Project Partner Profile: J-PAL

This is a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a network of 70 affiliated professors around the world who are united by their use of Randomized Evaluations (REs) to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation. J-PAL’s mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence.

J-PAL is the primary grantee and the project’s principal investigators and are designing and conducting the monitoring and evaluation for the facilities. They will test and scientifically evaluate the project and its various experiments using a randomised-controlled-trial methodology.

Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) have become the gold standard for clinical trials. The key distinguishing feature of the usual RCT is that study subjects, after assessment of eligibility and recruitment, but before the intervention to be studied begins, are randomly allocated to receive one or other of the alternative treatments under study.

For Project Sammaan, J-PAL will randomly allocate certain interventions to facilities in the host communities in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. These features include things such as bathing stalls and Operations & Maintenance models. The effectiveness of each of these interventions will be determined by the community’s adoption rates of the facilities and, by extension, their success in diminishing instances of open-defecation.