Generating and using evidence during a global crisis: what can we learn from the humanitarian sector?
Marcella Vigneri | 12 March 2021 In September 2020, CEDIL opened its new webinar series with a thought-provoking talk between Ruth Hill – Chief Economist at the Centre for Disaster protection, and Kevin Watkins – CEO at Save the Children UK. The event was a great opportunity to ask our colleagues to talk about their work as scholars and as promoters of evidence use in disaster prevention and humanitarian settings. What lessons can be learned and transferred in response to the ongoing health, economic and
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Big data in the time of a pandemic
Zeba Siddiqui and Francis Rathinam | 24 December 2020 With a significant number of active cases globally, the novel coronavirus represents an extreme public health challenge. The outbreak of the pandemic has led to stringent travel restrictions, making data collection a highly challenging task for the development research community. Traditional methods of data collection which require field visits can be risky during these times. In this context, if appropriate privacy and ethical safeguards are in place, then big data is both relevant and useful, now
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What can we learn from the HIV pandemic about how to tackle Covid-19? A middle-range theory lens
Howard White | 15 October 2020 HIV and Covid-19 are different. You need more intimate contact to catch HIV, but it was far more deadly once you did so prior to the widespread availability of antiretroviral drugs. But they are also the same. Both are pandemics for which we have no vaccine yet. Behaviour change to reduce the risk of infection is the only protection we have. It therefore seems sensible to ask, what can we learn from tackling HIV for fighting Covid-19? Unsurprisingly, I
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Impact Evaluation in the Time of a Pandemic
By Edoardo Masset | 3 June 2020 CEDIL recently awarded 25 grants to research teams to conduct a series of innovative evaluation studies. The awards were made before the pandemic outbreak and the study designs were presented at a workshop in Oxford on 26-27 February 2020 just as the crisis began to unfold in Europe. As the pandemic became global, we became aware that many of the CEDIL- supported research teams would have to change their plans to adapt to the crisis. Some research teams
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Taking disability evidence to the policy makers who need it
Thomas Shakespeare | 7 May 2020 How much is known about disability and development? In particular, how much is known on how best to improve the lives of the one billion disabled people in the world? Sadly, there are huge gaps, as the WHO and World Bank World report on disability 2011 and more recently the CEDIL-supported evidence and gap map 2018 have demonstrated. The former was unable to provide detailed guidelines on the best interventions. The latter found 138 eligible studies of which 53
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Unveiling 25 innovative CEDIL projects: breaking new ground on design and filling evidence gaps
Howard White | 13 March 2020 Twenty years ago, I was part of a team conducting a thematic evaluation of the poverty impact of British aid. The terms of reference for the evaluation did specify that we should consider the use of micro data to look at poverty impact at project level, but the team rejected that approach as infeasible. Ten years later the evaluation department of DANIDA convened a workshop in impact evaluation of infrastructure evaluations (the papers of which are published in a
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