Innovating for Impact
Carson Christiano, CEGA Executive Director, outlines CEGA’s top priorities in 2024, designed to expand the way we define and achieve “impact” in the evidence-informed policy ecosystem.
For fifteen years, CEGA has supplied decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with rich evidence, insights, and tools they can use to identify cost-effective solutions for reducing poverty and improving lives. As we’ve matured, we have become wiser to the ways in which our efforts may — and may not — be driving meaningful and lasting policy change. In recent years, we have turned the microscope on ourselves, looking closely at our successes and failures and contemplating ways to boost the return on investment in CEGA’s work. We are especially proud of the investments we’ve made to make evidence more cost-effective, more transparent and reproducible, and more inclusive.
This year, we’re re-committing to driving systematic change in the global development community and expanding our imagination of what our impact can be. Our priorities include:
1. Launching new research initiatives in priority areas.
As the world continues to contend with overlapping crises, there are several thematic areas where more evidence is urgently needed. CEGA faculty and staff are working to build research agendas and partnerships to support for new work in the areas of Gender & Agency, Conflict & Security, and Forced Displacement. Meanwhile, we are working to ensure that all of our thematic areas address the persistent threat of climate change, which in turn has exacerbated both conflict and forced displacement, especially for marginalized groups — and low-income women and children in particular.
2. Building open science infrastructure.
A key pillar of CEGA’s work is to make evidence better. As such, we’re constantly striving to improve the quality and credibility of the data, tools, and analytical methods used to make consequential policy decisions and drive large-scale social impact. This year, we’re expanding investments in our Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI), which is developing tools and standards for rigorous intervention costing. We’re promoting adoption of the Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP), which enables timely predictions of social science research, and the Social Science Reproduction Platform (SSRP), which crowdsources and catalogs attempts to assess and improve the computational reproducibility of social science research. We’re also excited to contribute a highly collaborative, novel effort to build a comprehensive, open-access, and searchable library of results from social science RCTs in low- and middle-income countries. By consistently documenting study design, intervention features and context, effect sizes, and measures of certainty and credibility, the envisioned Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL) will dramatically accelerate the translation of evidence into action by allowing users to quickly and painlessly access relevant information for a given set of studies. Once established, IDEAL will facilitate everything from qualitative systematic review to quantitative meta-analyses, making evidence-based decision-making easier for all across the development research ecosystem.
3. Promoting the use of novel data science tools and approaches.
CEGA’s embrace of multidisciplinary and mixed methods has allowed us to generate new types of insights for decision makers, thus diversifying and expanding the number of tools in their toolkits. For example, the use of novel data sources (like satellite imagery and cell phone metadata) and data science approaches (including applications of AI and machine learning) by CEGA researchers allows them to paint a more complete or accurate picture of what’s happening in a given geography or sector than they would relying on traditional data alone. This is particularly important in conflict or climate change-affected countries where household survey or government census data may be woefully out of date or insufficient for high-stakes decision-making. This year, CEGA is scoping new activities and partnerships that elevate the use of AI-based tools by researchers and policymakers for targeting, deploying, and rigorously testing a wide variety of global development solutions.
4. Putting ethics and inclusion front and center.
We’re mindful of our position as a Global North institution working on challenges facing people in the Global South, and are deeply committed to driving both ethics and inclusion in this ecosystem. Our Global Networks program, which has brought over 70 scholars from East and West Africa to the US for semester-long fellowships in impact evaluation since 2012, continues to thrive and expand. This year, we announced a new collaboration with the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) to create more training and mentorship opportunities for promising African scholars. At the same time, we’re helping to set new standards for ethics in development research, for example by studying the practices and preferences surrounding the returning of research results to communities. And our Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR) is examining — using both qualitative and quantitative methods — how the inclusion of African scholars can influence evidence-informed policymaking, and the obstacles that remain in doing so.
As CEGA matures and the world around us continues to shift, we’re striving to update how we define and articulate “impact” — not only in terms of our investments in research and evidence, but also our investments in methods, training, and research dissemination. In other words, we’re beginning to measure success not just by the specific programs or policies that have been informed by CEGA evidence — although that is important of course — but also by the ways in which the entire global development ecosystem has shifted towards the effective use of evidence. This year, we’re prioritizing efforts to better track and learn from our past experience and proactively integrating these lessons into our work.
At CEGA, we’re motivated by the opportunities that lie ahead and stretching our imaginations about the kind of impact we can have. We can’t do it alone — we’re proud of our collaborations with public, private, and non-profit partners, especially with those in the Global South, and look forward to seeing what we can do together this year (and beyond!) to make global development decision-making more cost-effective, innovative, and inclusive.
