general. I won’t get into this debate now, but if you’re interested check out Jonathan Bauchet’s blog entry. He also links to authors with different perspectives on this debate.
What do I personally do? As a Project Associate, I’m responsible for the on-the-ground management of projects. My responsibilities range from helping find and design new studies, working with partner organizations, managing project implementation, overseeing surveying and other types of data collection, all the way to data cleaning and analysis. During my 9 months at IPA, I have managed survey teams, analyzed data, interviewed moneylenders and fruit-stand owners, hiked up and down hills mapping villages, designed financial literacy fliers, spent hours stapling surveys, written surveys, re-written surveys, met with partner organizations and built a bed. Basically, the PA’s do anything and everything that needs to be done on the ground to get projects and evaluations implemented.
It’s pretty sweet overall, although I still don’t like stapling surveys.
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