WEBINAR: Evidence generation in challenging times: Lessons from agricultural innovations

17 March 2021. Evidence-informed development – starting with the man in the mirror | 3ie Evidence Dialogues webinar

‘Promoting evidence use’, ‘from evidence to policy impact’ – these have been the trending topics during countless webinars in 2020. The focus has tended to be on ensuring evidence-informed decisions by southern policy-makers and program implementers. What has been relatively less discussed is the practice and the decisions taken by international development institutions. To what extent are data and research used to diagnose the developmental problems that development institutions decide or agree to address in their country programming? To what extent does the institution incentivize and train people in using research and evidence to design the best possible interventions to address the diagnosed problem? To what extent is there continuous monitoring, evaluation, learning and adaptations in place to ensure that the chances of good outcomes are improved? To what extent is rigorous evaluation financed and built into development programs to ensure that next time around we know more about the effectiveness of the interventions and who it benefits and not?

• Alison Evans, Vice-president and Director General of IEG, WBG
• Kumar Iyer, Director of Delivery, FCDO
• Mark Sundberg, Chief Economist, MCC
• Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, Director of Knowledge and Evaluation, Norad
• Stacey Young, Agency Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning Officer, USAID
• Chair: Marie Gaarder, Executive Director 3ie

Related:

10 December 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic forced course corrections for midstream impact evaluations across the globe. Successfully conducting the research to learn findings can require a great deal of flexibility among researchers, in order to handle the unexpected turns that arise with everything from program changes to the weather.

This Evidence Dialogues webinar discussed lessons learned using examples from impact evaluations of agricultural innovations. The panel brought together the lead researchers from three 3ie-supported impact evaluations on agricultural innovations. They discussed the findings from their research and all of the mid-evaluation course corrections they had to make to the successfully complete the evaluations.

Panellists:

Annemie Maertens, Senior Lecturer, University of Sussex;
Fred Dzanku, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER);
Alan de Brauw, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI
Mark Engelbert, Evaluation Specialist, 3ie

Chair:
Sebastian Martinez, Director of Evaluation, 3ie