One year later, the world is in a very different place. The World Bank projects that COVID-19 could push 150 million more people into extreme poverty. Meanwhile, the economic downturn means governments are slashing aid budgets.

Ensuring that limited funds are used effectively to tackle poverty has never been more critical. This is why IPA matters now more than ever. And this is why IPA is leveraging our reach with 57 projects on 4 continents, informing 30+ government ministries' policy responses to COVID-19. These include:

Are people following social distancing guidelines? If not, what can be done? In densely packed Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in April, we found three-quarters of the people we were tracking had gone to a religious gathering in the previous week. With this information, the government began working with religious leaders to help share COVID-safety messaging, and we are embarking on new work to evaluate ways to increase mask usage.
To what extent do cash transfers shield households from the impacts of the crisis? We’ve run studies on giving cash to the poor, and now that governments need to get cash out to lots of people very quickly, many lessons we've learned are doubly important. We’re working with several governments to find and help the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of the newly poor.
How can governments ensure remote learning reaches kids and prevent kids from dropping out of school? With schools closed, our government partners in Peru need to know if their TV, radio, and internet remote-learning tools are working. They are also quickly scaling up a program we’d already shown prevents dropouts.

As we reflect back on the past year, Esther’s words that “It shouldn’t be about ideology, it shouldn’t be about intuition” but rather about evidence, ring more true than ever.