Sustainable Development Goal 2 – eliminating hunger – is breathtaking in both its simplicity and its scope. We all know how to avoid hunger in our own lives, but on a global scale, the task brings together a dizzying array of potential policies: agricultural support, cash transfers, school lunches, or taxes on sugary sodas, to name just a handful.
Natural and human-induced catastrophic events are pushing humanity to the brink. The compounding and cascading effects of armed conflicts, irreversible climate change, and the global outbreak of COVID-19 are devastating economies and driving more households into poverty. Today, nearly 193 million people are living in a food crisis (2022 Global Report on Food Crises) while 49 million are experiencing alarming levels of hunger (Hunger Hotspots report June 2022).
In our newly-released systematic review on routine child immunization, we developed a community engagement typology to bridge this gap between theory and practice. We came across three ways communities had been engaged: engagement in the design of the intervention, engagement in the implementation of the intervention, or engagement embedded as a component in the intervention.
As per current estimates, almost 765 million people are affected by food insecurity worldwide. Chronic vulnerability, hunger, and water insecurity have been compounded by climate change, humanitarian crises, and COVID-induced shocks and pressures. USAID, through the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS), works through dedicated centers to improve program impacts on these critical issues and accelerate the progress on building resilient communities and countries.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic drew plenty of attention to the need for one specific vaccine, the disruptions it caused also exacerbated existing challenges in ensuring all the world's children receive their shots.
As necessary as conventional quantitative methods might be, the importance of adopting a mixed-methods approach in order to understand and answer complex development questions cannot be overemphasized. This blog is the second of a two-part series by 3ie Senior Research Fellow Michael Bamberger in which he offers detailed guidance on how to design, implement and utilize mixed-methods evaluations.
Urban waste pickers face several intertwined challenges such as low incomes, limited education, poor health, social marginalization, and domestic violence. In Bengaluru, India, 3ie is currently evaluating an initiative called Saamuhika Shakti, which adopts an innovative ‘Collective Impact’ approach to improving the lives of informal waste pickers. The initiative, just like the problems it looks to address, is complex.
As necessary as conventional quantitative methods might be, the importance of adopting a mixed-methods approach in order to understand and answer complex development questions cannot be overemphasized. In the first blog of this two-part series, 3ie Senior Research Fellow Michael Bamberger explains how an integrated mixed-methods approach goes much beyond incorporating just a few tools from both the quantitative and qualitative traditions and why that is more effective for addressing real-world problems.
As we've noted before on this blog, the world faces a critical need to revamp its food systems to provide healthy diets for a growing global population within the planetary boundaries. Making these changes means policymakers need to know what interventions work, for whom, and at what cost – and the state of knowledge about that question is changing rapidly.
3ie’s recently-published working paper ‘Incorporating process evaluation into impact evaluation – What, why and how’ by Senior Research Fellows Vibecke Dixon and Michael Bamberger lays down guidelines that provide impact evaluators tools and ideas for exploring and adding relevant elements of process evaluations to experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluation designs.
