Birte Snilstveit

Birte Snilstveit
Designation: Director – Synthesis & Reviews and Head of 3ie London Office
Birte leads a dynamic team dedicated to the production and use of synthesised evidence to inform policy in low-and middle-income countries. She is the head of 3ie’s London office and as director, she is also part of 3ie’s senior management team.

Blogs by author

Not all ‘systematic’ reviews are created equal

In a recent World Bank blog based on a paper, David Evans and Anna Popova argue that systematic reviews may not be reliable as an approach to synthesis of empirical literature. They reach this conclusion after analysing six reviews assessing the effects of a range of education interventions on learning outcomes.  The main finding of their analysis: While all these reviews focus on the effects of learning outcomes based on evidence from impact evaluations, there is a large degree of divergence in the studies included in each review, and consequently the conclusions they reach.

Evidence gap maps: an innovative tool for seeing what we know and don’t know

Whether you are a research funder, decision maker or researcher, keeping up with the ever expanding evidence base is not easy. Over 2600 impact evaluations and 300 systematic reviews assessing the effects of international development interventions have been completed or are ongoing to help answer that question and understand how, why and at what cost.  Despite this increase in quality evidence, more evidence is needed, which is why funders and researchers continue to fund and produce new research.

Making impact evidence matter for people’s welfare

The plenary session at the Making Impact Evaluation Matter conference in Manila made clear that impact evidence – in the form of single evaluations and syntheses of rigorous evidence – do indeed matter. Two key themes were (1) strong evidence about the causal effects of programmes and policies matter to making decisions that improve the welfare of people living in low- and middle-income countries and (2) that, to make impact evaluation matter more, we need to continue to make efforts to build capacity to generate, understand, and use such evidence in those same countries.

Home Street Home

The International Day for Street Children provides a platform to call for governments to act and support the rights of street children across the world. But a recent study shows that we have very little evidence on the ways in which we could act most effectively to address the needs of street children. We need such studies as this is the only way we can avoid spending on ineffective programmes and channel funding to programmes that do work.

Evidence to policy: bridging gaps and reducing divides

Evidence-based policy-making is important but not always straightforward in practice. The complex reality of policy-making processes means that the availability of high quality research is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient for evidence informed policy.