NEW VIDEO
 Most innovative and effective industries spend a lot on research and development (R&D), but in the international development world, it’s less than 0.5 percent. In this new 3-minute video, we share how investing in research on what works and what doesn't is critical for ensuring limited resources actually make a difference, and how initial investments can ripple out to make a
difference for millions.
Watch the video here.
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FEATURED RESULTS
 Researchers: Lorenzo Casaburi, Michael Kremer, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Ravindra Ramrattan
The adoption of agricultural practices that can increase yields, like fertilizer application, remains low among smallholder farmers in many low- and middle-income contexts. While traditional agricultural extension aims to ensure farmers receive and act upon timely information to improve their agricultural yields, these efforts are often costly and time-consuming. In Western Kenya, researchers evaluated an SMS intervention whereby a large-agribusiness sent farmers with whom they contracted timely reminders on agricultural tasks to be completed. The SMS intervention was a cost-effective means of increasing yields, farmer revenue, and company profits. However, researchers found that the SMS intervention had no impact on yields when tested a second time on a different sample one year later.
Read the full summary here and the working paper here.
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FEATURED BLOG
 By Mehrab Ali, Jeffrey Mosenkis, and Aimara Sanchez
IPA’s ability to collect high-quality data rests on the quality of our dedicated staff in the field. Behind every number, every result, is a painstaking process that involves traveling, searching, interviewing, entering, storing (then repeating), and eventually, analyzing and publishing. In 2020, 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. In this post, we share the stories of Mehrab and Aimara, two IPA staff who worked this year in different corners of the globe to help us gather high-quality data.
Read the full blog post here.
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