J-PAL Latin American and the Caribbean

J-PAL LAC is a regional office of MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) hosted at the Pontificia Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Chile.

J-PAL LAC works throughout the region conducting randomized evaluations, building partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helping partners scale up effective programs.
Our research team works with J-PAL's network of affiliated professors to measure the impact of social programs and policies in LAC. Through online and in-person courses, we train implementers, policymakers, donors, and advocates on how to generate and use rigorous evidence. Our policy team works to institutionalize this learning and disseminate research results to governments and other partners.

J-PAL LAC is currently launching an Anti-Racism Fund to focus on interventions aimed at reducing hiring discrimination, police brutality, healthcare access, maternal and infant health, as well as policies that address individual biases. In Brazil, J-PAL LAC is expanding the Jobs and Opportunities Initiative to focus on issues particular to the region. This includes deep partnerships with individual implementing organizations to help them use evidence from elsewhere to inform their program design, as well as build the internal capacity necessary to conduct high-quality evaluations.

In the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Central America, J-PAL LAC is supporting the adaptation and scale of interventions aimed at increasing secondary school attendance and graduation rates through providing timely information to families about returns to education.

J-PAL is a research and policy center in the Economics department at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. J-PAL works with regional offices around the world, hosted at leading local universities in Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, North America (also at MIT), South Asia, and Southeast Asia.