Notre Dame institute joins group studying how to combat poverty
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The Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame is among a group of 10 organizations to receive a $75 million federal grant to help determine the most economical ways to fight poverty.
The United States Agency for International Development awarded the five-year grant to the Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence partnership, Notre Dame said.
Led by the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, the partnership will assess how investments in agriculture, global health and economic growth alleviate poverty.
“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 Rhoads said in a news release. “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.”
A network of more than 1,500 researchers, including more than 250 from low- and middle-income countries, will collaborate in evaluating the impact of agency-funded programs, the university said. The other eight members of the partnership are the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, CARE, Innovations for Poverty Action, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa, Save the Children, and UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
The partnership aims to prioritize the measurement of how much programs cost in addition to their impact, UC Berkeley said. Doing so will allow USAID and other agencies to compare different programs more easily and determine which ones are the “best buys.”
“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. “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.”