The initiative is founded on the recognition that despite availability of reproductive health and family planning services in most developing countries, low-income and marginalized individuals often are unable to achieve their desired reproductive outcomes. Challenges can include procrastination, misaligned incentives for health care providers, and problems with intra-household bargaining.
What we Do
Behavioral constraints, such as myths and misinformation, choice overload, procrastination, social pressure, and status quo bias, can prevent families from achieving their optimal reproductive outcomes. BERI researchers partner with service providers to identify such constraints, design interventions to overcome them, and evaluate the effectiveness of the evaluations.
Our Approach
Our evaluations focus on how to overcome salient challenges common to practitioners across many settings, where there is currently a gap in the evidence. Our investigators aim to isolate, understand, and disseminate the generalizable features of a particular program or policy. In this way, the results from one evaluation can benefit many. Ultimately our researchers’ results will reach a wide array of actors – NGOs, government agencies, policymakers and donors – who can scale up workable interventions well beyond the immediate scope of the evaluation in order to improve the lives of women and their families throughout the developing world.
BERI 