J-PAL Engagement Opportunities

The text below is from Alison Fahey:

Engaging With Regional Policy Teams

Looking forward, our Health sector staff and regional policy team would be glad to connect with interested fellows. Several questions and ideas for how to work together came up in the last half hour of our time together, most of which would benefit from more 1:1 follow up. J-PAL staff can share what we’re learning from the evidence on a given topic that can inform programming, help connect fellows to other researchers in the J-PAL network to explore opportunities for a new evaluation, and discuss other collaboration avenues including broader government partnerships. The best point of contact for health-oriented conversations would be Aimee Barnes (Health sector policy manager) , and she will loop in the relevant regional contacts from J-PAL Africa or other regions. When your fellows reach out to Aimee, please ask them to include me as well.

Other Resources

We also have some additional resources that would be great to share back with the fellows, if you can:

J-PAL’s Evaluation Summary database and Policy Insights (synthesis briefs) are convenient places to explore the evidence and policy recommendations on a range of health topics emerging from the RCT evidence base. Those links are filtered for health. For the fellow from Bangladesh, for instance, who was interested in what has been evaluated in Bangladesh across sectors, the summary database is also searchable by country.

J-PAL Regional Offices

Our regional offices work closely with government partners to support evidence use and generation, in both light-touch ways and through deeper partnerships like embedded labs (example here). They would also be glad to connect with policy fellows and Aimee could help facilitate introductions.

Our close partner organization, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), has additional country offices that are also worth connecting with as there are IPA offices in many of the countries where fellows are based.