The Global Evidence Commitment signatories, with keynote remarks from USAID Chief Economist Dr Dean Karlan, are holding an IDB-hosted event on 21 October to discuss the promise and progress of the pledge. In October 2023—as part of IDB’s Knowledge Week—3ie, together with several leading international development institutions, launched the Global Evidence Commitment. The Commitment is an opportunity for organizations to come together to improve their culture and practice of evidence use. 
 
The signatories, which to date include the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), the Inter-American Development Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Germany’s KfW Development Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), commit to mutual support and learning as they seek to deploy institutional levers summarized in the TRIPS framework to improve their evidence culture.
 
This public event will include a panel discussion of Global Evidence Commitment signatory organizations following the keynote and will kick off the first annual convening.
 
Please sign up for the event to join in person or virtually.

Featured
Women’s collective enterprises in rural India – learning from the Swashakt program 



To mark the International Day of Rural Women and upcoming Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, we are showcasing key findings from 3ie’s Swashakt program on empowering Indian women’s collectives. Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this program included the implementation of four pilot and five at-scale projects that supported collective and group-based models for women-led businesses across 10 Indian states.

Overview of process evaluations under Swashakt
While 3ie led three process evaluations of at-scale projects, we collaborated with IDinsight and IMAGO Global Grassroots on one study. Here is a summary of the programs we studied.

• We evaluated a program to form women-owned agro-producer companies to increase their incomes. This program was implemented by ACCESS Development Services in select districts of West Bengal, Rajasthan, and Odisha (see report)
• We evaluated a program that set up village-level common-interest groups (part of cooperative societies) and trained women in crafts. This program was implemented by URMUL Trust in Rajasthan (see report)
• We evaluated a program implemented by the Chitrika Foundation in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to mobilize women weavers into producer companies and provide technical and marketing training (see report).
• We also worked with IDinsight to conduct a process evaluation of a program on agro-processing enterprises implemented by IMAGO Global Grassroots and Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Setting up women’s collective enterprises in rural India: Learning from 3ie’s Swashakt program
We also conducted a synthesis of all four process evaluations, which provides insights into the barriers to training programs, how collectives transitioned from low to high-value enterprises, and the role of gender and social norms.
Read the report

Findings from a study on women in management training: Under the Chitrika-led project, the implementers worked to enhance managerial skills among women weavers through a micro-MBA program called the ‘Handmade MBA’ (HMBA) program. The larger goal of the HMBA program was to enhance women’s role in the management of the producer companies and their own businesses. Our study findings show that program participants benefited from certain modules, particularly those focused on HR and self-transformation. Read the working paper for detailed findings and recommendations.

Learn more about the Swashakt program | Listen to our podcast series

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How to communicate a null-results impact evaluation



Evaluation findings tell us many things about a program, based on which we tell implementers and donors what worked, for whom, and at what cost—and with key takeaways, we help improve future programming for greater effectiveness. However, when the results do not show any effects, or they show adverse impacts—which may not be as rare as it seems—the challenge is bigger in terms of what to communicate and how to communicate it in the best way possible. It is important for evaluators to think about how we can still make our findings useful for our partners so they don’t get disheartened.

In our latest blog, evaluation director Sebastian Martinez offers six tips for communicating null results. He shows how null results offer an important opportunity for learning and introspection and why the way we talk about our evaluation results and findings is no less important than the findings themselves.

Read more

Featured
Navigating ethical considerations in evaluations 



Evidence production, especially in low- and middle-income countries, must be cognizant of ethical and security issues. To ensure that the evidence produced is credible and aligned with ethical practices, our Transparency, Reproducibility, and Ethical Evidence (TREE) initiative promotes stronger integration of ethical principles into research. As part of this, we offer the TREE Review Framework—a public good designed to complement the Institutional Review Board (IRB process—to help research teams evaluate and document the ethical considerations inherent in social science research. 

Earlier this year, our TREE team collaborated with the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) and Effective Basic Services Africa (eBASE Africa) to implement the TREE Review Framework in two upcoming evaluations in Cameroon. Our latest blog highlights how it impacted their evaluations, and the lessons learned from its implementation.

Read blog

Journal | Special issue on TREE

We also recently published a special issue of the Journal of Development Effectiveness that highlights issues around transparency and ethics in the context of impact evaluations. Read the complete issue here. To submit an article to the journal, please read the guidance here.

Funding
FCDO Research Commissioning Centre 



UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), through the Research Commissioning Centre (RCC), has announced a new upcoming funding opportunity for a scoping review of the science, research and innovation landscape in Southeast Asia. If you are interested in this opportunity, learn more here and sign up to receive updates.  

For more information, please visit the RCC section on 3ie’s website. To receive alerts for these and other opportunities, please sign up for funding alerts

The RCC is managed by 3ie and the University of Birmingham. You can learn more about it here or sign up to receive updates here.