As 2024 concludes, marking the end of the first quarter of this century, we stand at a pivotal moment for evidence-informed decision-making. Leaders across governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, and academia are driving systemic change, reaping the benefits of the last 20+ years of investments in evidence and the evidence ecosystem. Faced with a stagnating rate of decline in global poverty, increasing global conflicts, democratic backsliding, and the many challenges of climate change, it becomes ever more important to squeeze as much benefit out of national budgets and international development spending as possible.
We at 3ie are proud partners to these changemakers and champions, equipping them with access to curated and AI-enhanced databases of rigorous development effectiveness evidence across the sustainable development goals, as well as guidance on the institutional levers they can pull to promote improved evidence cultures. To accelerate progress toward achieving the SDGs, the next five years are critical.
In our work across sectors and low- and middle-income countries, we work with our partners to bring the most relevant evidence during the program and policy cycles. We also see it as central to 3ie’s mission to highlight gaps where rigorous evidence is urgently needed, identify shortcomings in existing research-to-policy approaches, and respond to new challenges and changes in the evidence marketplace with innovations and public goods. Being a mission-driven organization, what continues to drive our innovations and creativity is the fact that we incessantly ask ourselves: ‘What stands in the way of better use of evidence to improve lives?’ (see our strategy 2024-26). This approach has led to some remarkable public goods, innovations, and impacts that we—and our partners— have contributed to; a few examples are below.
Generating evidence and facilitating its use in key priority areas
Climate change: Mitigating climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time and an area where the need for evidence-informed decision-making is urgent. We need effective, scalable solutions—because the cost of failure is high. Through our ongoing partnerships with the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), we have made important contributions to the evidence base. For instance, we developed pioneering evidence gap maps (EGMs) on climate change, biodiversity livelihoods, and sustainable energy.
Agriculture: We critically appraised and synthesized a large body of evidence focusing on market access interventions for smallholder farmers to examine how their effects vary across contexts and sub-groups and to identify evidence on program costs. Our systematic review is an important read for those seeking to invest in such programs and additional research (see our review and brief).
Gender and livelihoods: We deepened our collaboration with India’s rural development ministry, with the launch of the endline evaluation of the country’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) (see blog). At a high-level workshop with stakeholders from the government, donor organizations and private sector, we moderated a session on using data and evidence to catalyze positive change in NRLM.
This year also marked a significant milestone for one of 3ie’s most innovative research projects in India under our gender portfolio—‘Swashakt’ (the Hindi word for self-empowered). Our partners studied and evaluated interventions aimed at enhancing women’s livelihoods and their economic and social empowerment. Evidence from this program can help understand what work works to enhance viability, scalability and returns of women-led collective enterprises.
We kicked off a new project that will look at gender intentionality in digital public infrastructure (DPI) in India, lessons from this have the potential to inform the whole DPI ecosystem. We are also looking forward to continuing collaborations with several NGOs, including Jan Sahas and Indus Action, to foster synergies and explore opportunities to further the demand and use of evidence.
Peacebuilding: Earlier this year, we also completed an impact evaluation of the UN Secretary General’s Peacebuilding Fund-supported peace and coexistence project in Darfur. We found that the project reduced the number of land conflicts and improved service provision. Apart from sharing the findings, we have presented this event at several key forums to inform and enhance the use of our work. This is the first of other evaluations, that 3ie is working on as part of the PeaceFIELD initiative with the Peace Building Support Office at the United Nations and the International Security and Development Center. Forthcoming evaluations will look at interventions in Guatemala, on the Mali/Niger Border, Sierra Leone/Guinea border, and Sudan.
Strengthening the global evidence infrastructure
As some of you might be aware—critical to our mission is strengthening the evidence ecosystem. This year, several of our initiatives made significant strides. We completed one year of the Global Evidence Commitment (GEC)—which onboarded its eighth signatory—USAID—with a convening of our partners in Washington. We brought together leaders who are committed to driving evidence use in their own organizations and heard from them how the levers mentioned in 3ie’s TRIPS Framework have helped them to build their own cultures of evidence use and where challenges remain. We’ll reconvene in the autumn of 2025 to hear from them about their progress on remaining challenges and to share lessons across organizations.
Our flagship public good—the Development Evidence Portal (DEP), which now houses more than 18,000 studies—has continued to inform the work of development practitioners (see the Centre for Global Development’s article on climate finance using DEP data). It also gained much-needed traction and call for improved funding (see article on publicly available evidence repositories).
3ie’s Journal of Development Effectiveness took concrete steps to support equity, inclusivity and transparency in the research it publishes. It became the first social science journal to introduce and implement guidelines on ethics, including an author reflexivity statement.
We have also been working very closely with the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office on the Research Commissioning Centre (RCC), which is led by 3ie, the University of Birmingham, and 18 other partners from across the globe. The RCC is a pilot—and our main objective is to help FCDO commission, collate, and communicate new research. We are learning as we go, aiming to build a more accessible, inclusive way of accessing research funds that address some of the most critical global challenges. We’ve made significant progress in setting up this new entity while also managing several new commissions, and we look forward to sharing more updates in the coming months.
I look forward to deepening our partnerships to achieve our full potential and leverage these advancements for sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development.
I wish you season’s greetings and a wonderful end of the year. We hope you take this time to do things that truly give you joy, warmth, and peace.
Marie Gaarder
Executive Director, 3ie |
