The Lab That Touched 600 Million Lives — and the Family Behind It

Before Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel agreed to fund a small team of economists at MIT who were running experiments on poverty alleviation, he asked them one question: “How many people’s lives could you touch in 10 years?” Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo came back with an answer — 100 million.

The lab they built together, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL, has since reached more than 600 million people across 80 countries. Banerjee and Duflo won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work there. Duflo became the youngest person and second woman to receive the prize.

Hassan Jameel at the 20th Anniversary

Speaking at J-PAL’s 20th anniversary celebration at MIT, Hassan Jameel reflected on the lab’s origins and the courage it took to build it. “Sometimes when we look back and see the Nobel Prize, seven offices around the world, hundreds of staff, affiliated professors, 600 million lives touched, it can be tempting to think that this was always going to turn out this way,” he said. “But the courage and the vision of that small group of people… are truly the bedrock of these towering achievements.” The work of J-PAL — and the broader ALJ story — is a thread running through three generations of Jameel family leadership.

What Community Jameel Does Now

Community Jameel, the international philanthropic organization Hassan serves as Vice Chairman, encompasses J-PAL and a wider range of initiatives in health, education, and climate. Its approach is grounded in evidence: programs are evaluated with randomized controlled trials, and funding follows the data.

Future plans include embedded policy labs in India, Egypt, and South Africa, as well as the European Social Inclusion Initiative. Hassan has described the organization’s mission as inseparable from ALJ’s commercial purpose: “The bottom line, alone, is not a purpose for a company anymore.”

Alongside the philanthropic work, Hassan serves on advisory boards at the University of Tokyo and MIT’s School of Engineering, reflecting a consistent commitment to the institutions and ideas that shaped his own formation.