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.
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 recent years, international observers such as the V-Dem Institute have highlighted an alarming crisis of democracy with a decline in competitive elections, political participation and public accountability. For the first time in two decades, the Institute’s 2023 Democracy Report found more closed autocracies than liberal democracies in the world.
Despite being highly effective in preventing avoidable disease and death among children, routine child immunization remains well below targets. Child immunization has been especially hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, reversing years of gains. In 2021, 25 million children missed essential vaccines, a high not seen since 2009. Putting immunization back on track, especially in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs), is an urgent priority.
With development evidence, as with many things, more is generally better. But there's a caveat: lots of evidence on a topic can easily be overwhelming unless there's a good synthesis to tease out the strong findings from the background noise.
Across the globe, women face tremendous challenges when it comes to equitable access to resources, exercising meaningful agency and decision-making power and aspiring to and accomplishing achievements. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, those challenges are often exacerbated, as women are particularly vulnerable and often left out of decision-making.
With COVID still raging across the world, the topic of immunization is receiving more attention than it has in decades. Today, the world is waiting to see if immunizations will help turn the corner and end the biggest health and humanitarian crisis in a generation. Given this, policymakers and implementers need to know what works to increase immunization rates, for whom, and at what cost.
In 2020, 23 per cent of the world’s population lived in fragile contexts, including 76.5 per cent of all those living in extreme poverty. While women comprise about half of the population in fragile and conflict-affected contexts (FCAS), there are often major gaps in how interventions in these settings consider their inclusion and empowerment.
Interventions that raise agricultural productivity in poor regions have the potential to offer two benefits at once: increasing the food supply and providing income for farmers, who make up a majority of the world's poor.
A majority of the world's poor live in rural areas and work in agriculture, according to the World Bank. Furthermore, hundreds of millions of people, including some of those same farmers, do not have enough nutritious food to eat.
