Evidence Generation: A Critical Tool for Understanding Displacement
Addressing Evidence Gaps to Facilitate Strategic Decision Making for Displaced Populations
Humanitarian crises are fueling an increase in the number of forcibly displaced people around the world, yet a lack of quality evidence surrounding interventions and programs makes it difficult to decide how to allocate limited funding. In this blog, Forced Displacement Research Associate Mansi Kalra outlines CEGA’s new effort to close the evidence gap, produce new insights to guide policymakers, and improve the lives of displaced people.
An Unmet Need for Evidence
Today, low- and middle-income countries are disproportionately affected by displacement, with about three-fourths of the world’s poorest people living in fragile contexts. Humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria, and Ukraine have generated an unprecedented increase in the number of forcibly displaced people around the world. Most decision-makers lack the resources to support these nearly 2 billion people. Faced with such urgent needs, it’s critical that leaders can access the right evidence to make effective decisions.
Unfortunately, very little causal evidence exists on what works best in conflict and crisis settings. To fill these critical knowledge gaps and help improve lives, CEGA will expand the evidence base by scaling ongoing research and expanding a coordinated portfolio of research through its existing Forced Displacement Initiative. At last December’s Global Refugee Forum, CEGA outlined its four-step approach:
- To build research capacity, CEGA will launch a fellowship program that supports scholars affected by displacement or who study displacement in their home countries.
- CEGA will collect new rounds of data in two longitudinal panel studies that report on economic inclusion, social protection, and other policy-relevant outcomes.
- CEGA will also invest in partnerships that facilitate collaboration between research, policy, and practitioner communities concerned with forced displacement.
- CEGA will develop and promote a set of ethical guidelines for researchers who work with displaced populations.
Centering Displaced Voices
CEGA is committed to supporting people directly impacted by forced displacement by providing opportunities for leadership, learning, and talent development to researchers with lived experiences of displacement. Our proposed fellowship program will equip scholars with the skills, networks, and resources they need to develop their careers and lend their voices to research and policy debates while increasing the evidence base that leaders can use to drive innovative, sustainable, and locally-led solutions to displacement.
Expanding Panel Datasets to Create Lasting Public Goods
One of CEGA’s unique contributions is the creation of longitudinal panels. These studies track displaced populations over time and measure a wide array of demographic, social, and financial data. The first of these studies is the Syrian Refugee Life Study, a representative panel of Syrian refugees in Jordan that generates evidence for key policy questions. Currently, data and materials from the in-person 2020 partial survey round are available on the Harvard Dataverse, and additional rounds of data will be made publicly available in the coming months. This open source public good is a highly beneficial tool made available to the research community at large. CEGA also led the creation of the Kenya Analytical Program on Forced Displacement, a panel of 6,000 refugee households and 3,500 Kenyan. These projects are conducted in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other decision makers, thereby ensuring that policymakers are included in this work. Through the creation of these datasets, CEGA is expanding the availability of robust data and closing the evidence gap.
Creating Collaborative Relationships for Informed Decision Making
As funding for humanitarian efforts becomes increasingly constrained, it is critical that the limited funds are directed to the most cost effective and impactful interventions. To advance this effort, major donors can invest in the creation of basic evidence and expand critical experimentation. One such example is the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Refugees Initiative which recently collaborated with CEGA to develop a rapid review of youth livelihoods interventions in displacement settings.
CEGA’s review of the evidence finds:
- A dearth of quality evidence available to guide decisions about the effectiveness of interventions among refugee and displaced populations;
- Limited impact evaluations of interventions for displaced populations that integrate cost analysis into their design;
- Multiple layers of context that make it difficult to generalize and adapt policies and programs “off the shelf” from one setting to another.
These findings raise a key question: What is the strategy for an evidence-based approach to investing in interventions that work when the relevant evidence is so limited and where the complex context constrains the options? Expanding future investments in research will be critical to answering this question, and CEGA is actively working to build these necessary partnerships.
Grounding Our Work in Ethics
Displacement settings are particularly prone to ethical challenges and clear guidelines are critical to building trust with respondents and ensuring that researchers do no harm. CEGA is developing a set of practices to incentivize and institutionalize an ethical approach in our displacement research, and is working with partners to ensure these practices are applied effectively. The Center’s aim is to develop a framework for our own research and disseminate these findings to the larger research community.
The Realities of Forced Displacement
Today, more than 100 million people are forcibly displaced. The need for a robust evidence base to inform critical responses has never been higher, and this work never more pressing. To learn more about CEGA’s Forced Displacement Initiative and ongoing research, please refer to this link.
