The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) is a hub for research, training, and innovation headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. We generate insights that leaders can use to improve policies, programs, and people’s lives. Our academic network includes more than 150 faculty, 65 scholars from low- and middle-income countries, and hundreds of graduate students–from across academic disciplines and across the globe–that produce rigorous evidence about what works to expand education, health, and economic opportunities for people living in poverty.
Every year, more than $150 billion dollars of government aid—and billions more from private philanthropy—are spent worldwide to combat poverty, promote health, and preserve the natural environment in the face of climate change. Despite these hefty figures, we know that they amount to only a fraction of the funding needed to address these enormous tasks.
But there’s another problem that might be even more motivating: many of the scarce resources available for development go into inefficient, sometimes wasteful, programs and services that fail to meaningfully improve lives. While technology companies regularly invest 10-15% of their revenue in R&D, governments and multilaterals—which are essential in advancing welfare and human development—spend about 1% of their annual budgets to rigorously test policies and programs being rolled in low-income countries. CEGA was established to remedy this.
CEGA researchers import ideas and techniques from other disciplines–like psychology and sociology–to help understand and solve complex economic challenges.
In the early 2000s, a small group of economists at UC Berkeley–a progressive institution and the world’s leading public university–started talking about the need for new approaches to research on poverty and global development. They began applying empirical, quantitative methods to the study of inequality and economic development at a time when others were focused on issues like aggregate economic growth and productivity (which largely ignored people’s livelihoods, life experiences, and political participation). From the beginning, CEGA researchers have imported ideas and techniques from other disciplines – like psychology and sociology – to help understand and solve complex social and economic challenges.
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