Mission Statement
GPRL accelerates poverty reduction by generating frontier research and creating public goods (data, methods, and syntheses) that enable others to design, test, and turn evidence into action.
Vision Statement
A world where reliable evidence guides decisions, making systems more efficient and equitable, and expanding opportunities for people to escape poverty and thrive.
GPRL Pillars
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Drive Frontier Research.
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Advance Research Methods.
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Aggregate Global Evidence.
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Increase Aid Effectiveness.
How We Do This
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Transparent, AI-enabled research operations. We build partner-compatible tools and open-science workflows: reproducible pipelines, automated quality assurance, AI-assisted coding, and shared data dictionaries. We publish our playbook as an evolving resource, updated as we adopt new tools and learn from others.
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Cultivate talent systematically. We provide structured onboarding, skill-building, mentorship, and career support, and create meaningful roles for Northwestern undergraduate, master's, and PhD students through paid research positions, field and internship placements, and class-linked projects.
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Collaborate. We grow strategic partnerships that extend our capacity, enable mutual learning, and multiply impact, seeding multidisciplinary teams that start at Northwestern.
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Communicate for uptake. We make our products easy to use and act on, testing with users and iterating through briefs, dashboards, and webinars, and reviewing usage quarterly to keep improving.
Guiding Values
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Public Goods Mindset. We share openly and reward replication and null results, including analysis of unpublished studies and datasets.
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Scientific Rigor with Humility. We expose every step of the research-to-action pipeline to scrutiny and learn from failure.
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Partnership First. We co-create with LMIC scholars, IPA, CEGA, J-PAL, the World Bank, CGD, and others to push the frontier together.
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Interdisciplinary Approach. We link economics with computer science, statistics, psychology, anthropology, business, engineering, and public health, starting on the Northwestern campus.
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Actionability. We deliver evidence in practitioner-friendly formats, such as scorecards, procurement templates, and dashboards, on timelines that matter.