USAID - the United States overseas aid agency - has announced an historic USD 75 million investment in J-PAL and 9 consortium partners (including the International Rescue Committee) to conduct rigorous evaluations of USAID’s global poverty reduction programmes. The consortium will “leverage a Nobel Prize-winning approach to guide the fight against global poverty” — referring to the 2019 Nobel prize awarded to J-PAL co-founders Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee and their longtime collaborator Michael Kremer.