The BRAC-CEGA Learning Collaborative

Established in 2012, the BRAC-CEGA Learning Collaborative (BCLC) is a partnership between BRAC, a development organization known for the effectiveness of its anti-poverty interventions, and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a network of leading university researchers and academics headquartered at UC Berkeley. The BCLC aims to institutionalize the use of rigorous evaluation in the design and delivery of BRAC programs in order to  generate robust evidence that ensures BRAC’s development programs are grounded in and yield impact. In order to achieve its goals, the Collaborative has focused on three main complementary activities: 1) Building the research capacity of BRAC researchers and program managers; 2) Matchmaking BRAC and CEGA researchers to foster potential research collaborations; and 3) Funding joint research studies on the cost-effective delivery of anti-poverty programs.

The BRAC-CEGA Learning Collaborative is generously supported by IDRC, CRI,  and an  anonymous donor.

BRAC

Established in Bangladesh in 1972, BRAC is a global leader in creating opportunity for the world’s poor. It is known for cost-effective, evidence-based poverty innovations in extremely poor, conflict-prone and post-disaster settings. BRAC provides a suite of social and economic empowerment programs serving an estimated 130 million people in 11 countries in Asia and Africa, including education, healthcare, microfinance, girls’ empowerment, agriculture, human and legal rights, socially responsible businesses, a bank, a university, and the world’s largest mobile money platform. It is a highly innovative and learning-focused organization, with a stated goal of generating lessons that other development agencies can replicate at scale. To this end, BRAC’s leadership has endorsed the use of rigorous impact evaluation in the design and delivery of its programs.

CEGA

The Collaborative is administered by the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a center of excellence in development research based at the University of California (UC), in coordination with BRAC researchers. The Center for Effective Global Action designs and tests solutions for the problems of poverty, generating actionable evidence for policy-makers in less developed countries. Using rigorous field trials, behavioral experiments, and tools from data science, CEGA measures and maximizes the impacts of economic development programs throughout the world.

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