Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) was established in 2003 as a research center at the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This grant will conduct a randomized controlled trial to test effects of clean birth kits, community mobilization, and lay health workers on reducing maternal mortality in Nigeria. Funding will ensure continuous data collection, refresher training for enumerators, research assistance, and dissemination costs.

This grant will support the Post-Primary Education Initiative at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which will, together with support from other donors, fund research on development interventions in secondary education. J-PAL and its network of 72 professors and six partner research institutions will establish a competitive fund to support multiple rounds of randomized evaluations of targeted interventions to improve secondary education. J-PAL’s Policy Group will help disseminate the results of the research through policy publications, networking and conferences, and, for interventions found to be successful, will assist scale-up by identifying local partners (including governments) and assisting them.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) will undertake a comprehensive literature review to define the post-primary research domain and to understand, and identify gaps in, the state of knowledge on what works as well as gaps in knowledge to improve post-primary education in developing countries. The objective of this project is to conduct the preliminary, conceptual and background work necessary to establish the J-PAL Post-Primary Education Initiative, a coordinated research program to be led by J-PAL and to be based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) will develop a cell-phone based system to collect data on births and maternal deaths in a study area in northern Nigeria, support the salary of a research manager, develop a community-based maternal health education initiative, and widely disseminate research results.