Innovations for Poverty Action
@poverty_action
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We bring together researchers & decision-makers to evaluate poverty solutions & ensure evidence is used to improve lives. Join our team https://t.co/hcZV5F4Rma
Africa, Asia, & LAC
Joined March 2008
What are the coming innovations with the potential to improve lives at scale? Our sector teams have reviewed the evidence & today we’re sharing a new report highlighting 14 promising interventions “Best Bets: Emerging Opportunities for Impact at Scale”
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🚨Big announcement! 🚨.IPA, with a number of partners, is launching a research collaboration hub for development researchers working on COVID-19 [thread] 👇.
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Are you working on a research project that tracks the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis? IPA is putting together an online hub with projects, questionnaires, and datasets. Add yours here [corrected URL]:
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Morning of the conference and still waiting for three presenters to send in their slides
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Some yrs ago, our Peru office observed the graduates they were hiring tended to come from private universities, which offered the research training required for the jobs, but also served higher-income students. To build a more inclusive workforce they 1/2.
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🚨 Important new paper just out in Science Advances: What were the effects of 2020 COVID lockdowns and disruptions on households in lower income countries? .(From 26 co-authors on 3 continents!) .Summary/brief: Full Paper:
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Black lives matter. IPA stands in solidarity with those protesting police violence and systemic racism in the U.S. and abroad. We condemn violence against people engaged in peaceful protest and stand beside them for equality and justice.
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Bold new Unconditional Cat Transfer program from @cblatts.
Chicago folks: We’ve been fostering a kitten trio for the last two months and they are ready for adoption. We’ve fostered a lot of kittens. These are amazing. So friendly. Not only do they endure 24/7 manhandling by our kids, they come back for more. Reply or DM me if interested
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Congratulations to our founder Dr. @DeanKarlan on being named as @USAID Chief Economist. His expertise will be a major asset for both USAID & the countries they support. Read our #PressRelease:
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An enormous congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer from all of us at IPA! #NobelPrize.
BREAKING NEWS:.The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”. #NobelPrize
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Published today in Science, RCT of 600 villages and nearly 350,000 people in Bangladesh using behavioral techniques to triple mask wearing, which in turn reduced COVID. Ungated: As you may gather from the author list it was a huge collaboration, BUT 1/2
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Water spill at the office delights both statistics and Halloween fans
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Today marks 16 years since IPA's founding in @deankarlan's living room. Celebrating over 700 RCTs in 52 countries!
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A randomized controlled trial (N=341,830) conducted by IPA, @mushfiq_econ, @Jabaluck, doctors and mask engineers from @StanfordMed with Bangladesh health researchers and officials increased mask wearing by a lot, and the behavior maintained after the intervention ended
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Following Bill Gates and Elon Musk's example, we and .@JPAL want to give back, find 170 downloadable data sets on our dataverse hub:
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Fantastic opportunity to learn the basics of impact evaluation for fighting poverty, Billy Jack of @gui2de_GU has a new *free* EdX course: Impact Eval Methods in Low and Middle-Income countries .
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On Friday 12:00-12:50(CDT/Colombia)/13:00–13:50(EDT) catch the live stream of @cblatts presenting his work (w/@SantiagoTobon @BigBigBLessing and @gusduncan) at BREAD @cepr_org @STICERD_LSE @Trinity_TIME Conference on #DevEcon on gang rule in Medellin
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For running RCTs, we and @JPAL are now . instruments
Yep, you see where I'm going with this: We decided to use JPAL and IPA presence in a region to construct an instrument for whether a study is an RCT. Where and when JPAL-IPA open offices is endogenous to researcher demand, but once established, presence is highly persistent. .
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Nobody tell Lant.
Sure RCTs are great, but did you know they caused the mafia?. Lind’s 1747 RCT finds citrus fruits cure scurvy. Demand for Sicilian lemons booms. Mafia emerges to protect lemon profits.
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Amazing paper, showing effects on test scores based on how far in the month kids' families are from receiving their food stamps (@dynarski).
So I blew it and forgot the link to that food stamp study:
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No Black Panther spoilers here, except that if you have the opportunity to watch it with a bunch of political scientists, probably pass.
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Join us, @dnp_colombia & @PGN_COL TOMORROW/Weds for some fantastic talks, including w/Esther Duflfo (times in Colombia & Eastern US, registration page in Spanish, but these will be translated in English and Spanish). (more below 👇)
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A new site for students in low- and middle-income countries who'd like to sit in on remote-taught classes at US and European universities.
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We're trying to trick craft beer enthusiasts into learning about economics of poverty.
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Thanks to all our presenters for getting your slides in before the conference.
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From the Stata journal- New command baselinetable, creates handy summary stats tables for your baseline reports! Exports to Stata, Excel, CSV, etc to make it really easy to create better tables for your reports. In Stata net describe st0524, from(.
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New study out!: Many countries w/large unemployed youth populations use employment training programs to improve skills of the potential workforce. @AndrewZeitlin & Craig McIntosh w/IPA Rwanda, ran a head-to-head comparison between one such program and cash.
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We are launching an ambitious, multi-faceted new research agenda for #COVID19 response. Introducing Research for Effective COVID-19 Responses, or RECOVR:
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Valentine, I'm sitting here waiting for you to discover me.like relevant literature in an econ-adjacent field.#econvalentines.
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Daniel Kahneman: when making predictions beware, because confidence and accuracy are uncorrelated
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Happy #WomenInScienceDay! We're going to highlight some scholars today, starting with Esther Duflo's Nobel speech .She opens saying that behind great research are many people. @CarolNekesa5 & @KareninKenya were instrumental in starting IPA RCTs in Kenya
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Since May IPA has been running our RECOVR survey measuring the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Today we're releasing data from 9 countries on Dataverse!.🇨🇴🇬🇭🇸🇱🇧🇫🇨🇮🇲🇽🇷🇼🇿🇲🇵🇭.All surveys contained common sets of questions on health, livelihoods, education but-.
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Equally important is what happened next. Here @asifsaleh of @BRACworld (the worlds largest NGO), @MahaRehman1 & Reema Nanavaty explain:
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🚨🚨🚨3 rare positions open for coding whizzes- links here but we're going to tell you what's unique about them below in a quick 🧵 & please share!.Data Manager: Data Specialist: Data Associate:
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Call for Proposals! How has COVID affected women’s work, entrepreneurship, and skilling? .Which policies can address these challenges effectively? Deadline extended to Feb 12, pls share!
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PSA to non-academics: Monday's Columbus Day, but also the econ nobel, so if you want to chat with any economist friends, feel free to call them at 4:30AM, don't worry, their ringers will be on.
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This is what it looks like when an org cares more about solving problems than its image. Donors should respond and help @EvidenceAction be an example for other orgs to follow.
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We wouldn't put it quite so strongly, but we set out a strategic ambition several years ago to move beyond just RCTs to affect broader policy change: .
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Today, the cover of @ScienceMagazine features Dr. @salma_mousa_'s research, on using soccer to build social cohesion between Christians and Muslims in Iraq after ISIS. Supported by IPA and @JPAL, with funding from @DFID_RED_GCSD .
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IPA Congratulates 2019 Nobel Prize Winners Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer! . Full announcement:
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NEW Call for proposals for research on Peace and Recovery, including from COVID-19. Note the wide range of opportunities available including for early career scholars (Deadline Nov 20).Links below 👇 & please share! ./1
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Seriously, how do we not have a sponsorship deal yet?
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IPA is thrilled to be a part of this partnership to promote play-based, early learning solutions for children impacted by the humanitarian crises in East Africa #playmatters .
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You: A Ph.D.-level researcher with a passion for development, but who sometimes secretly wonders if one-off studies and incentives for publication lead the field to underinvest in measurement.Us: A development org with 750+ RCTs, more than 200 right now.
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Announcing IPA & @JPAL's new Displaced Livelihoods Initiative, a research fund generously supported by the @IKEAFoundation that will generate new evidence on livelihoods programs for displaced populations & host communities. Press release:
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We ripped off the graphic from @DaveEvansPhD, which we recommend as a good way to start any project.
If you’re a researcher, funder, or practitioner, this blog is for you! How to keep good research from dying a bad death: Strategies for co-creating research with impact - by Bridget Konadu Gyamfi &.Bethany Park @poverty_action
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🚨 Important new study out today🚨.First of its kind large randomized trial in a real world setting demonstrating impact of masking on COVID.
With dozens of researchers at Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and IPA and several other organizations, we ran a cluster randomized trial involving almost 350,000 people and 600 villages in Bangladesh to assess the impact of community masking on COVID.
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Upcoming webinar Feb 10th, 10AM Central US time, w/ @cblatts, @SantiagoTobon, @JGarciaG1 & @BarbaraSparrow Gang Rule: An Experiment in Countering Criminal Governance
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Amazing story of coming to understand gang leaders as civil servants here, a product of years of dedicated work (qual and quant) by academic researchers and local IPA staff in Medellin, Colombia.
Here's a story of unintended consequences, of academic theories and government policy gone wrong, of how damn hard it is to tackle organized crime, and of insights into what criminal organizations really want and do. It starts in Medellin. [Paper:
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Just posted, w/ Banerjee, @MichaelLFaye, @PaulFNiehaus, @SuriTavneet and the late Alan Krueger. IPA Kenya had finished 2yr data collection on an ongoing RCT of Universal Basic Income with nearly 15,000 people in 300 villages, when COVID hit-.
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From the IPA NYC office party secret Santa (via @peterpcarroll), best wishes for a normally distributed year
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NEW! How are parents doing in the COVID crisis? A survey of 61,000 parents in 3 Latin American countries by IPA and @the_IADB finds mothers, especially of young kids, with higher stress and psychological distress levels across the board
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New from @kyle_holloway and @sebchaskel: what have we learned about short-term pandemic response in Colombia from round 1 of the RECOVR survey?.
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ATTN Researchers: .IPA is accepting applications for funding on COVID-19 response, please share with colleagues!.With gratitude to @DFID_RED_GCSD for funding it.
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Webinar TOMORROW Monday June 8 with @drlisadcook:."The economic and social implications of racial disparities". From @PrincetonEcon, 12:30 Eastern US Time. Register:
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@economeager We and @JPAL have 190 public data sets on dataverse, not sure if we can figure out how to block just Rachael, in our new "fairly open science" movement.
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No kids want to talk about version control, but if you don't they'll just learn it on the street.
I admit to spying on my kid's @onedrive account. And now I know it's time to have "the talk" about how we name files in this family 😠
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Thank you Twitter for acquiescing to our demands for more space to discuss clustering standard errors (1/128).
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Now, IPA Exec Director Annie Duflo joins Esther Duflo & Carlos Scartascini talking about innovation in government at #Interruptor2020 .Some challenges to experimentation in gov: Not set up for small tests & changes, & change is often difficult for any large org
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Webinar now, @drlisadcook explains effect on violence on African-American economic output measured in innovation. Patents peaked in 1899 and never recovered. "Missing patents" equivalent to a medium-sized European country.
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IPA's Peace & Recovery Program, w/funding from @FCDOREDGCSD @OpenSociety, has become a major supporter of research on reducing crime, violence, and conflict. Our brief quickly summarizes several recent studies on crime and policing in Latin America 🧵.
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Join us, the @WorldBank, & other #FinancialInclusion leaders on January 12, 2023, at 10 AM ET to launch the 2021 #Findex Microdata. The #webinar will explore different ways the #Findex microdata can be used to equip policy & research. Register here→
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Made 3 low-cost changes to make these research jobs more accessible to students from different backgrounds, and by 2021 51% of staff were from public universities. In the post they offer 5 tips many organizations can use to make their workforce more inclusive. 2/2
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Where it all began:.
In the mid-1990s, Economic Sciences Laureate Michael Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful an experiment-based approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya. #NobelPrize.
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We are pleased to announce a new partnership with @researchincolor to increase the number of Black Ph.D. students & students of Color in economics & to amplify meaningful economic & policy research on & by individuals from these communities. Learn more
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We wanted to introduce you to one of the people behind IPA's data efforts, Joseph. (here he is waiting patiently for a farmer to come back from the fields in a @Cblatts study)
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@seema_econ For more failure confessions we recommend this series from the Development Impact Blog .
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At the office instead of valentines we give each other power calc reminder cards
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FYI any PIs working w/us passing through NYC are always welcome to grab some space at our co-working space (esp. students!) There's hot chocolate. (Plus you never know what conversations you'll have, Anne's already come up with a way to improve methods for the field).
Courtesy to @mosenkis spending a great day at @poverty_action NYC! They even have free hot chocolate 😊 #idealworkconditions.
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Good data collection is the backbone of what we do. Here’s Abdulai Bah sharing the story behind the data in Sierra Leone.
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Us trying to get PIs to send us their slides before the conference.
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If anybody wants to know how economists relax on the weekends, it's exactly how you think.
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IPA's Executive Director Annie Duflo & Chief Research and Policy Officer @radharajkotia talk about what we've learned about diversity and inclusion at IPA over the last year, and what we'll be doing to promote it in our offices in 22 countries:
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Ten years after implementing the Sustainable Transformation for Youth in Liberia (#STYL) program, the positive impacts persisted. Learn how low-cost cognitive-behavioral therapy (#CBT) changed the lives of young men in #Liberia: #MoreEvidenceLessPoverty
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We're hiring! Are you passionate, highly motivated, & dedicated to discovering and promoting effective solutions to poverty problems? Join us!.#Applynow #devjobs #Hiringnow
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Our followers are a strange mix of development economics enthusiasts and confused beer fans.
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A consortium of 26 authors recently published data from last spring's COVID disruptions, including 6 IPA-administered national samples from 8,672 households in 🇧🇫🇨🇴🇬🇭🇵🇭🇷🇼🇸🇱, for which we owe a huge 👏👏👏 to @sebchaskel .
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Acemoglu has put up a 569 page PDF book of his political economy class notes.
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In response to some inquiries, our Nairobi offices are near Riverside Drive in the broader neighborhood of the DusitD2 Hotel complex; we can confirm all of our staff are safe.
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🚨New opportunity for research funding on a critical topic 🚨.Today IPA is announcing new funding available under its Human Trafficking Research Initiative. Worldwide *25 MILLION* people are enslaved for the commercial gain of others.
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IPA is pleased to announce new seed funding for research into human trafficking. Small grants ($2.5-35k) inc. developing ideas, travel, pilots, partnership development. With leadership from @ceciliamo & @guygrossman & funding from @JTIP_State
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People who have negative stereotypes about economists should really follow Dina.
@harrissonpedro If you're going to be serious about doing the work I'll pay your tuition.
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We don't normally comment on domestic U.S. politics—it's not our area of expertise and we typically strive to be apolitical. But there's a difference between that and being deliberately blind.
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Q from @deankarlan: do people make too much about what nudges can do?.Kahneman: everybody is excited about being right on the direction of the hypothesis, but ignore the magnitude of the effect, which is often quite small, or comes with very high variance
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Two really interesting papers on measuring women's empowerment and decisionmaking
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Acemoglu has put up a 569 page PDF book of his political economy class notes.
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Tomorrow (Weds) AM! Join Stanford's @ImmigrationLab to hear about low-cost WhatsApp surveying w/@mercycorps & @LIRSorg. Researchers surveyed panels of thousands of refugees in Colombia and the U.S. - hear the how-to's
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@ryanbedwards @DinaPomeranz And feel free to use our and @JPAL_Global's data sets and replicate the analysis
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Welcome to our new Chief Research and Methods Officer @EduGlaze, who'll be working to coordinate and harness the power of the ~300 studies we have in progress to improve methods for the whole field!.
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If they'd just hacked at that a little more.
I post this Halloween image with a trigger warning to all academics.
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A friendly reminder to our colleagues in Finland getting your Ph.D.s DON'T FORGET TO ORDER YOUR DISSERTATION SWORD! .
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Great news out today! @BRACworld awarded $60M from TED's @TheAudaciousPrj to scale up the robust Ultrapoor Graduation approach to reach 21 Million more of the world's poorest!.
We’re proud to announce that our Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative has been named a 2020 @TheAudaciousPrj to scale #TheGraduationApproach in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa and help #21MillionMore escape extreme poverty. @TEDTalks
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