J-PAL executive director Iqbal Dhaliwal and senior policy associate Michael Hou call for rigorous impact evaluations of AI in the social sector in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “To inform our future decisions, we need to know what works and what doesn’t when we try to infuse our existing social programmes with a new general-purpose technology like AI or design new programmes based on it.
“Thanks to more than two decades of building the field of rigorous impact evaluations in partnership with implementers, donors and local communities, we can shape the direction of AI by learning from past evaluations and designing evidence-enhanced AI programmes from the start.”