J-PAL announces new, multi-year training partnership in Cote d’Ivoire for policy impact evaluation

Blended training programs for students and civil servants will focus on content from MITx MicroMasters and MITx

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Europe office and the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics of Abidjan (ENSEA) have co-launched a new civil servant training program in Côte d’Ivoire. The in-service training blends online courses from the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP) and aims to equip 40-60 civil servants per year with the tools of rigorous impact evaluation. The online MITx course 14.73x (The Challenges of Global Poverty) is a significant portion of the training, in terms of both time spent and content learned.

This training is part of an ambitious collaborative effort, supported by the Ivorian government and the French Development Agency (AFD), to build capacity that also targets students. In addition to access to the MITx DEDP MicroMasters courses, the training will offer tutoring and scholarship opportunities. The collaboration further envisions the development of a blended master's program at ENSEA that will also include courses from the MITx DEDP MicroMasters program.

The partnership in Côte d’Ivoire marks the beginning of a broader collaboration between J-PAL and Community Jameel, an international organization advancing science and learning for communities to thrive, which will see the formal launch of a new Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training, ADEPT, later this year.

ADEPT will equip individuals and organizations around the world with the tools to innovate, test, and scale policies and programs designed to fight poverty. This expansion of J-PAL’s capacity building work worldwide will empower a new generation with the capacity, ambition, and opportunity to improve the lives of billions of people experiencing poverty.

“I am delighted to commit ENSEA, as the first institution in Africa, in this brand new and promising initiative to build solid human capital for the evaluation of public policies, so that every penny is spent efficiently to benefit development and help reduce poverty,” said Dr. Hugues Kouadio, Director of ENSEA.

ADEPT will unfold as a network of academic institutions, governments, and multilateral organizations around the world working with J-PAL to offer high-quality training in rigorous impact evaluation and policy design. ADEPT will additionally aim to engage with governments and other learning institutions to empower civil servants and leadership to champion a culture of effective, evidence-based policymaking. 

While ADEPT partnerships will include an initial collaboration with J-PAL to establish institutional training programs, the goal is to ultimately lay a strong foundation that will enable these programs to thrive in the long term without direct J-PAL involvement.

“With demand for evidence continuing to grow, the world needs many more people with the capacity, ambition, and opportunity to make change,” said Esther Duflo, Co-Founder and Director of J-PAL and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “ADEPT represents a new vision to scale our capacity building work beyond the limits of what we can achieve alone, creating a global ecosystem of evidence-informed policymaking that will help transform how decisions are made and improve countless lives.”

George Richards, Director of Community Jameel, said: “ADEPT is a powerful new way for J-PAL to massively scale up its support for the worldwide movement of researchers and practitioners working to alleviate poverty through scientific evidence. With the need to expand this work as great as ever—in the face of climate change, conflict and other challenges—Community Jameel is supporting J-PAL to launch ADEPT later this year, and we are excited to see the ground laid for an ADEPT program in Côte d’Ivoire.”

The work ahead requires a truly collaborative effort to engage new audiences and partners, and work with existing J-PAL partners in new ways, to breathe life into this vision, help shape it, and put it into action. For more information or to explore ADEPT partnerships, contact J-PAL.