Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director of J-PAL, addressed the HELP Commission in Washington, DC on March 12th about how U.S. aid agencies could improve their effectiveness by generating and responding to rigorous evidence about what works. The HELP Commission (whose full name is Helping to Enhance the Livelihoods of People around the Globe), is a bipartisan commission with members appointed by the President and congressional leaders. In the words of Congressman Frank Wolf, who established the Commission, its objective is to “help our nation do a better job of helping those who need it most.”

Dr. Glennerster’s main message was that aid could be made much more effective if there was more rigorous evidence about what works and investments were made in line with the evidence. Drawing a distinction between process evaluations that need to be done in all projects and rigorous impact evaluations that accurately identify how a project changed the lives of those it sought to help, she suggested that agencies focus their impact evaluation resources on some high-quality, randomized evaluations that are designed to answer the most important questions facing an agency.