University of Cape Town

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)

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.