Mehrab Ali (pictured below), who has been working with IPA Bangladesh for more than 9 years, helped IPA pivot to conducting phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allowed IPA Bangladesh to continue important research on refugees and migration, including in Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh (pictured above).

Hi John,

Today, on the last day of this tumultuous year, we’re sharing a two-part series on people behind the data at IPA. It’s also the last day to make a tax-deductible donation in 2020, so please consider making a gift if you are in a position to do so.
 

Mehrab Ali (pictured at left), who’s been working with IPA Bangladesh for more than 9 years, is one of dozens of data and methods experts who innovated over the last year to help IPA and the hundreds of researchers we work with gather accurate data for policy decisions during the pandemic.

When Bangladesh went into lockdown, Mehrab had the same concerns at home that everybody else has for their family, but an additional one he had was for the thousands of people he and other staff at IPA Bangladesh had been tracking for important studies about refugees, migration, and other pressing problems.

There was a heightened need to understand how people were doing in the face of the crisis, but the means to gather data—through complex face-to-face surveys—was cut off. Mehrab and colleagues had to quickly adapt to phone surveys without previous experience, and they worked and tested new modules rigorously for months.

 “The process of asking questions on the phone is different, but before you can do that, just finding the people when you can’t track them down in person is very challenging,” he explained. He came up with an innovative and fast way to train surveyors in far-flung areas with poor internet connections, and invented a software solution that ensured respondents were followed up with the same number of times and in the sequential order—the “geeky” work that helped us to pivot and innovate in a pandemic.

Good data on how people are managing through crises and how best to help them is always important, but this year it was especially critical. Please consider ending 2020 honoring the people who’ve worked tirelessly this year to support this work.

Thank you, and best wishes!

The IPA Team