The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center that works to reduce poverty by ensuring that policies are based on scientific evidence. Drawing on a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL evaluates the impact of poverty reduction activities with the aim of improving the quality and ultimately the effectiveness of development and poverty reduction policies. A wide range of programs are evaluated. By 2020, the Poverty Action Lab and its collaborating researchers had conducted 1073 randomized evaluations in 90 countries.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab was founded in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The co-founders, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and their long-time collaborator Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 for their pioneering approach to fighting global poverty.

Dr. Igor Asanov, who will be part of the J-PAL research network as an "Invited Researcher", is a Senior Researcher at INCHER. He represents the research area of evidence-based science and innovation policy. He is also a member of the research group "Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship" at the Department of Economics at the University of Kassel.

The fight against poverty through scientific knowledge and sustainable development through innovative (digital) education and training are at the top of his agenda. In 2019, together with Thomas Astebro, Guido Buenstorf, Bruno Crépon, David Mckenzie, Francisco Flores, Mona Mensmann and Mathis Schulte, he received the prestigious Path to Scale Award from Innovations for Poverty Action. The Showing Life Opportunities (SLO) project, for which Asanov and colleagues were honored in 2019, investigates the effectiveness of psychology-based online courses to promote innovative entrepreneurship and scientific careers. Dr. Igor Asanov continues to pursue this research program. Together with the INCHER team - Anastasyia-Mariya Asanov (Noha) and Guido Buenstorf - he has adapted and tested an individualized WHO self-help training to improve the mental health of refugees for online use. With the same INCHER team, he has just received a grant from the INCHER Innovation Research Fund to support a successful intervention in socio-emotional learning (SEL) education programs among 58,000 students in Vietnam - a randomized control trial conducted together with a team from the World Bank (Quy-Toan Do and Hanan Jacoby).

Dr. Asanov himself says about the invitation: "J-PAL is the leading global research network in my field that conducts randomized impact evaluations. I am honored to have been invited to join the J-PAL Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) research network as a researcher and am very excited to be invited and to contribute my expertise and interest to the excellent work of the research network."

More information can be found here:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216686120

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39481277/

https://www.igorasanov.com/

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