In Champawat, India, only 38% of girls continue their education beyond 10th grade.

Can theater-based learning help adolescents build holistic skills? Researchers partnered with Rang Kaarwaan to find out in 96 public schools.

Read more: bit.ly/4zAQ4S9

📚 Your weekend reading list is here!
The latest on the J-PAL Blog:
🌾 Scaling village input fairs
🌍 Building nonprofit and government capacity
🧒 Improving preschool learning outcomes
🌱 Strengthening food systems for smallholder farmers
💼 Understanding Egypt’s jobs mismatch
BFIW

🚽 Open defecation is a common public health risk. J-PAL reviewed 27 RCTs on efforts to increase access to and use of improved toilets.

✅ Subsidies, loans, & info campaigns can help, but health impacts are often limited without greater toilet coverage. bit.ly/4fcRhXw

In Mali, 70% of farmers had to travel outside their village to buy seed and fertilizer. Farmers want inputs and dealers want to sell, yet the market is missing.

Researchers explain how one-day village input fairs, run by a social enterprise, could help: bit.ly/4yXZxlm

Enroll in J-PAL’s free Evaluating Social Programs online course to learn how to use randomized evaluations to strengthen the culture of evidence use in your organization. Deadline: Nov 30.

bit.ly/4y9wGKN

Cash transfers keep children in school. But what happens 20 years later?

In Mexico, villages that got PROGRESA transfers 18 months earlier saw children stay in school longer and, in one cohort, earn about 15% more as adults.

bit.ly/4ixaVPc

How do you improve preschool quality when resources are limited?

In Ghana, the Lively Minds program trained local mothers to support play-based learning alongside teachers.

Result: children showed stronger numeracy and executive function gains, implementation costs fell.
bit.ly/4ixaVPc

This week's newsletter features a DEDP student and his work on improving public policy interventions, a new direction for an @mitlibraries initiative, and more. mailchi.mp/mit/shass-week… @MITEcon @MIT_CIS @JPAL_NA @JPAL

How do you know whether the impact of a program holds across different contexts? 🌍 Explore this question and more in J-PAL's free, online Evaluating Social Programs course where @j_floretta breaks down how to think about generalizability.

bit.ly/4y9wGKN

At the start of COVID-19, people in India were hearing health advice over and over again, but not always acting on it.

Inspired by evidence from Indonesia, they tested celebrity video messages sent via text to 25 million people.

The impact?

✅ 20% less travel

✅ More handwashing

✅ Increased symptom reporting

The Indian government scaled the campaign, including during high-risk moments like festivals, ultimately reaching 32 million people. Learn more: povertyactionlab.org/case-study/enc…

Want to pursue a graduate degree at a leading university? 🎓

If you are taking the Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP) MicroMasters, your coursework can help you get there.

Through the Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT), DEDP learners can apply their coursework toward admissions applications at our partner institutions.

📅 The DEDP team is joining our partners’ webinars to share more about the upcoming term. Find the webinars and register here: micromasters.mit.edu/dedp/announcem…

In Egypt, 51% of employed workers have more education than their jobs require. 90% of unemployed respondents have a minimum acceptable wage above what they would likely earn in the informal private sector.

Read the Egypt Impact Lab's findings: bit.ly/3Wr7uls

In rural Ghana, a US$3 cash offer raised verified Covid-19 vaccination by 12.3 percentage points, a 43% increase.

A US$10 offer had no effect.

Researchers suggest matching incentives to vaccination's real costs: too much cash may breed suspicion instead of uptake. bit.ly/3VXN3wo

How does an evaluation's design impact a study's credibility?

When researchers design a study—including randomized evaluations—they rely on assumptions, like the assumption that people in a study are split into truly random groups. The credibility of any impact evaluation e assumptions are plausible in a given context. J-PAL Research and Training Lead Michala Riis-Vestergaard explores what those assumptions are, why they matter, and how to assess them across different evaluation designs.

povertyactionlab.org/blog/6-17-26/t…

Bihar set out to reach its most vulnerable households. Two years on, households in the program had 2x the monthly income and 8x the business revenue of comparable households.

Built and scaled by Government of Bihar and JEEViKA, and now scaling to 12+ states. Read more: bit.ly/482Kj3v