India is responsible for the majority of the world’s open defecation – a practice that spreads disease and cuts lives short. To address the issue, the Indian government’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM; Clean India Mission), which completes its third year, has been providing toilets, particularly in rural areas where they are most needed. SBM has also made explicit the importance of behaviour change and getting people to use those toilets.
Building a culture of evidence is a tall order, one that demands the engagement of different stakeholders committed to evidence-informed policy. While we embed capacity-building activities in our grant programmes, we continue to explore alternative approaches beyond our grants to increase local researchers’ familiarity with impact evaluation, so the pool of research centers able to provide impact evaluation services in a given country expands.
Carlos Oya and colleagues recently published a systematic review of agricultural certification schemes that stands out for me as useful research for informing policy and programming. Why do I say that? Agricultural certification schemes set and monitor compliance to voluntary standards with the objective of making production socially sustainable and terms of trade fairer for smallholder farmers and workers.
The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. What I know is that HIV self-testing has finally made it. At this year’s International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Science there were an array of posters, oral abstract presentations and satellite sessions on research related to HIV self-testing.
In a recent blog post, Ronda Zelezny-Green and Alexandra Tyers claim “now scientific fact: mobile money can lift women out of poverty”. The scientific fact they cite comes from a new study [gated] published in Science by Tavneet Suri and William Jack. This study is an impact evaluation of M-PESA in Kenya using a quasi-experimental design, and it finds that increased access to M-PESA is associated with a decrease in poverty.
Forest protection is among the most effective approaches we have to mitigate climate change. At the same time, agricultural land and forests provide food, livelihoods and fuel for billions of people globally, particularly in low and middle-income countries (L&MICs). At the same time there are concerns that large-scale forest protection programming will have negative knock-on effects on food security and other aspects of human well-being.
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