Continuing our 'state of the evidence' series exploring insights from the DEP – this blog explores and shares key insights from the evidence on the Middle East and North Africa region.
Côte d'Ivoire faces substantial nutritional challenges, with 17 percent of children under five experiencing stunting and over six percent exhibiting wasting in 2021. Overall, 18 percent of the population grapples with the imminent threat of acute food insecurity. In addition, many communities lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, which can transmit diseases such as cholera, dysentery and polio. Recurrent infections can also be a major cause of malnutrition and child stunting. 3ie’s WACIE Helpdesk supported the government’s response to the crisis by providing up-to-date evidence to inform and improve its strategy.
3ie, en partenariat avec le gouvernement du Bénin, lance l’évaluation d'impact d'une initiative révolutionnaire : un programme de nutrition pratique et évolutif pour améliorer les résultats en matière de santé maternelle et infantile.
3ie, in partnership with the Government of Benin, is launching an impact evaluation of a groundbreaking initiative: a practical, scalable nutrition program to improve maternal and infant health outcomes.
When policymakers come to us for rapid response evidence, they want it to be immediate, actionable, and reliable, drawing on findings from high-quality evaluations. These requirements can sometimes seem to be at odds – often there are details of a specific policy situation that have not yet been addressed by rigorous research. So how do we balance the competing needs to be both actionable and rigorous?
In August 2021, 3ie and New Light Technologies co-led a series of capacity-building workshops with 10 researchers from the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) on the potential to use remotely-sensed geospatial data for impact evaluation. This blog is the third in a series of four in which workshop participants reflect on the uses of remotely-sensed and geospatial data.
Across the world, governments used cash transfers, including unconditional transfers, to shield vulnerable people from the economic hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of December 2020, cash transfer schemes made up more than a third of the estimated 1400 social protection responses to the pandemic across 215 countries and territories.
Les lacunes dans l'expérience d'évaluation sont criantes dans les pays membres du programme de renforcement des capacités et évaluation d'impact en Afrique de l'Ouest (WACIE), comme en témoigne l'étude exploratoire du programme. En conséquence, l'utilisation des données probantes dans l'élaboration des politiques est limitée. Mais l'obstacle principal à cette utilisation est la capacité, pas l'intérêt. L’étude exploratoire a révélé un intérêt presque universel chez les décideurs politiques et professionnels de l'évaluation pour le l’accompagnement et le renforcement des capacités en la matière.
In the countries where the West Africa Capacity-building and Impact Evaluation (WACIE) program works, the gaps in evaluation experience are stark, as the program's scoping study found. Accordingly, the use of evidence in policymaking is limited. But the barrier is capacity, not interest – the same study found that the desire among policymakers and evaluation professionals for support and capacity building was nearly-universal.
In 2019, as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his State of the Nation address, one of his new policy announcements was the expansion of a program aimed at helping children learn to read.
