By now, virtually everyone in the development community recognizes the centrality of gender equality in improving lives. Now the question is: how can interventions be designed to effectively move the needle on entrenched gender prejudice?
Measuring the impact of peacebuilding is different than measuring the impact of other types of programs. We should aim for a more evidence-based foreign policy and multilateral interventions, which might be able to propel us to new levels of global peace.
Every time you sit down for a meal, you are part of a food system—the chain from production through distribution to your plate and disposal of leftovers. Most of the time, people only focus on the near end of that chain: what to eat today.
We recently completed a new systematic review, ‘Strengthening women’s empowerment and gender equality in fragile contexts towards peaceful and inclusive societies’. This systematic review, also called the Gender SR, examined 14 gender-specific and gender-transformative interventions focusing on women’s empowerment in fragile contexts.
In the second blog of his two-part series, 3ie Senior Research Fellow Johannes Linn builds on the discussion in Part I around the factors that support and hinder the scaling process and pathway. In this piece, he writes about both quantitative and qualitative evidence-based evaluation of scaling efforts and the practical application of these approaches.
How helpful can an evaluation be if it shows an intervention had no effects on desired outcomes? The first evaluation of a community-driven reconstruction (CDR) program called Tuungane, implemented in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is one such study. The evaluation did not show positive effects on all desired social and behavioural outcomes, but it did help the implementer, International Rescue Committee (IRC), revamp some of its systems.
Impact at scale is the new mantra – whether it is for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, for the implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement, or for realizing the goals of the Sendai Framework on disaster risk reduction. Achieving impact at scale, however, remains challenging and is the subject of much discussion
It seems straightforward: producing and using high-quality development evidence requires evaluators and policymakers to have the capacity to do so. However, getting there is not always so simple. When funding decisions are made and evaluation programs assembled, capacity strengthening efforts often take a back seat to other priorities.
Our systematic review finds that aquaculture interventions improve productivity and income for fish farmers in most contexts. However, we need more and more rigorous measurement of impact, particularly on nutrition and women’s empowerment outcomes. While many aquaculture programmes target low- and middle-income countries, there is an overall lack of rigorous impact studies. The studies that could be included also had an overall high risk of bias and do not usually allow for subgroups analysis.
With development evidence, as with many things, more is generally better. But there's a caveat: lots of evidence on a topic can easily be overwhelming unless there's a good synthesis to tease out the strong findings from the background noise.
