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The end of data collection is usually the last time community members ever hear from the research team. It’s been flagged as a genuine ethical concern in the field. As part of our PeaceFIELD initiative, 3ie and our partners set out to do things differently, travelling back to the communities in Sierra Leone and Guinea where endline data was collected in 2024. Conducted jointly with the International Security and Development Center (ISDC) and the UN Secretary-General's Peacebuilding Fund, the ‘data return’ trip brought preliminary findings back to the farmers, herders, traditional authorities, and community leaders who took part in the evaluation, which measures the effects of a cross-border project to reduce farmer-herder conflict along the Sierra Leone–Guinea border.
Held in local languages across a series of community events, the sessions opened with a short presentation of findings before turning to community reflection and dialogue. Each session drew roughly 50 participants, many of whom traveled from neighboring villages. For residents of these remote border areas, who often struggle to access current information at all, the visit was as much about restoring a connection as sharing results, and it surfaced new insights the evaluation team is already using to sharpen the analysis ahead of full publication later this year.
Read the blog | Read more about the PeaceFIELD initiative
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Featured
What ten years of evaluation capacity building achieved in Costa Rica
Costa Rica has greater capacity to evaluate its public policies and use evidence in decision-making, according to an independent impact evaluation 3ie presented in San José this month alongside MIDEPLAN and Germany's DEval.
The study covers a decade of capacity development work, from 2015 to 2025. It found more evaluations, better quality, greater ability to fund external evaluation from national resources, and more public information about programmes and how they are assessed. It is the first rigorous impact evaluation of a national evaluation capacity development programme at systemic level, which makes the findings useful to any country strengthening its own system.
3ie presented at Costa Rica's Plataforma Nacional de Evaluación, to the Minister of National Planning, and to the First Vice President and Council of Ministers. The full report follows shortly. |
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Featured | 3ie's NRLM evidence cited in Indian Parliament
Our impact evaluation of India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) made it to the discussions in the Indian Parliament once again. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha on 11 August 2026, the Ministry of Rural Development cited 3ie's findings on the program's impact on rural women’s lives. The 3ie study — based on two rounds of data collection in 2019 and 2024 across 9 states, covering roughly 23,000 households — found that household incomes rose by 9.5% in NRLM blocks overall, with income gains in mature community institution clusters ranging from 12% to 33%. The evaluation also documented a 6–11% increase in per capita household consumption, alongside measurable improvements in women's empowerment, livelihood diversification, and household welfare.
This is another example of evidence traveling all the way from field data to national policy discourse and highlights the relevance of our ongoing research and stakeholder engagements.
Read more about 3ie's study |
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Featured | 3ie leadership contributes to WFP's 2025 Impact Evaluation Report
 3ie's Executive Director Marie Gaarder and Board Chair Carola Alvarez both serve on the World Food Programme’s (WFP) Strategic Advisory Panel on Impact Evaluation. The Panel's 2025 Annual Report was released last month, marking another year of progress on embedding rigorous, real-time evidence into WFP's operations across some of the world's most complex humanitarian and crisis settings.
The Panel plays a critical advisory role as WFP implements its Impact Evaluation Strategy — refining methodologies, guiding evidence generation in fragile and active-crisis contexts, and helping ensure findings translate directly into program design, strategic planning, and funding decisions. This year's report highlights progress on embedding evaluation across core areas, including cash-based transfers, climate adaptation, anticipatory action, and school meals, alongside continued innovation in conducting rigorous evaluations within active emergency response settings.
It's a fitting extension of 3ie's own institutional commitment to strengthening evidence in humanitarian and peacebuilding contexts and a reflection of the trust placed in 3ie's leadership to help shape how one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations learns, adapts, and improves outcomes for the people it serves.
Read the report |
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Partnership | New MoU with SMERU Research Institute
3ie formalized a strategic partnership with SMERU Research Institute to advance evidence-informed policymaking across Indonesia and the wider region. The collaboration will span joint evidence generation and synthesis, capacity building in impact evaluation and related methods, co-hosted policy events, joint knowledge products, and technical advisory support to governments. With priority focus areas including poverty reduction, social protection, gender equality, and social inclusion, the MoU marks the start of a long-term collaboration between the two organizations.
Read more about the MoU |
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Call for papers | Journal of Development Effectiveness
The Journal of Development Effectiveness is inviting submissions for its next special issue on ‘Rapid and Responsive Evidence Synthesis for Sustainable Development’. We're looking for work exploring the full range of technological, methodological, and relational innovations shaping how evidence synthesis is done — from methods development and testing of AI tools to other methodological innovations, applied case studies, and research on knowledge translation and evidence use.
The special issue is guest-edited by Dr Ashrita Saran (Global Development Network) and Birte Snilstveit (3ie).
The deadline to submit manuscripts is 30 September 2026.
Read more |
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WHO EMRO-3ie Seminar | Evidence gap maps and the key dimensions of evidence-informed policy-making | 24 September 2026 | Online
3ie is collaborating with the World Health Organization's Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (WHO EMRO) to strengthen technical capacity for evidence-informed policy-making across the region. At this upcoming session, we will present the defined key dimensions for supporting the evidence ecosystem and institutionalizing use of evidence for policy-making. The presentation will explore how these elements help bridge the gap between research and policy, fostering more systematic, transparent, and evidence-informed health decisions.
Speakers
Dr Arash Rashidian
Coordinator, Science, Innovation and Data for Impact, Health Systems and Life Course, WHO EMRO
Dr Mehrnaz Kheirandish
Regional Adviser, Evidence, Data and Research for Policy and Impact, Health Systems and Life Course, WHO EMRO
Dr Birte Snilstveit
Director – Synthesis and Reviews and Head of London Office, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
Dr Tamara Lotfi
Senior Evaluation Specialist, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
Join the session
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Call for abstracts | What Works Climate Solutions Summit 2027
We invite our community of evaluators, researchers and evidence practitioners to submit abstracts for the WWCS Summit 2027, which will be hosted by ASCEND at the University of Cape Town, 13–16 April 2027. The summit is looking for rigorous, real-world evidence on what works in climate policy and practice, spanning seven focus areas and four methodological tracks: policy evaluation, evidence synthesis, evidence use, or novel methodology.
Early-career researchers and applicants from low- and lower-middle-income countries are especially encouraged to apply, with travel support currently in development.
Submit by 20 September 2026 | Read the detailed call.
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3ie at the PIUneer Curriculum Co-Creation Workshop in Nairobi
3ie's Executive Director Marie Gaarder joined development institutions in Nairobi on 31 August – 2 September for a workshop convened by the World Bank Group, African Development Bank Group, and Islamic Development Bank rethinking how results measurement is taught and practiced. Gaarder stressed that the results and evidence field has spent a generation building the supply side — producing rigorous studies, synthesizing them, making them findable. The real bottleneck now sits on the demand side, in the institutional incentives that determine whether evidence actually reaches a decision. The workshop introduced the "outcome reflex" idea, according to which questioning assumptions can't be a one-time step at a project's design stage, but a habit applied to every claim, throughout.
Read reflections from the workshop
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3ie at Asian Evaluation Week
Lucas Sempé, Lead Evaluation Specialist, spoke in a session co-organized with UNIDO and the Global Environment Facility on generating, embedding, and using evidence for better policy and resource-allocation decisions. He presented the Evidence-Informed Policy-Making (EIPM) framework being developed within FCDO's Research and Commissioning Centre. This attempts to bring together: - the actors evidence moves through — producers, intermediaries, users
- the pathways evidence actually travels to reach a policy decision
- the moderating factors that speed it up or stall it along the way
- the outcomes when it lands — conceptual, instrumental, and beyond
The session shared concrete examples of how 3ie is now using AI within its evidence synthesis pipeline to speed up evidence production without loosening the rigour. The session also touched on small-n evaluation approaches as one way to strengthen evaluation practice within an EIPM lens. |
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Featured
Senior Research Fellow  3ie’s Senior Research Fellows Program includes experts from various sectors – including development, evaluation, policy as well as academia. This month, we feature Vitor Pereira, who has extensive experience designing and implementing rigorous evaluations to inform public policy, with a strong focus on education, early childhood and social protection. He previously served as Director of Evaluation at the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development, where he led the development of large-scale randomized control trials. His research has also directly supported the design of major government initiatives, including the Pé-de-Meia savings program for high school students. Read moreSince 2020, 3ie's Fellowship Program has contributed to achieving our mission by tapping into diverse expertise and experience across the world. |
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