Wall Street Journal: Activist Annie Duflo Uses Data and Incentives to Fight Global Poverty

From the article:

Some promising experiments can still fail when they are scaled up. A non-IPA program that offered small loans to poor farmers in Bangladesh if they moved to a city to work looked good in trials but was called off in 2019 when new data showed it simply didn’t work. Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, has noted that when governments or big charities take over these programs, they are more likely to attract opposition or bureaucratic ineptitude. But these instances highlight just how important it is to continue to collect data, Ms. Duflo notes, particularly as hard numbers can bypass the strong emotions and polarizing politics that can attend antipoverty programs. 

During the pandemic, IPA’s work has become harder and more urgent. The progress of the past two decades, in which the number of people living in extreme poverty had fallen by more than 1 billion, is being reversed. The World Bank estimates that as many as 124 million people world-wide became impoverished in 2020, living on less than $1.90 a day.