UC Berkeley

Strategies to improve women’s health and family welfare must address challenges at multiple scales—on an individual level as well as households, communities, institutions, and markets. The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the University of California’s premier center for research on global development, plans to establish the Reproductive Health Innovation Initiative (RI2) to spur the design of behavioral, social, and market interventions that strengthen reproductive health outcomes. RI2 will focus on improving outcomes for low-income households in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In collaboration with innovative NGOs and public service providers, CEGA researchers will develop low-cost, scalable interventions that integrate insights from behavioral economics and economic theory with rigorous evaluation techniques. The Initiative is envisioned as a multi-year program. This grant would support the first phase, which will include three key activities: (1) map the barriers faced by women in low-resource settings and identify interventions that are known to address these barriers to highlight key knowledge gaps and set research priorities; (2) administer competitive grants for researchers to design, prototype, and pilot evaluation of new interventions; and (3) organize a matchmaking conference to introduce CEGA researchers to practitioners to facilitate new research partnerships.