UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy will join a worldwide group of research institutions seeking to improve the effectiveness of the United States Agency for International Development, it was announced Monday.
The $75 million, five-year partnership with institutions such as the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley, Mercy Corps, Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame and Save the Children is intended to provide evidence to USAID on how best to use funding to fight global poverty.
“I came to USAID to help improve the use and generation of cost-effectiveness evidence across humanitarian and development outcomes at the world’s largest bilateral aid agency,” said Dean Karlan, chief economist at USAID. “Our new cooperative agreement with the excellent consortium led by CEGA is an important step towards this goal, and also is a path to influencing academic research to help deliver more research tailored to policy needs.”
The project — Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence or PILCEE — will involve more than 1,500 researchers from around the world, including more than 250 from countries not among the world’s wealthy.
In collecting evidence of how well (or poorly) USAID-funded programs work from randomized controlled trials, project organizers hope they can direct the significant financial weight of the federal agency to more effective use to better people’s lives.
“We are excited to be building this close collaboration with the preeminent U.S. government development agency,” said Craig McIntosh, a professor of economics at UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and co-director of the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab. “With the costing work being led from UCSD, this consortium presents a fantastic opportunity to add rigor to the investments made by USAID, making sure that taxpayer dollars achieve the maximum possible reduction in global poverty.”
PILCEE prioritizes the measurement of how much programs cost, as well as their impacts, a statement from UCSD read. This will allow for an apples-to-apples comparison when deciding what to direct money and time toward.
“This groundbreaking collaboration promises to set an example for aid agencies that want to leverage the power of evidence to do the most good for people experiencing poverty and humanitarian crises around the world,” the statement from UCSD concluded.
