Howard White

Howard white
Designation: Director, GDN Evaluation and Evidence Synthesis Programme
Howard is the Director of the GDN Evaluation and Evidence Synthesis Programme. Formerly, he was the CEO of the Campbell Collaboration and Adjunct Professor, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University. He is also a former executive director of 3ie.

Blogs by author

Tackling radicalisation through sports

Ten years ago, on 7 July, four suicide bombers killed 52 people in London. This included the bombing of the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square, just yards away from the building that now houses 3ie’s London Office. Today, ten years on, in the town of Dewsbury, home to the mastermind of the 7/7 bombings, cricket is being used to combat radicalisation. The NGO Chance to Shine has put together three cricket teams for getting the youth to mix with each other.

Do communities need funds or facilitation?

A group of villages in Haryana, India came together to build a much-needed bridge to reduce travel time to the nearest town. This sounds like the sort of community initiative that donors have been supporting for more than a decade with community driven development (CDD) programmes. Except it isn’t.

Understanding what’s what: the importance of sector knowledge in causal chain analysis

My recent blog, How big is big enough?, argued that you need sector expertise to judge if the effect of a programme is meaningful rather than just statistically significant. But the need for sector expertise goes far deeper than that. I have recently been reading impact evaluations of water supply and sanitation studies. The studies by the non-sector researchers (mostly economists) collect data on the outcome of interest, usually child diarrhoea. But they do little more than that.

What’s wrong with evidence-informed development? Part 2

3ie’s recent systematic review of farmer field schools (FFS) found that these programmes worked as pilots and small- scale programmes. But the few impact evaluations  of  national-level programmes found no impact.  The evidence suggested that problems in recruiting and training appropriate faciliators impeded the scale-up of the experiential learning model of farmer field schools.

What’s wrong with evidence-informed development? Part 1

On my reading list as an undergraduate in development studies was Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, This is a social history that challenges the view that pre-industrial England was a stagnant society. Rather, it had many of the features of industrial or even modern Britain.