One small step for Norway, one giant leap for evidence-informed decision-making in Norwegian aid

If economists are the ‘dismal scientists’ always harping on about limited resources, evaluators are often considered the ‘pessimist scientists’ who only see the half-empty glass, rather than the half-full one. The end of the year is, however, a perfect time to break with that tradition. It is a time to reflect and appreciate progress, promising initiatives, and flickers of hope. Evidence suggests that positive reinforcement can be effective in ensuring that positive developments or behaviors are maintained.

Best practices for working with survey partners and monitoring data quality

Collecting primary data for impact evaluations can be both costly and time-intensive, especially in terms of planning, designing survey instruments, setting up field protocols, training enumerators, data collection, supervision, quality assurance, and handling field-level challenges. Evaluators and researchers often partner with survey firms to implement and manage field operations for data collection.

Five ways process evaluation is helping us evaluate an aquaculture project in Bangladesh

Integrating mixed-methods approaches with impact evaluations like process evaluations and implementation studies has been in practice for a while, and for very good reasons. In this blog, we share how embedding a process evaluation within an ongoing evaluation of an aquaculture intervention in Bangladesh is adding value to evaluation findings.

How sanitation collectives in India help the marginalized earn livelihood and respect

Deepa (name changed), a 36-year-old transgender woman, had to flee her home in southern India when she was 18. She came to Delhi and subsequently underwent sex reassignment surgery. Recalling her days in the capital, she says, “I used to beg in trains and at traffic signal junctions for survival. During marriages or other celebrations, I would go to people’s houses demanding money”. She further adds, “Society treats us with disdain because of who we are and what we do. However, lack of viable job opportunities forces us to resort to these methods of earning a living”.

Mapping evidence of what works to strengthen resilience to shocks and stressors

Wars, droughts, floods and other effects of climate change are leading to pervasive and complex emergencies globally, causing displacement, famine and crop failure, among many other adversities. As several of these events occur in tandem, there is a need to have a multi-dimensional understanding of how things such as climate change, conflict and intersectional identities intertwine. One of the key pillars to mitigate their impacts is resilience — as highlighted by the ongoing 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt — and in this blog, we share how some of 3ie’s ongoing work will help inform future policy on how people, communities and institutions can better prepare and respond to shocks in the future.

Six learnings from Swashakt program's complexity-aware monitoring

Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) approaches for development interventions have been constantly evolving over time. It started as a country-level focus in the 1960s and expanded to individual program-level MLE approaches, methods and standards in the 1990s and newer and innovative approaches have been developed since then.

Sanitation-linked livelihoods project: Six key insights from a learning study

In this blog, we discuss the key findings emerging from our study—supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and conducted in partnership with the Technical Support Units (TSUs) of the states.

Standards of care in policy research

This blog post expands on ideas discussed in an earlier series of blog posts on ethics in social science research. Read the introduction to that series here and read about 3ie's Transparent, Reproducible, and Ethical Evidence framework here.

A framework for examining women’s economic empowerment in collective enterprises

Swashakt, launched with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2020, has now reached more than 6900 women across 480 villages in 10 Indian states who have become a part of farm or non-farm women’s collective enterprises. In this blog, we discuss how we define and measure women’s economic empowerment in the context of our program.

Groundbreaking studies now part of 3ie's Food Systems and Nutrition Evidence Gap Map

In June 2022, a high-level expert group from the European Commission called for independent and up-to-date reports on the scientific evidence about food systems transformation. We certainly agree this work is essential – that’s why we’ve been producing such reports since 2020 as part of 3ie’s living Food Systems and Nutrition Evidence Gap Map (EGM). In our latest update, we add groundbreaking studies to the map, including one on sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.