DISCOVERING “WHAT WORKS”TO ALLEVIATE POVERTY

However, Jameel realized that governments and donors were contributing vast sums of money to programs that addressed critical needs in the fields of health, education, and livelihoods, even though there was a near-total absence of data to show which programs were effective. As his son, Fady Jameel, president, international, of Community Jameel, notes, “Sometimes, interventions conceived with the best of intentions can have minimal – or even negative – impact on the people they are trying to help.”

The situation was particularly troubling given the scale of the need. For example, in 2003, fewer than 30 percent of secondary students in the Arab region met international thresholds for math proficiency. This generation also faced a challenging future, as the region had the world’s highest youth unemployment rate. 

That and other dispiriting realities redoubled Jameel’s desire to find a better way to identify, support, and scale effective programs. There had to be a more precise approach than simple dashboards of “key performance indicators” that may or may not determine impact.

At about the same time, 4,000 miles away, economics professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Sendhil Mullainathan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – where Mohammed Jameel earned his bachelor’s degree – were confronting the same conundrum: How do we determine whether an antipoverty program actually works?

In an attempt to answer that question, the MIT economists established the Poverty Action Lab (PAL), a global research center focused on poverty and development. PAL differed from its peers in that it used randomized evaluations to test the efficacy of antipoverty programs. The idea: an organization introduces a new program randomly among some people but not others, and PAL’s researchers would measure and compare how much improvement occurred in each group. Because both groups are identical in every other way, any differences in outcomes can be attributed to the program.

This approach can test many antipoverty programs – from education to health to employment – and provide evidence that positions PAL to help governments, donors, and NGOs advance only those programs that deliver the most value and impact.

For PAL to realize that vision, it needed someone to bet big on its growth. By 2005, PAL had conducted 48 randomized evaluations. Further scaling its research and expanding its influence would require building more infrastructure. Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president at the time, knew of Jameel’s interest in using evidence to fight poverty. That same year, she introduced him to Banerjee and Duflo.

Fady Jameel recalls that when he and his father learned about PAL, they “saw that it was aligned with Community Jameel, with the potential to impact millions of people worldwide.” That meeting was the start of what would become a groundbreaking partnership to galvanize the fight against poverty globally.

First, through J-PAL, Community Jameel made an enduring commitment to alleviating poverty. While the Jameel family had invested heavily in Saudi Arabia and the countries around it, both in business leadership and philanthropy, Community Jameel's support for J-PAL was grounded in the family's aspirations to advance health, education, and livelihoods around the world. Community Jameel made a long-term, sustaining investment – structured as endowments – to establish J-PAL.

Community Jameel’s 2005 gift endowed a professorship, two fellowships, and a research and teaching fund, all in the areas of poverty alleviation and development economics. While endowment gifts are common in academia, they are rare in initiatives focused on social change, like J-PAL, and especially in those that are essentially start-ups. This gift represented a leap of faith. For more than 13 years, Community Jameel has continued to provide flexible support that is integral to J-PAL’s efforts.

“A huge part of J-PAL’s success has been that we have a guaranteed source of income from year to year,” notes Iqbal Dhaliwal, executive director of J-PAL Global. “This has allowed us to think long term, focus on the work rather than on fundraising, and attract talent who would normally look at government or other jobs.”

Second, with J-PAL, Community Jameel chose to deliver on that ambition with an indirect impact approach, a departure from the more typical path of investing in specific projects that directly address people’s needs and deliver more readily quantifiable results: houses built, jobs created, children fed. Jameel instead backed a start-up that was committed to generating evidence that helps direct service providers, like NGOs and governments, deliver more effective programs.

Finally, Community Jameel was at the forefront of the evidence movement in the social sector. The family believed that rigorous statistical analyses, such as randomized evaluations, could help identify and direct resources towards promising ways to tackle poverty.

Randomized evaluations had long been used in other fields such as medicine to assess the efficacy of new treatments. As one of the first actors to bring this approach to the social sector, J-PAL was poised to play a pivotal role in advancing the “what works” movement, helping NGOs, governments, and donors around the world direct their efforts and resources toward the most effective antipoverty programs.

Just as important, J-PAL would also work to build demand for data, by shifting the focus of governments, NGOs, and donors from “good intentions” to evidence-informed decision making.

J-PAL has transformed itself from a start-up with a novel approach to an organization that has benefitted more than 400 million people around the globe, through programs and policies that J-PAL affiliates evaluated and found to be effective.

In the Arab region, in collaboration with Community Jameel, J-PAL has launched its newest regional office, J-PAL Middle East and North Africa (MENA), based at the American University of Cairo. J-PAL MENA will partner with local philanthropists to evaluate compelling global education, employment, and anti- poverty interventions.

Through rigorous randomized evaluations, J-PAL expands the social sector’s understanding of which poverty-alleviation programs work and which do not. Its affiliates have led more than 1,000 randomized evaluations across a diverse range of topics, from clean water to microfinance to crime prevention. The research group at J-PAL, funded in part by Jameel’s investment, helps support affiliates in conducting evaluations.

It is not unusual for these studies to contradict unproven, common-sense approaches. Consider the body of research on the effect of class size on academic outcomes. Because schools in low and middle-income regions tend to be overcrowded, many programs aim to improve learning by reducing class sizes. As a result, they often invest significant money in hiring additional teachers to improve student-teacher ratios.

However, studies have repeatedly shown that simply adding resources is not enough to meaningfully improve students’ performance. Class-size reductions and other one-off changes must be integrated with broader improvements in pedagogy or school governance to truly amplify student learning.

Therefore, in this case, a metric for J-PAL's success would be funders redirecting their investments to proven initiatives, such as Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). Having evaluated this pedagogical approach in India and several other countries, J-PAL found that TaRL boosts learning outcomes by grouping students according to their learning level (rather than age or grade) and tailoring teaching to that level.

J-PAL researchers’ studies are only helpful if they inform the decisions of governments and donors about which approaches they should fund. Take J-PAL's TaRL work: various Indian state governments, seeing the model’s success in India, have incorporated it into their own work. Co-Impact, a donor collaborative focused on large-scale social impact, recently announced a grant to scale TaRL’s approach across several countries in Africa.

To spread its research and insights, J-PAL policy staff work with the network of professors to distill findings into lessons that are relevant to policy makers. It also builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, and other decision makers to share frameworks for applying global evidence to local contexts, and to support the use of evidence to drive policy reform.

These supports include providing funding and technical assistance, as well as embedding staff to help shape projects and policies that deliver results.

J-PAL educates and trains policy makers and program staff on how to conduct high-quality evaluations and then use evidence to make smarter decisions. It has a range of training resources and in-person executive education options, including online courses and customized workshops. J-PAL offers free, online courses on evaluating social programs and measuring health outcomes.

It also offers in-person workshops for researchers, field managers, or anyone else, which can be customized by sector or interest.

To understand how J-PAL’s approach can overturn conventional wisdom, consider what it has revealed about microcredit, which NGOs and governments around the world embraced as a way to alleviate poverty. As of 2013, microcredit-based initiatives had reached over 200 million people, half of whom were living in extreme poverty. Yet despite this broad reach, detractors argued that microcredit trapped poor households in debt.

In the midst of this debate, J-PAL affiliates conducted a series of randomized evaluations to test microcredit’s impact. They found that microcredit’s impact is limited. On average, it does not lead to higher incomes or pathways out of poverty. At the same time, it does not leave borrowers worse off.

Further research by J-PAL affiliates, in partnership with leading NGOs, has helped reveal promising, more holistic approaches to tackling the challenges facing poor households. For example, J-PAL-affiliated researchers worked with BRAC, a Bangladesh-based NGO, to evaluate one of its initiatives, the Graduation Approach. Pioneered by BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP) program, the Graduation Approach provides ultra-poor households with a productive asset (such as a goat, cow, or supplies for trade), training on how to manage the asset, and additional supports such as healthcare, life-skills training, and ongoing coaching. The goal: help marginalized people earn their way out of extreme poverty.

After partnering with BRAC to test the program in Bangladesh, researchers working with implementing organizations in seven countries evaluated replications of the program. They found that the model enabled the poorest women to diversify their income sources and begin running small businesses, increasing their earnings by an average of 38 percent over four years.

There were also improvements in food security, asset holdings, and savings. These studies provided hard evidence that the Graduation Approach helped alleviate poverty.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these findings. Before the Graduation Approach emerged, there had not been “much rigorous evidence that outside aid can sustainably lift people out of poverty,” as Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times in 2015.

After launching six successful regional offices around the world, in 2015, J-PAL began deepening its efforts in the Arab region, working with AUC. Two years later, J-PAL co-founder and co-director Abhijit Banerjee announced that the organization would further expand its work in the region. AUC and J-PAL formalized their partnership shortly thereafter, and in 2020, J-PAL MENA at AUC launched in collaboration with Community Jameel, becoming J-PAL's seventh regional office.

Community Jameel has been an important partner in J-PAL’s early work in the Arab region, both by providing seed funding and by helping it build relationships. Community Jameel worked with J-PAL to organize a half-day convening in Dubai to seek advice on how it could help tackle social policy priorities in the region, raise its own profile, and build partnerships.

As Fady Jameel puts it, “In the Arab region, where Community Jameel’s footprint is greatest, we work to advocate J-PAL’s findings, to promote J-PAL’s approach among key regional players, and to identify new opportunities for J-PAL to work with agencies and regional NGOs to evaluate the impact of interventions.”

With this support, J-PAL’s efforts to build demand seem to be paying off, as it is seeing an uptick in requests to evaluate locally developed interventions from NGOs and government partners. One example is a set of new partnerships to evaluate programs targeted at Syrian refugees and host communities in the region. This is potentially groundbreaking, as the field has seen few randomized evaluations until now.

Community Jameel supports social and economic development, including job creation, arts and culture, health, education, poverty alleviation, and ensuring safe, plentiful water and food for all. In addition to founding J-PAL, Community Jameel established J-WAFS (the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab), J-WEL (the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab), and Jameel Clinic (the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health), all based at Jameel's alma mater, MIT.

Jameel received the King Abdul Aziz Medal of the First Order, Saudi Arabia’s highest award, from HM King Abdullah for his job-creation initiatives for young men and women. He also received an Honorary Knighthood from HM Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for his philanthropic activities and support of arts and culture.