What Works, and What's Next for J-PAL Africa

For over two decades, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has worked to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually works in the fight against poverty? Founded at MIT and now a global network of more than 1,100 affiliated researchers, J-PAL uses rigorous evaluation methods to test which social policies and programs deliver real results, and then works with governments and partners to help bring the effective ones to scale. Here at SALDRU within UCT, J-PAL Africa leads that work across the continent. As its new Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director, we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves, share something of the moment we're stepping into, and say a little about the work ahead.

I'm Matt Edmundson, and I've joined J-PAL Africa as Executive Director after three years at J-PAL's Global office at MIT in Cambridge (USA). I’ve seen how rigorous evidence can shift the terms of a policy debate, moving a conversation from what sounds plausible to what has actually been shown to work. But evidence is not sufficient on its own: it must be brought into decisions by people who trust it, and that trust is built through partnerships and the slow, important work of creating and growing relationships. The world today is responding to profound changes in the aid landscape and to complex uncertainty about how AI will reshape economies, jobs, and our daily lives. In that context, the question of what works, and for whom, matters more than ever. J-PAL Africa sits at the centre of a number of deeply consequential questions in development, working directly with governments and researchers across the continent, and I'm privileged to have joined the team at this moment.

And I'm Clare Hofmeyr, stepping into the role of Deputy Executive Director. I've been part of J-PAL Africa for many years, most recently as Associate Director of Education and Training, a title I'll continue to hold. In my role I have worked to translate the methods and findings at the heart of our research into training that reaches practitioners, policymakers, and students. That work taught me something that shapes how I think about this new role: rigorous evidence only matters if the people positioned to act on it can understand it, trust it, and use it. Building the connective tissue between research and practice is slow and steady, and it has a long horizon. A central aim of our training is to equip local African researchers with the tools and skills to lead their own evaluations, so that the evidence shaping policy across the continent is increasingly produced by the people who know its questions best.

Between us, we bring both a fresh perspective and a long institutional memory, and we see that combination as central to the moment J-PAL Africa is in. We're not arriving to redirect an organization that already does important and impactful work. Our aim is to sharpen it, and to build on foundations that are already strong.

Our long-term partnerships with the Government of Benin, with South Africa's Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, and with the City of Cape Town are all models of what this can look like: co-designing evaluations of government programs, putting evidence directly into the hands of decision-makers, and training officials in evaluation methods so that the capacity to ask and answer these questions lives inside government itself. Partnerships like this are how evidence stops being an external input and becomes part of how a government learns.

It means, second, closing the gap between what we know works and what actually reaches people at scale. This is the gap much of our work is built to close, working alongside governments and their delivery partners to move proven approaches from small trials into national systems. Through our Scaling Access to Safe Water in Africa portfolio, we're supporting country-led efforts to expand access to clean, safe water, a foundation for health that millions still go without. Our newly launched Jobs and Livelihoods portfolio takes on another urgent question: what actually enables firms to grow, reach larger markets, and create the jobs the continent needs. And in education, where so many children across sub-Saharan Africa still cannot read a simple sentence by age ten, this shift from evidence to institutionalized practice is among the most urgent tasks we face.

And it means, third, extending our reach into the questions and countries where rigorous evidence generation and use is still scarce. In South Africa, our research team works with some of J-PAL’s affiliated researchers to run randomized evaluations. Part of this Research portfolio is testing, for instance, what actually helps people find work in South Africa, from reference letters and skills accreditation to job-search support and transport subsidies that connect job-seekers to opportunities, alongside studies on how prepaid electricity meters affect low-income households. More broadly for the continent, our Digital Identification and Finance Initiative in Africa (DigiFI) looks at how governments, companies, and NGOs can use digital payments and identification systems to improve public service delivery, strengthen governance, and expand financial inclusion. Widening the map of where evidence is produced, and by whom, is central to what we hope to achieve.

Running through all of this is a commitment to local talent. The long-term goal of our training and capacity-building is not simply to share methods, but to sustain a culture of learning that continuously empowers African Scholars to lead. The most durable version of this work is one in which the questions, the evaluations, and the answers increasingly come from within the continent rather than from outside it.

None of this is possible without the researchers, partners, funders, policymakers, and staff who make up this community, including at SALDRU and UCT. We're extraordinarily grateful for the work that you do and the trust that you place in ours, and we look forward to what we'll build together to improve the lives of people living in poverty.

Thank you.