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

Using the causal chain to make sense of the numbers

At 3ie, we stress the need for a good theory of change to underpin evaluation designs. Many 3ie-supported study teams illustrate the theory of change through some sort of flow chart linking inputs to outcomes. They lay out the assumptions behind their little arrows to a varying extent. But what they almost invariably fail to do is to collect data along the causal chain. Or, in the rare cases where they do have indicators across the causal chain, they don’t present them as such.

Delivering Global Public Goods

3ie not only funds studies, it also sets international standards for impact evaluation. For the studies we fund, we do this through our review process. For others, we offer quality assurance services and issue conceptual papers and guidelines. We have also launched a replication programme to test the robustness of study findings, and are preparing a registry of planned impact evaluations in low and middle income countries.

Using impact evaluation to improve policies and programmes

Community-level water supply does not have health benefits. There is emerging evidence that community-driven development programmes do not increase social cohesion. These statements can be made with confidence based on the considerable body of evidence from impact evaluations undertaken to answer the question of what works in development. 3ie is now adding this body of evidence as more completed studies are becoming available.

Can we do small n impact evaluations?

3ie was set up to fill ‘the evaluation gap’, the lack of evidence about ‘what works in development’. Our founding document stated that 3ie will be issues-led, not methods led, seeking the best available method to answer the evaluation question at hand. We have remained true to this vision in that we have already funded close to 100 studies in over 30 countries around the world.

Exercising credibility: why a theory of change matters

The strength of randomized control trials (RCTS), like this study, is their ability to establish causal relationships between the intervention and the outcome. But we need factual analysis of what happened, to help complement the counterfactual analysis of causality. In the case of this study, participants should have been asked to keep food and exercise diaries.