Spring Cleaning: Refreshing CEGA’s Annual Priorities
CEGA’s Director of Operations Lauren Russell and Executive Director Carson Christiano share the center’s ambitions for 2023.
Spring is upon us and we’re cleaning CEGA’s proverbial house. This means reflecting on our priorities and commitments, and tidying our goals for the year — each of which we hope will bring us closer to a world where people are better off because decision-makers use insights and tools backed by rigorous, inclusive, and transparent evidence.
Below we outline five strategic ambitions for CEGA that we believe will generate new insights and tools leaders can use to improve policies, programs, and lives.
Incubating new research portfolios on forced displacement, conflict and security, and gender and agency.
These are topics of central importance to decision-makers and researchers, for which data and evidence remain lacking. We have made headway on each: a new suite of CEGA studies is focused on generating more and better data (including panel data) on the refugee and host community experience, as well as the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve outcomes for both. Meanwhile, we are building a portfolio on conflict and security, leveraging an ongoing project on post-conflict security structures in Latin America. Finally, we’re scoping a new, cross-cutting research portfolio on gender and agency, designed to answer important questions about social norms, wellbeing, and measurement, and to inform improvements to social programs that affect underserved groups.
Promoting the use of novel data and data-intensive analytical approaches by the development research community.
New types of data — including call detail records, sound and text data, and satellite data — and new methods to analyze them (like machine learning and AI) can generate more accurate, nuanced, and useful insights on global poverty and development than traditional surveys. Through our Data Science for Development (DS4D) portfolio, CEGA is seeding frontier research leveraging these data and approaches — like employment matching, new poverty estimates, and using historical satellite imagery to predict growth — and building the capacity of early-career researchers and partners, including in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), to use similar tools. In parallel, our Digital Credit Observatory (DCO) recently launched a new focus on data privacy, which is generating evidence on the effectiveness of privacy enhancing technologies.
Centering the voices of women, LMIC scholars, and other underrepresented groups in our work.
CEGA continues to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) in all that we do, for example, by empowering African scholars to generate policy-relevant research through fellowships, networking and dissemination opportunities, and access to dedicated research funding and mentorship. This year, our Collaboration for Inclusive Development Research (CIDR) is taking a structural view to investigate the need for — and effectiveness of — various inclusion strategies, in close partnership with the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA). Finally, CEGA works tirelessly to make social science research more transparent, benefitting underrepresented scholars by increasing access to knowledge (more below). We are eager to expand these activities, and to serve as a partner and resource to other organizations seeking to make development research more open and inclusive.
Advancing open and transparent research.
In 2023, CEGA is redoubling efforts to promote ethical, transparent, and reproducible research practices that can improve scientific integrity and inspire better public policy, while making the entire research process more inclusive. We are particularly excited to grow our Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI), which will drive new efficiencies in global development by helping to standardize the way the cost (and cost-effectiveness) of development interventions is measured. Importantly, we are further investing in our work on Open Policy Analysis (OPA), a crucial element of democratic and effective policymaking, which is advancing through an ongoing collaboration with the Ministry of Finance in Chile.
Investing in partnerships to strengthen policy impact.
The pathways by which evidence improves people’s lives are rarely linear (or even clear). CEGA’s impact stories highlight some of the many circuitous ways in which evidence-based tools and insights have guided improvements in programming, policy, and practice. Our approach to policy engagement has long involved investing in LMIC researchers, facilitating the co-creation of research through strategic matchmaking activities, and prioritizing demand-driven research in our competitive grantmaking. This year, CEGA seeks to partner with organizations in LMICs that can inform our research agendas and deliver key insights to decision-makers at opportune moments. Meanwhile, we are continuing to investigate our own impact to understand how CEGA investments have contributed to policy change so that we can incorporate lessons into our evolving policy engagement strategy.
Marie-Kondo-ing our annual goals renews our motivation to continue advancing rigorous, transparent research that informs critical decisions impacting people experiencing poverty. We are deeply grateful for our diverse and committed network of affiliated faculty, LMIC scholars, partners, supporters, and staff. We invite you to engage with the CEGA community by reading about our research, attending our events, following us on social media, and sharing our data and resources as we work to meaningfully improve people’s lives.
