Claims about what might improve or harm our health are everywhere. Some of these claims are reliable, but many are not. People often don’t know how to tell the difference. Making decisions based on unreliable claims wastes resources and can result in unnecessary suffering. This problem was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which was accompanied by an “infodemic”— an overload of information, including false or misleading information.
Opening the expert panel which convened last week in Washington to mark 3ie's 15th birthday, Inter-American Development Bank President Ilan Goldfajn made a pitch that would be echoed throughout the morning.
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.
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.
One year ago, a group of experts on a 3ie panel agreed that simply producing evidence and data was not sufficient for learning. On Friday, 3ie’s Executive Director, Marie Gaarder, invited those experts back to her virtual table to share what they've learned about how to set up processes within development institutions so that good evidence is not just generated but incorporated into the project planning cycle.
By now, virtually everyone in the development community recognizes the centrality of gender equality in improving lives. Now the question is: how can interventions be designed to effectively move the needle on entrenched gender prejudice?
While the COVID pandemic may be what brought vaccinations to the forefront of global headlines, the public health community has been working for decades to make sure everyone gets the shots they need. Experts gathered for a 3ie Evidence Dialogues discussion to reflect on a new resource for those looking for evidence about how best to accomplish that aim: 3ie's new Evidence Gap Map on routine childhood immunizations.
Fifteen years ago, the Evaluation Gap Working Group published a report noting the absence of solid evidence on the effectiveness of development programming. This report, and the intellectual community behind it, drove a wave of work on impact evaluations in the development sector. So, did we learn?
In Thursday's 3ie Evidence Dialogues webinar, nutrition experts shared the reasons implementation research is so important in the field, as well as some examples of key takeaways from already-completed studies.
