CEGA Impact Report

Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Friends,

The past year was defined by remarkable shifts in both policy and technology. CEGA is working hard to keep pace with these changes, and leverage our comparative advantages to meet this unprecedented moment. In this Impact Report, we detail accomplishments from the last year that showcase our commitment to improving lives around the world by delivering evidence-backed insights to decision-makers. Highlights include:

• Leading a groundbreaking effort to transform USAID. Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE) was launched to increase the generation and use of cost-effectiveness evidence for decision-making at USAID and advance global knowledge about solutions to global poverty. While PILCEE was terminated by the new administration in a sweeping effort to dismantle USAID, we remain committed to working with the incredible consortium of organizations we built to continue to advance tools and standards for cost-effectiveness.
• Developing a new model for government engagement. In close collaboration with Minister Cina Lawson, CEGA secured funding to launch the Togo Data Lab. This embedded lab will establish a sustainable data science function within the Togolese government, empowering the Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation to integrate data-driven insights into policy-making and service delivery. If successful, this approach may serve as a model for deep engagement with government partners in other countries and regions.
• Expanding our fellowships for LMIC scholars. With support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, CEGA has expanded and diversified our fellowship offerings for scholars from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Over the next two years, we will bring 10 new fellows to UC Berkeley who are studying forced displacement, early childhood development, and youth employment in priority countries. This spring, we hosted three fellows studying forced displacement who are themselves refugees or members of host communities in Colombia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

Pressure continues to mount for evidence-based policy insights that can drive sustained impact for the 700 million people living in extreme poverty around the world. It’s at this nexus where CEGA generates the most return. Our strategy prioritizes frontier innovations. Our multidisciplinary network surfaces new ideas through new types of collaboration. We hope this report offers a compelling look at CEGA’s approach in action. As always, we are grateful to you and the community of evidence advocates whose support and engagement makes our work possible.

With thanks,

Carson Christiano
Executive Director

About CEGA

We improve the lives of people living in poverty by generating insights and tools for decision-makers backed by rigorous, inclusive, and transparent research.

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 170 faculty, 85 scholars from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and hundreds of graduate students–from across academic disciplines and across the globe–to produce rigorous evidence about what works to expand education, health, and economic opportunities for people living in poverty.

CEGA’s agriculture portfolio explores how access to markets, technologies, information, and financial services can improve the lives of smallholder farmers. The Center’s flagship agriculture programs are the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI) and the Digital Agricultural Innovations & Services Initiative (DAISI), jointly managed with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT. These programs have supported over 100 studies aimed at understanding the barriers that prevent farmers from adopting beneficial technologies, with DAISI focused specifically on digital and bundled agricultural tools and services.

Contact: Jenna Fahle, Program Manager

Impact

• In collaboration with Niger’s Ministry of the Environment, an ATAI-funded randomized evaluation on training farmers in simple water catchment techniques like demi-lunes is being scaled to 15,000 households.
• In Kenya, an ATAI-funded randomized evaluation demonstrated that Sauti East Africa, a social enterprise that empowers rural, women-led businesses, increased women traders’ profits through access to its mobile platform.
• Researchers presented evidence from ATAI-funded research at the 2024 Paris Peace Forum, the Science Summit at UNGA79, and to policymakers in Senegal with the Interdisciplinary Policy-Oriented Research on Africa (IPORA).
• DAISI is expanding evidence on large-scale, digital and bundled interventions for farmers through four ongoing randomized evaluations.

CEGA’s Conflict and Governance portfolio works to improve the performance of governments, expand citizen participation in public decision-making, and empower communities affected by conflict and forced displacement. The portfolio includes studies of reforms designed to reduce corruption, inform and engage voters, and improve the well-being of displaced communities.

Contact, Conflict: Jonathan Chang, Project Manager

Contact, Forced Displacement: Mansi Kalra, Research Project Manager

Impact

• The Syrian Refugee Life Study (S-RLS) presented early findings from its panel data to stakeholders in Jordan, completed another phone survey round, and was awarded $130,000 to undertake an additional in-person panel survey round, making S-RLS one of the only studies to track a vulnerable population over five years.
• The Kenya Analytical Program on Forced Displacement (KAP-FD) launched a new dashboard of its panel data and released a report of its early findings, and members of the team presented findings to the Kenya Department of Refugees to inform the coming Shirika Plan.
• Both KAP-FD and S-RLS contributed to open research efforts, as S-RLS published three rounds of panel data on the Harvard Dataverse and KAP-FD launched its public dashboard of panel data.
• CEGA launched a new fellowship program to bring 10 scholars over two years to UC Berkeley, with a focus on centering individuals from countries with high rates of displacement.

Innovations in remote sensing, machine learning, and big data analytics allow for more accurate, frequent, and granular insights related to global poverty and inequality. The Data Science for Development (DS4D) portfolio supports researchers, regulators, and public servants to use ML/AI for social impact by democratizing access to the skills and data needed to successfully develop computationally-intensive analysis and tools. We do this through direct collaborations with public sector partners, tailored workshops for researchers and students, and facilitating new partnerships.

Contact: Sean Luna McAdams, Senior Program Manager

Impact

• Launched the Togo Data Lab, a new partnership with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation to accelerate the adoption of data science approaches for social impact.
• Software developed by CEGA researchers to remotely target humanitarian aid, Cider, was a finalist for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize.
• Measuring Development, an annual CEGA-World Bank conference focused on better measurement of global development challenges and solutions, marked its tenth year with a conference on large language models, bringing more than 400 attendees.
• More than 200 people trained to use geospatial data and tools like MOSAIKS and Synthetic Aperture Radar data.

CEGA runs the Development Economics Challenge to provide catalytic funding for rising researchers looking to take a leadership role in designing and implementing field studies that improve the lives of those living in poverty. Twice a year, this program organizes a competitive request for proposals from CEGA’s graduate student and affiliate networks. CEGA seeks innovative and rigorous projects that have a pathway towards policy impact when making these grants.

Impact

• The majority of awarded studies were led by women PIs, and 75% of spring 2024 funding was distributed to researchers from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, contributing to greater diversity in the economics research pipeline.
• Funds awarded in spring 2024 more than doubled the amount in spring 2023.
• CEGA’s catalytic support for graduate student research significantly expanded over the last year, with 21 new schools now represented in the proposal process.
• The program expanded to include funding opportunities for faculty researchers.

CEGA’s Financial Inclusion portfolio builds the evidence base on how better tools for managing money — from mobile payments to digital credit and insurance — can help low-income households save, manage their finances, and grow their businesses. The Digital Credit Observatory (DCO), our flagship program supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, funded 33 studies across 15 countries from 2016 – 2024, with a focus on the delivery, design, and impacts of digital credit products and their data privacy considerations.

Contact: Sean Luna McAdams, Senior Program Manager

Impact

• The DCO released a joint report, Mobile Instant Credit: Impacts, Challenges, and Lessons for Consumer Protection, with colleagues at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) synthesizing evidence.
• The second phase of the DCO funded 16 credit-related projects (totaling $1.3M) and five additional projects focused on novel data privacy questions.
• The DCO published accessible resources on the gap in data privacy specific to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including several blog posts and a webinar introducing foundational concepts for data privacy.
• CEGA published reports on the use of privacy-enhancing technologies in humanitarian, social protection, and financial inclusion initiatives, and presented at USAID, the Federal Reserve Bank at Philadelphia, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the North American Criminal Defense League, and among others.
• CEGA supported the two-day event, “The Digital Future: Fintech, AI, and the Path to Financial Inclusion,” co-hosted by the Lab for Inclusive Fintech (LIFT) at the University of California, Berkeley and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and featuring keynote remarks from Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University and former Chief Economist at USAID Dean Karlan.

CEGA’s Global Networks portfolio seeks greater equity and diversity in the evidence-informed policy ecosystem. Since the Center was founded, we have invested directly in LMIC scholars by providing research capacity building opportunities, hosting research dissemination events in East and West Africa, and connecting fellows with policy makers, partners, and research collaborators. The Global Network team further serves as a thought leader in the field of research ethics, for example, by supporting the formation of new norms for returning research results to participants when a study is complete.

Contact: Amy Shipow, Program Manager

Impact

• CEGA hosted 11 fellowships, including both resident and non-resident fellows.
• We invested in a new cohort of fellows to support LMIC scholars studying forced displacement, youth livelihoods, and early childhood development.
• We advanced our analysis on the state of inclusion in global development research by using a comprehensive survey to generate insights from 600 policy makers, practitioners, and scholars.
• The American Economics Association recognized CEGA’s commitment to amplifying new LMIC voices in the economics profession with its 2024 Award for Outstanding Diversity and Inclusion.

CEGA’s Health and Psychology portfolio explores how individual and systemic biases, as well as social norms, affect the provision and take-up of health services. Additionally, by investing in longitudinal studies, CEGA researchers are able to trace the educational, social, and economic impacts of low-cost public health interventions—for example the treatment of parasitic worms in children—over decades and generations. CEGA has also built a robust and growing interdisciplinary research community that fills important evidence gaps on the psychological consequences of poverty and downstream impacts on social and economic development.

Contact: Kristina Hallez, Senior Research Manager

Impact

• CEGA-funded research insights integrated into an AI-enabled text messaging platform promoted better antenatal care-seeking in 2.5 million mothers in Kenya.
• CEGA researchers raised $2.9M to adapt and scale a low-cost intervention in Malawi that helped thousands of smallholder farmers in Zambia save for and buffer against seasonal hunger. While the project was affected by recent USAID cuts, it continues with support from the Weiss Asset Management Foundation and J-PAL’s Social Protection Initiative.
• Through the Psychology of Economics and Poverty Initiative, CEGA funded three student-led projects and three awards that matched Agency Fund grantees with PEP researchers to support evaluation efforts.
• Researchers piloted and evaluated a novel curriculum to combat drug addiction in collaboration with the Department of School Education through a randomized trial covering almost 10,000 students in Punjab, India.
• Researchers on the Kenya Life Panel Survey Team explored the intergenerational effects of parental exposure to deworming and the improved human capital outcomes in a sample of 3,500 children, including in health, non-cognitive development, and cognition.

Promoting ethical, transparent, and reproducible research practices can improve the integrity of science and inspire better public policy. CEGA leverages new tools and approaches to train researchers and policymakers, create communities of practice, develop wide-reaching institutional policies, and build capacity to produce and utilize high quality evidence.

Contact, Cost Transparency: Elizabeth Brown, Staff Scientist

Contact, BITSS: Jo Weech, Program Manager

Impact

• BITSS received the 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in the Institutional category, in part, for its active role in the “credibility revolution” in science.
• The Reporting Guidelines and Publications Bias (RGPB) project encoded hundreds of studies and thousands of hypotheses into a standardized format, allowing the project team to study research patterns and to measure the file drawer problem.
• The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation issued a new policy memo strengthening its commitment to the use of cost evidence in decision-making, citing paper from Cost Transparency Staff Scientist Liz Brown.
• CEGA led cost research projects in conjunction with randomized evaluations in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, in partnership with the Economic Social Research Foundation, IFPRI, and USAID.
• CEGA partnered with the Agency Fund to provide their grantees with access to tools and guidances to evaluate their own costs for decision-making.

The Opportunity Lab (O-Lab) is a CEGA-affiliated research center focused on poverty and inequality in the US and beyond. This portfolio explores domestic issues like child poverty, regional economic inequities, criminal justice policy, and racial disparities in the labor market, as well as cross-border issues like climate change and wealth inequality.

Contact: Joe Broadus, Program Director

Impact

• Student Spotlight on Ini Umosen, a 6th year PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Economics department, who is investigating the racial impacts of a Chicago program that provides grants to small business owners. Read the spotlight
• O-Lab also organized a conference on Cash Assistance and Child Well-Being to explore how research and policy can improve children’s lives. WATCH the conference 

 An overview of CEGA’s finances for FY24