The Poverty Reduction, Social Protection and Employment Research Programme (PROSPER) tackles barriers to employment growth in low- and middle-income countries.
Launched in 2025 and anchored at the Blavatnik School, PROSPER is a collaboration between world-leading researchers and governments and NGOs in South Africa and Kenya, seeking to develop evidence-based interventions which can be delivered at scale to increase hiring and improve job quality.
Many firms struggle to expand, while capable jobseekers from disadvantaged backgrounds face steep barriers entering formal work. Welfare systems often reach too few or fail to help recipients transition to sustainable livelihoods. PROSPER tests scalable, evidence-based solutions – from smarter recruitment and job search tools to digitally enabled income support – to generate measurable gains for workers, firms, and economies.
Support
The PROSPER programme is a multi-country collaboration of researchers from the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE), University of Oxford; the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; the University of Warwick; Duke University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Berkeley; Peking University; the RAND Corporation; the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Africa; the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics; and Research on the Economics of Migration, Integration and Trade (REMIT).