image: Jeffrey F. Rhoads, vice president for research at the University of Notre Dame.
Credit: University of Notre Dame
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded $75 million to a consortium of leading global institutions, including the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, to enhance the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs through research.
The Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE) partnership, led by the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, represents a historic investment by USAID over five years to inform its activities and programs with detailed evidence linking investments in agriculture, global health and economic growth to improvements in human lives and community well-being.
“We’re proud that the Pulte Institute has been selected to identify the most efficient and impactful programs to fight poverty and improve lives,” Vice President for Research Jeffrey F. Rhoads said of the award, announced this week. “Through PILCEE, Notre Dame looks forward to deepening our partnerships with researchers around the globe with the shared goal of providing sustainable interventions to end poverty, part of our University’s strategic framework.”
Through PILCEE, a worldwide network of more than 1,500 researchers — including more than 250 from low- and middle-income countries — will collaborate to guide USAID’s work by evaluating the impact of agency-funded programs and synthesizing findings from the growing evidence base. In doing so, PILCEE will generate insights for the global development community about the most economical ways to improve lives and promote growth.
The Pulte Institute offers a unique ability to support the work of the PILCEE effort, as demonstrated by its experience synthesizing evidence for USAID in large-scale efforts, including the $40 million Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education activity, focused on improving global education outcomes, and Expanding the Reach of Impact Evaluation, a $15.5 million multi-country effort to retrospectively assess the effectiveness of aid programming in areas from food security to peacebuilding.
“The Pulte Institute’s inclusion in this groundbreaking consortium underscores the Keough School’s and Notre Dame’s commitment to addressing global challenges through evidence-based solutions,” said Mary Gallagher, the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs. “Through this partnership, we will continue to advance research that directly informs practical solutions to poverty.”
In its work on behalf of the consortium, the Pulte Institute will connect USAID requests for research, evidence synthesis, evaluations and costing analyses with appropriate engagement opportunities and academic expertise from the Global North and South through an established network of local partnerships.
“Cost-effectiveness is a crucial area for USAID — and for all of us — to be investigating right now because there are limited resources that we can spend in international development and humanitarian aid,” said Danice Brown Guzmán, associate director of evidence and learning for the Pulte Institute and a lead researcher on the Expanding the Reach of Impact Evaluation project. “Being able to make strong, rigorous comparisons between different programs or ways of doing development work provides you with an understanding of which approaches are going to lead to the most impact with your investment.”
PILCEE will prioritize evidence from randomized controlled trials, an approach recognized by the Nobel Prize committee as transformational in understanding promising solutions to global poverty. The Center for Effective Global Action and other consortium partners — including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Innovations for Poverty Action and the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa, among others — are experts in measuring program impact. Collectively, the consortium has produced, analyzed and translated more than 1,800 randomized controlled trials in nearly 100 countries over the past two decades, in addition to extensive research translation and dissemination work.