University of Cape Town
For Establishing A Unit To Promote Impact Evaluations Of Poverty Reduction Programs
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Amount$1,000,000
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Program
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Date Awarded7/19/2010
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Term36.0 Months
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Type of SupportProject
Overview
The University of Cape Town is one of the premier African research and training institutions and is already a key Hewlett Foundation partner for the Population Program. Taking advantage of UCT's in-house expertise and collaborative relationships with researchers throughout sub-Saharan Africa, this new grant would establish a unit at UCT to build African ability to conduct impact evaluations of social programs and to use the results to influence policy decisions. The model for the new unit is the Hewlett Foundation grantee MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the premier entity devoted to reducing poverty by generating evidence on what works through randomized evaluations of poverty reduction programs. At UCT, the new unit would be known as J-PAL Africa, the Africa regional affiliate of the J-PAL network. The goal of J-PAL Africa is to make social programs in sub-Saharan Africa more effective by ensuring that policymakers and the public have access to rigorous evidence about which social interventions are most successful and cost-effective. Making decisions in this way helps ensure that development resources are expended with greater accountability for both impact and value for money.
About the Grantee
Grantee Website
www.uct.ac.za
Address
University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Western Cape, 7700, South Africa
Grants to this Grantee
for J-PAL Africa HR planning
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab for Africa (J-PAL Africa), based at the University of Cape Town, works to ensure that policymaking in Africa is informed by rigorous evidence. This grant will help J-PAL Africa hire an HR specialist to benchmark salaries across the African countries where they have staff to help them create equitable and competitive salary bands and benefit packages. (Strategy: Evidence-Informed Policymaking)
for improving the lives of African citizens by ensuring policy is informed by evidence
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab for Africa (J-PAL Africa), based at the University of Cape Town, works to ensure that policymaking in Africa is informed by rigorous evidence. This grant will help J-PAL Africa bridge the gap between research, policy, and practice by ensuring that evidence informs policy decisions, supporting more Africans to conduct and understand impact evaluations, and helping local institutions to design and scale evidence-informed interventions and policies. (Strategy: Evidence-Informed Policymaking)
for support of the Centre of Actuarial Research's (CARe) population science training program
Although the sub-Saharan African population projects to double in the next forty years, the African continent continues to lack adequate vital registration systems needed to accurately generate information about births, deaths, and other life events for development policy and budgets. A grant to the University of Cape Town would support the Centre for Actuarial Research (CARe), the only African institution currently training population scientists to use demographic estimation techniques to overcome these poor data systems and convey population data for policy. Through its partnership with the Foundation, CARe supports vulnerable junior scientists from as many as fifteen different African countries to develop skills in technical demography. These scholars move on to research positions in their home governments and research institutes across Southern and Eastern Africa.
