Charlotte Lane

Charlotte Lane
Designation: Senior Evaluation Specialist, 3ie
Charlotte provides technical assistance and capacity development to help increase the adoption of evidence-informed programmes and policies. Prior to joining 3ie, she worked on evaluations of interventions to support infant health in eastern Africa.

Blogs by author

Five lessons from our Transparent, Reproducible, and Ethical Evidence (TREE) reviews

We have been consolidating our efforts to develop stronger systems for producing transparent, reproducible, and ethical evidence (TREE). We have emphasized asking ourselves the right questions at the right times, even when there are no easy answers. We’ve examined very specific questions such as: Does a state of scarcity or equipoise make it ethical to withhold an intervention from a control group?

3ie Living Evidence Gap Map: New food systems evaluations focus on the big picture

Food systems transformation is a global problem, and increasingly evaluations of food systems interventions are considering national and transnational solutions. The world's food system is under threat from the “three Cs” – COVID, climate, and conflict. As the Food and Agriculture Organization notes, the war in Ukraine brought these threats into sharp focus in 2022, pushing the already high global food prices even higher. To mitigate the effects of, and eventually recover from, these shocks, we need to know what interventions are effective at improving food security and nutrition, who they work for, and what they cost. In our newest update to our living Evidence Gap Map we've added 72 new studies, some of which show positive effects of nation-wide plans to shift land ownership policies.

Groundbreaking studies now part of 3ie's Food Systems and Nutrition Evidence Gap Map

In June 2022, a high-level expert group from the European Commission called for independent and up-to-date reports on the scientific evidence about food systems transformation. We certainly agree this work is essential – that’s why we’ve been producing such reports since 2020 as part of 3ie’s living Food Systems and Nutrition Evidence Gap Map (EGM). In our latest update, we add groundbreaking studies to the map, including one on sugar-sweetened beverage taxes.

In the fast-growing field of food systems impact evaluations, a shift toward evaluating consumer behaviour

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.

New research on food systems and nutrition still neglects priority topics

Most new food systems research focuses on topics that previous research has already addressed, while only a handful of new studies break ground on under-studied priority subjects. This finding comes from newly-updated figures based on our first-ever living Evidence Gap Map on Food Systems and Nutrition,