One was that to do the field work that we were doing, that we were,
had, had just started doing really, required a lot of time in the field.
And a lot of expertise that we don't get trained in as economists or
other disciplines either.
Then it's about managing people.
It's about managing surveys,
design of surveys, coordination with organizations, to setup randomized trials.
And this requires a lot of time and effort, and
skills that that you acquire, and you want to keep using.
And so the, the typical model at that time was to use graduate students,
to get them involved in the project.
But then it's, every year it's like a new flow of people.
It would be much better and much higher quality work if we had an organization
that was trained and skilled in helping to support this type of field work.
So that was the first gap that I felt like was, existed and so we needed an entity.
And the, and the other thing we realized is that this gap is,
shouldn't sit within any one university because we want to be able to provide this
type of support to researchers at other universities.
So this is why we created it outside of, outside of the university.
The second reason for it was the, the,
the gap that lies at the heart of our incentives as academics.
So my incentives as an academic is to write an academic paper,
get it nicely published, and move on to some other paper.
I don't have the academic incentive to work on the policy side.
Not nearly as much at least.
I mean not to, sit down with organizations that are in that space and help show them
and, you know, this is what we've learned and this is how you can use it.
And in some cases that might actually require incubating the actual idea
at large scale to see how it works.
So the second motivation for the organization was to work on that policy
sides, to make sure that the knowledge doesn't just get created and
get published and then we just kind of hope that people read it.
>> Right, right.
>> But to actually think about, okay, what are the steps we have to take,
to make this take this to action?
Do we have to do it ourselves?
Do we need to bring it to government?
Do we need to bring it to other organizations?
Who do we do that with?
>> And IPA has now become quite a large organization, right?
>> Yeah, we.
>> Quite a number of people.
>> We have around 1000 employees.
About half of those are full time long term employees and
about half of them are short term hire for management of a particular project,
like a survey or something of this nature.
>> And how many of them living in the United States or other affluent countries?
>> Not too many. Most of them are in the, in the field.
So I think in the United States we have something in the ballpark
of 70 to 80 employees.
And the rest are all international, living overseas.
We have we have about 18 countries that we have focused on.
So one thing that we have found for sure is that our im, ability to impact
policy is much stronger when we have a long-term presence in the country.
>> So you're employing the local people native to that country and they're.
>> Employing, employing locals and
also just building long-term relationships with local policy makers, donors, NGOs.
So that it's not just going in, working on one study and
then moving onto some other country.
So we have actually done projects in 51 countries.
>> Right.
>> But we're focused on 18 in terms of our development and
our efforts to influence policy.
