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Uzma Sulaiman and Abhijit Banerjee launch J-PAL's Water, Air and Energy Lab in Cape Town

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Uzma Sulaiman and Abhijit Banerjee launch J-PAL's Water, Air and Energy Lab in Cape Town
14 March 2024
Cape Town, South Africa

Overview

[TEXT]
[VIDEO EMBED ABHIJIT]

[VIDEO EMBED UZMA SULAIMAN]

Transcript

Uzma Sulaiman: Thank you Mayor Jordan Hill Lewis, Professor Banerjee, Professor Duflo, guests speakers, ladies and gentlemen. It's a privilege to be able to address you at this timely and important event. I'd like to thank J-PAL Africa and, of course, the City of Cape Town for hosting us today. I'm honoured to be addressing you today, especially in a city that I used to call home and will always hold a very special place in my heart.

As you can all see, Cape Town is an incredibly unique city, not only for its natural beauty and the diverse community, but also as a cultural centre across the continents as well. But like any city, it faces challenges when it comes to access to energy and also the future challenges that climate change will bring.

And I think it's a testament to the city and the city officials that they're choosing to face these challenges head on and take a science-based approach at that. And I'm proud that Community Jameel will be a part of this journey with J-PAL and the city of Cape Town to launch the Water, Air and Energy lab that'll improve access to clean air, water and reliable energy for almost 60 years.

So you already heard about the lab from Kelsey, and you're going to hear a lot more about it as well from my fellow speakers, but I thought I would focus my very short remarks on the importance of event vesting in evidence informed policy and why Community Jameel decided to co found the project. J-PAL Air and Water and Energy labs here in Cape Town, but also as you saw in India and in Egypt as well.

So as Hugh mentioned, Community Jameel is a global independent organisation that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. We are a philanthropic organisation with our chairman, Mr. Mohamed Jameel from a family that comes from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. And climate change is a very important part of our priorities.

And we will continue to invest in science to help tackle these challenges and achieve impact at scale. So we've made a lot of investments in advancing science across the globe. We've financed It's groundbreaking research, and importantly, we've strengthened capacity to ensure that research is locally developed and takes into consideration traditional knowledge.

But it's always critical that that research doesn't just stay in an academic institution, but that it impacts communities, especially the most vulnerable. And policy is obviously the best way to achieve that. Better policies result in stronger and more equitable decision and a better allocation of resources.

Evidence and data as you can see from what Kelsey presented they can ensure equitable access to electricity and can help measure the health benefits of increased safe water adaptation. And nobody does this better and exemplifies these principles than J-PAL. It's been over 20 years now since Community Jameel made its first investment in J-PAL, and it's incredible that they've been over the past 20 years been able to reach 600 million people across the globe.

And so with that, we are so proud to be continue to that association with J-PAL and launch the Water, Air and Energy Lab. Climate change and its impact on communities are continuing to evolve, and every day we read about research, and That uncovers new threats to livelihoods and ecosystems. So integrated government labs like this one that we are launching today are critical to protecting the most vulnerable, but most importantly, ensuring that policies continue to be updated and they continue to evolve as we better understand the impacts of climate change on communities.

Our ambition at Community Jameel is to grow these government partnerships and to strengthen capacity within government and also the systems that surround it. And our mission to advance science based approaches so that people can live healthier lives. So with that thank you so much I look forward to the rest of the evening and also to meeting many of you at the reception.

Thank you so much.

Abhijit Banerjee: Thank you very much for having me here. Mayor Jordan and there is Uzma from Community Jameel, our friends from, from J-PAL, our friends, our friends of friends, our friends from the city government and and anybody else who happens to have been here. I'm delighted. This is really a delightful moment.

It's the kind of moment, that this should happen more often. When it happens, it's a privilege to be able to speak about them, because they represent, in a sense, the fruition of lots of aspirations that we have in J-PAL. There are moments when those aspirations actually converge on a point like this, and I'm so delighted to be able to be part of that, this celebration for that.

I got to randomise control trials and this work kind of in a half a sleep state. And that's, if you know me, that's unusual. I'm mostly half asleep. But and the point is that in some sense, I wasn't particularly, directly aware of the potential implications that this kind of work might have had when, when we started this.

At this point of time, in the mid 90s, I realised that I really didn't know anything. I was teaching development economics at MIT to brilliant students, some of whom are here, students at Harvard and MIT, they're brilliant. I was telling them all kinds of things, and I didn't know anything.

Almost anything. And I didn't know meaning, I knew that, for example, schools that have better grades were, had, you know, better infrastructure or the children had, you know, textbooks. But I didn't know whether that's the reason they were doing better or not. And so in some sense, and that's the key question.

The question, we know the correlations, the question is what is cause, what is causative? And, and to be honest, I realised And I wasn't, I'm not being modest. I think I really realised that I didn't know anything. When I talked to policymakers. I would say something, but I realised that they could say, well, why do you believe that and not the opposite?

And that conversation, I think, in some sense, got us into trying to do randomised control trials, to have some answers that, at least for a first approximation, I'm not subject to that complicated conversation about, it's my guess or your guess, guess. And that, that eventually persuaded us to start the Poverty Action Lab. We started Poverty Action Lab with I think 8 affiliates, who had some total of maybe 10 randomised control trials that had been either done or were on the way. Now we have 1, 600 randomised controlled trials and actually many more than that, which we don't actually know till they kind of come to some fruition and we have 900 affiliates of one form or the other. That's we're, we're just in a very different place. And I think a lot of that has happened through collaborations in with institutions. J-PAL is a center at MIT. We have basically friendly centers like the one that's called J-PAL Africa, which is based in Cape Town.

It's really a center at the University of Cape Town and it was built with, would not have been possible to do without the help of people at the University of Cape Town. We are very grateful to Murray Leibbrandt as the, as the leader of SALDRU, to Laura Poswell, who was our director for 10 years and, and executive director for 10 years and who worked with SALDRU to make it happen.

Similar stories you could tell about all the other centers as well. We really live off the intellectual environment provided by the University of Cape Town. We are very grateful to the administration at the University of Cape Town. Eddy came to my talk yesterday. I know that maybe Jeff Murugan, who's the additional vice chancellor for research, will be here, maybe here today. All of their support is critical to where we are.

Now, one of the things that support has allowed us to do is to build a portfolio of research.

And in some ways that portfolio of research is where I think naively we thought we would be. Because, naively, because we thought that, well, once we do the research, it's just going to be there. The truth will be out there and people will just adopt the truth. And sometimes it does happen.

Sometimes when it is clear question, there's already a debate. For example, I think the one example - Pascaline Dupas is actually in Cape Town - her work with Jessica Cohen on the fact that, when people are given free insecticide treated bed nets, they use it and malaria goes down.

That was a, that was a great example of the kind of randomised controlled trial that really changes policy because largely there was a debate about that. But in many cases, what we have is that there is a distance between that and the question, policy question that people are asking.

And that's where a lab like this one steps in. It steps in because you can do the best research possible, but if there isn't really a sharp question that it directly answers, then people say, "Okay, well, but what do you have to tell me about what I want to know?" And what we've since learned is that this series of labs that we have set up with governments, in Peru with the government on education in the state of Tamal Nadu in India with the government on a variety of topics, largely to do with health, and many other places in the world working with governments.

What it does, it gives us an opportunity to embed ourselves into those conversations. So that when we hear, we don't come to people and say, we have this evidence, use it. We come to say, with the understanding, people have other priorities and it's when we listen to them that we learn what the questions are that we need to answer. It gives an opportunity of seat at the table.

I think the advantage of this approach of building labs is precisely that we get to have a seat at a table where people who are doing, actually busy, who are busy lives, who are doing important things, who are some part of the way towards asking a question. We can talk to them. We can try to see what we know or what we could know by doing an experiment, could somehow contribute to what they're interested in.

And we've been doing this, as I said, formerly as a lab in Indonesia, for example, we haven't functioned as formally as a lab, but we've been collaborating with the government for 15 years now.

But the government comes when the government has a policy change in mind, we get often a message saying, we are going to change this policy in the near future. If you have something to say this is your chance. And then, then sometimes we have something useful to say, sometimes we don't.

But at least it gives us a moment – it focuses the brain like nothing else. When you say, "In six months, the policy will change. It's going to affect the lives of 220 million people. What do you want to do about it?" It's really an excellent way to get interested in the right question.

And that's, I think, the value of an enterprise like this. That's why, I think, I think of these labs as being kind of the pinnacle of our success. When we are able to have these labs, we have, we are put ourselves in a position to have, get into those conversations, which eventually give value to the work we do.

And it's really an extreme privilege to be able to be part of this launch. I will honestly say I did nothing to make it happen. And so it's, it's especially delightful when somebody else does the work and I can get to take some credit for it. Thank you, Kelsey. Thank you, Community Jameel. Thank you, city of Cape Town for making it happen. It's really wonderful moment. You also want to say that this is about policy, but it's also about research in a sense. Each of these labs, eventually what they do, is help change the whole world.

When people ask us, "Well, why should we take it seriously?" Part of what we do is we drop names. We say we work with the government of Cape Town, and that name dropping works because people say, "Yeah, yeah. You're a professor, but what professors know?" But if you say, we work with the government city of Cape Town and we worked on this particular policy change in Indonesia, then people take us seriously.

And so it is about valorising research, but it's also about launching new research. I think eventually this is an opportunity for us to also think new thoughts. Every research opportunity, however policy directed, eventually turns out to be a slightly different thought. It's not just a practical question. It is also a question that is deep often, and in ways which we don't anticipate, but eventually allow us to frame things that we wouldn't have otherwise. It helps us answer questions that are not just valuable in Cape Town, but will be valuable everywhere in the world. People will use the research that we do from here and take it elsewhere.

The other thing that I think that 900 affiliates didn't come about by some act of academic will. It came out of the fact that in the process of doing the work you attract people.

People are interested in the work that's, because the work is useful, because it is changing lives. You attract people who are both the most committed and the most serious. And, and those people eventually do other research and that's how our network grows. In particular I hope that this process, at this moment will actually give a fillip to something we're trying to do, which is to create a network of African researchers who will work on African problems.

I think that the African Scholars Programme in J-PAL will get a huge boost from the fact that now there are opportunities to work on research on important topics in Africa. That also is one of the great privileges that we get from this partnership.

I hope I have given you a sense of why we are excited about it. I hope you are excited about it and thank you very much.

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