Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE)
“Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE)” represents a historic, $75 million investment by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to inform its activities and programs with rigorous evidence about what works to alleviate poverty. Over the next five years, a global consortium of research institutions led by CEGA will contribute vital evidence to USAID to dramatically improve the cost-effectiveness of its efforts to fight global poverty and promote economic growth.
PILCEE brings together a worldwide network of over 1,500 researchers — including over 250 from low- and middle-income countries — to guide USAID’s work by evaluating the impacts of Agency-funded programs and synthesizing findings from the growing evidence base. In doing so, PILCEE will generate important insights for the global development community about the most economical ways to improve lives and promote global growth.
The program prioritizes evidence from randomized controlled trials, an approach recognized by the Nobel Prize committee as transformational in understanding promising solutions to global poverty. CEGA and the consortium partners are experts in the field of measuring of program impact. Together, the consortium has produced, analyzed, and translated more than 1,800 randomized controlled trials in nearly 100 countries over the past two decades, in addition to extensive research translation and dissemination work.
Consortium partners include:
- Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT
- CARE
- Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)
- International Rescue Committee
- Mercy Corps
- Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA)
- Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame
- Save the Children
- UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy
Importantly, PILCEE prioritizes the measurement of how much programs cost, in addition to their impacts. This will make it much easier for USAID and its peers to compare different program design options and decide which ones are the “best buys.”
As governments face overlapping crises and constrained budgets, 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.
