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April 2016   Making Evidence matter
New funding opportunities
3ie bursary for USAID’s 'Impact Evaluation of Population, Health and Nutrition Programs' workshop:
A limited number of 3ie bursaries are also available for USAID’s MEASURE Evaluation Project's international workshop on 'Impact Evaluation of Population, Health and Nutrition Programs', for English-speaking professionals. The workshop will take place in Accra, Ghana on 18-29 July 2016. .
 
Grant award updates

Thematic Window - Agricultural Innovation

  • The University of Sydney will conduct an impact assessment of the East African Marketing Development Associates’ banana initiative to increase technology adoption by smallholder farmers in Kirinyaga County, Kenya. For more information, click here.
  • 3ie is funding the University of Notre Dame’s impact evaluation of soil fertility management technologies to improve smallholder farmers' livelihoods in Burkina Faso.
  • 3ie is funding the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, to evaluate the impacts of a soil fertility training programme on farm productivity in the Volta region of Ghana.
New 3ie members and associate members
Members: Corporation Andina de Fomento (Development Bank of Latin America)

Associate members: Association for Stimulating Know How, India; International Water Management Institute, Sri Lanka; and Samuel Hall
Evidence uptake and use from 3ie-funded studies
Programme evaluation for strengthening teacher training in the People’s Republic of China: In 2010, the Chinese government constituted the National Teacher Training Programme (NTTP) in order to address poor teacher quality. Despite investments of up to one billion dollars annually, there has been no rigorous evaluation of NTTP to understand its impact on learning outcomes for students. With funding through our Policy Window, 3ie member, the Henan Province Department of Education, commissioned the International Centre for Action Research on Education, Henan University, to conduct an evaluation to understand the impact of NTTP in Henan Province. The team engaged extensively with the provincial and local officials to discuss the scope, design and implementation of the study and raise awareness and understanding about evaluations. These efforts have led to the teacher training evaluation being included as a key component of the 2015-2016 provincial education work plan, which lists priority areas of work. The department is in charge of planning and implementing education policy for approximately 30 million children of school-going age in the province.
3ie at events
3ie London Evidence Week, 11-15 April: The week-long evidence week kicked off on 11 April with the Howard White Lecture 2016. Prof Leonard Wantchekon (Africa School of Economics and Princeton University) spoke about how town hall meetings between voters and candidates affected the outcome of elections in Benin and the Philippines. The LEW seminar by James Hargreaves, director of LSHTM’s Centre for Evaluation, was on the convergence and divergence in the way economists and epidemiologists conduct RCTs. The oversubscribed one-day conference was on Meeting local and global development goals: how rigorous evidence can help. Dr. Alison Evans, chief commissioner, Independent Commission for Aid Impact delivered the keynote address on the importance of evidence and scrutiny in development. The conference had four sessions: Using rigorous evidence, the role for impact evaluations and systematic reviews; Education effectiveness and the SDGs: what we can learn from a new 3ie systematic review; Ethics in impact evaluation and Innovation in evidence production and synthesis. On the final day, 3ie organised an engaging and interactive workshop on evidence gap maps and systematic reviews to a full house of representatives from development NGOs in UK.A detailed report with videos, presentations and other resources about London Evidence Week will be up soon on the 3ie website.
 

Click on the thumbnails to watch the interviews of Leonard Wantchekon and Alison Evans.



3ie London-LIDC seminar on evidence from the adoption of agricultural practices, 14 March 2016: The seminar on The value of advice: evidence from the adoption of agricultural practices by Shawn A. Cole, Harvard Business School, detailed the dramatic differences in agricultural productivity around the world, with a focus on farm size, risk aversion and credit constraints, and how they might serve to limit technology adoption.

3ie Delhi seminar on generating useful evidence from multiple contexts, 3 March 2016: In Learning from others: Insights from J-PAL's experience in generating useful evidence from multiple contexts, Rachel Glennerster, executive director, J-PAL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a practical framework for drawing not only on the detailed knowledge of local conditions, but also on rigorous impact evaluations from other countries to generate more effective policies.

3ie Delhi seminar on evaluation in the era of SDGs, 24 February 2016: Marco Segone, director, UN Women’s Independent Evaluation Office, chair, United Nations Evaluation Group, and co-chair, EvalGender+, explored how SDGs are simultaneously the biggest opportunity and challenge posed before the evaluation community in the talk, Evaluation in the era of SDGs: Is it business as usual?

Please click here to know more about 3ie-sponsored seminars, conferences and other events.
New 3ie publications
Annual report 2015
This report highlights 3ie's work in 2015 and the continued growth across all areas of our work, including filling knowledge gaps by funding policy-relevant research in new thematic areas. Read this report here
Impact evaluations
3ie Impact Evaluation Report 32: The effect of transfers and preschool on children’s cognitive development in Uganda.
examines the impacts of two transfer modalities linked to school enrolment on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development in Karamoja, Uganda. Read this report here
3ie Impact Evaluation Report 33: The effect of conditional transfers on intimate partner violence: evidence from Northern Ecuador
provides evidence on whether cash, vouchers or food transfers targeted at women to reduce food insecurity also affects intimate partner violence in northern Ecuador Read this report here
3ie Impact Evaluation Report 34: A triple win? The impact of Tanzania’s Joint Forest Management programme on livelihoods, governance and forests
assesses the impact of Tanzania’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme on three sets of outcomes -- restoring forests, improving livelihoods and strengthening local governance. Read this report here
3ie Impact Evaluation Report 35: Sustainability of impact: dimensions of decline and persistence in adopting a biofortified crop in Uganda.
studied the sustainability of impact of an agricultural intervention that promoted the adoption and consumption of biofortified orange sweet potato by farming households. Read more about this paper here.
3ie Impact Evaluation Report 36: Removing barriers to higher education in Chile: evaluation of peer effects and scholarships for test preparation.
evaluated the impact of providing scholarships to secondary school students from low- and middle-income households to help them attend high-quality training institutions to prepare for standardised entrance tests for college admission in Chile. Read more about this paper here.
Systematic Reviews
3ie Systematic Review Summary 5: Supplementary feeding for improving the health of disadvantaged infants and children: what works and why?
examines the evidence on whether supplementary feeding can improve the health of infants and children between three months and five years of age. Read this report here
3ie Systematic Review Summary 4: Community-based rehabilitation for people with disabilities.
looks at the impact of community-based rehabilitation (CBR) on health, education, livelihoods, social inclusion and empowerment. Read more about this paper here.
3ie Systematic Review Summary 3: Identification and measurement of health-related spillovers in impact evaluations.
tries to identify mechanisms that trigger spillover through geographic or social proximity, learning or imitation, norm-shaping, income and substitute effects, general equilibrium effects and relative deprivation. Read more about this paper here.
3ie systematic review policy brief: Do self-help groups empower women? Evidence from a systematic review.
tsummarises the key findings from a recent 3ie systematic review on the effectiveness of economic self-help group programmes in improving women’s empowerment. Read more about this paper here.
3ie systematic review policy brief: Do programmes outside the formal education system improve children’s literacy in developing countries?.
summarises the findings of a systematic review that examined the effectiveness of programmes that are aimed at parents, families and communities for improving children’s literacy in low- and middle-income countries. Read more about this paper here.
3ie systematic review policy brief: What works in addressing the needs of street-connected children and young people
examines the evidence on the effectiveness of interventions to promote reintergration and reducing harmful behaviour and lifestyles in street-connected children and young people. Read more about this paper here.
Working papers
3ie Working Paper Series 26: Power calculation for causal inference in social science: sample size and minimum detectable effect determination
developed in-house by 3ie's Eric Djimeu and Deo-Gracias Houndolo, presents the basic statistical concepts used in power calculations for experimental design and provides an online calculation tool. Read this report here
3ie is co-organising the What Works Global Summit in September

The What Works Global Summit (WWGS), 26-28 September 2016, London will share experience from around the world and across sectors on measuring policy impact, experiences in the use of evidence, promoting policy uptake, knowledge translation and critical appraisal of evidence, as well as discussions of new evidence and study methods. This event is jointly organised by 3ie, Campbell Collaboration, Sense about Science and Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation. Confirmed speakers include Dr. David Halpern, chief executive, Behavioural Insights Team and What Works National Advisor, UK, Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive, Education Endowment Foundation, UK, and Professor Orazio Attanasio, co-director, Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies, University College London. For more details, click here
Useful resources
New on 3ie website: 3ie member profiles This new website feature showcases the important work our members are doing and how they are interacting with 3ie. Check out our new member profiles here  
3ie in the news
  • 3ie evidence gap maps on primary and secondary education evidence is mentioned in the Hewlett Foundation blog by Ruth Levine, Friday Note: Mind the Gap Map. She calls these evidence gap maps as elegant, colourful visualisations of what we know and what we have yet to discover and recommends them as a one-stop-evidence-shop for experts and curious non-experts alike.
  • In their blog, Impact Evaluation: How the Wonkiest Subject in the World Got Traction, Ruth Levine and William Savedoff from the Centre for Global Development describe the series of events that led to the creation of 3ie. They describe how it contributed and even accelerated the numbers and quality of impact evaluations undertaken over the last decade. To read more, click here.
  • A new 3ie grant awarded to NOVAFRICA, Mozambique was mentioned in a project report, On the mechanics of the political resource curse: information and local elite behavior in Mozambique, in the University of Navarra website.
New blog posts
Let’s bring back theory to theory of change Annette Brown argues that theory is our best hope for the external validity of any impact evaluation and for using small pilots to indicate what might happen at scale. Read the blog here.

How synthesised evidence can help with meeting the Sustainable Development Goals JEmmanuel Jimenez and Edoardo Masset illustrate how systematic reviews and evidence gap maps can synthesise the results from rigorous evidence for informing effective approaches. Read the blog here.

The pitfalls of going from pilot to scale, or why ecological validity matters Annette Brown talks about how when we have impact evaluation evidence from the pilot, we rarely bother to conduct another rigorous evaluation at scale. Read the blog here.

Visit the blog, Evidence Matters to view all of our posts.
 

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3ie is an international grant-making NGO promoting evidence-informed development policies and programmes. We are the global leader in funding and producing high-quality evidence of what works, how, why and at what cost. We believe that better and policy-relevant evidence will make development more effective and improve people’s lives.
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