C4ED congratulates Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for the acknowledgement of their hard and groundbreaking work! The three researchers from MIT and Harvard University were awarded the Nobel Prize “for their experimental approach in alleviating global poverty.” Having founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) in 2003, researchers around Banerjee adapted the techniques of randomized clinical trials from medicine to concepts useful for impact evaluations of public programs to reduce poverty in developing countries.
C4ED is officially affiliated with JPAL and is one of the few organizations in Europe that has been working with the same rigorous methods to evaluate development programs worldwide. We believe that the acknowledgement of the Nobel Prize winners‘ hard work will have a lasting impact on our work at C4ED. It will lend credibility to the rigor of our research, help us strengthen the clients’ trust in the methods we use and convince the implementing partners of the importance of this work. Their hard work amending their implementation plans to control for spill-over effects, to include a control group and/or treatment arms, their openness to rigorously test new approaches to alleviate poverty and to provide access to monitoring systems in order to learn from successful programs does eventually pay off. We thank the Nobel laureates for helping us to establish the trust we need to achieve a greater goal. We send our best wishes to the three laureates and to colleagues at JPAL, and are looking forward to continuing to contribute to making an impact in alleviating global poverty.