Loading

Tools to Support Evidence Based Decision-Making

An Interactive Platform to Support Cooperative Development

USAID has worked for decades to strengthen cooperatives in many sectors to support development objectives. Activities such as the Cooperative Development Program have invested in improving the enabling environment for cooperatives, cooperative development research, and activities to increase collaboration and learning among cooperative development organizations. However, it has been a daunting task to track specific cooperative development activities around the world by types of donors, implementing agencies, partners, budgets, sectors, and beneficiary countries.

To that end, the Project recently helped USAID/E3’s Office of Local Sustainability create a comprehensive database of international cooperative development activities as well as an interactive data visualization platform. The database includes information on global cooperative development activities such as sectors, funding sources, partners, geographic scope, and summary results. The online platform maps those activities to help users better understand the cooperative development environment and trends on global cooperative funding across sectors and other areas. By utilizing the tool, USAID, its partners, and other cooperative development actors can make better-informed decisions for future programming in support of cooperatives.

Synthesizing Evidence for Effective Decision-Making

An initial objective of the Agency’s evaluation system was to share evidence across the USAID community. However, in today’s era of work and information overload, resources such as the Agency’s Development Experience Clearinghouse – which holds around 12,000 evaluation reports – can also be a bridge too far. To help busy decision-makers quickly access the Agency’s wealth of evaluation lessons and digest evidence about “what works,” the Project is helping the E3 Bureau and the Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research in the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning (PPL/LER) produce and disseminate new evaluation evidence utilization products. The Project is building on its experience with the development and dissemination of user-friendly, accessible evaluation evidence products to help USAID staff quickly move from a need for evaluation lessons to having “what works” evidence in hand.

These evaluation synthesis activities include:

  • To synthesize evaluation evidence by topics, the Project produced a compendium of evaluation abstracts on the use of mobile devices in support of literacy, numeracy, and workforce development interventions. This allows users to rapidly locate the most relevant evaluations for the tasks and decisions they face.
  • The Project produced two volumes of Sectoral Syntheses of Evaluation Findings for the E3 Bureau (see 2013-2014 and 2015). These studies include topical summaries of evaluation findings organized around E3 sectors, as well as findings on the quality and compliance of evaluations in E3 sectors with Agency evaluation policy, using a checklist linked to USAID’s 2009-2012 Agency-wide meta-evaluation.
  • USAID/E3’s Office of Education worked with the Project to complete two new evaluation synthesis studies to support evidence-based decision-making that will advance development effectiveness. First, the team created a new tool to gauge the strength of evidence in education evaluation reports, which was used to screen 92 evaluation reports for evidence strength and then prepare three topical evaluation syntheses based on topics relevant to USAID’s Education Strategy.

An Evidence-Based Tool to Assess and Improve the Scaling Potential of Agricultural Innovations

A big question for the international development community is how to achieve large-scale, lasting, and sustainable adoption of agricultural innovations. What drivers, strategies, and activities will help scale up agricultural innovations in developing countries through commercial pathways?

Since 2015, the Project has been supporting USAID’s Bureau for Food Security to understand how donor projects can achieve greater scale and foster long-term commercial sustainability. First, the team prepared and synthesized five case studies of scaling up pro-poor agricultural innovations through commercial pathways in Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia.

Building on this research, USAID asked the Project to develop a tool to assess the scalability of agricultural innovations, to help guide future planning and resource allocation. The resulting Agricultural Scalability Assessment Toolkit allows Agency staff to appraise an innovation’s strengths and weaknesses relative to scalability, the most promising scaling up pathways, and the extent to which target locations and populations currently facilitate scaling.

The Toolkit consists of two components: An Agriculture Scaling Decision Tree (to help select the appropriate scaling up pathway for an innovation) and an Agricultural Scalability Assessment Matrix (to help determine if a commercial pathway is viable). The toolkit can help users integrate scaling up considerations, assess scaling progress, decide whether scaling up makes sense and the challenges involved, and modify current approaches to innovation design, testing, and scaling, based on new evidence.

Applying Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting Approaches to Address Social Impacts of Renewable Energy Projects

While Mexico is a global leader in attracting private sector investment in renewable energy through reverse auctions, solar and wind projects have faced significant challenges stemming from local community concerns about sharing in the project benefits. To address this challenge, USAID and its local implementing partner, Iniciativa Climática de México (ICM), are engaging local communities in participatory and inclusive development of renewable energy projects.

The Project is supporting the USAID-ICM team by introducing collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) approaches to provide “live” feedback and guidance and increase collaboration within the energy stakeholder community. The Project’s CLA support, in collaboration with the E3 Office of Energy and Infrastructure and USAID/Mexico, includes:

  • Formation of a Strategic Advisory Council to help ICM and USAID pause and reflect on project outcomes and strengths and weaknesses, and offer guidance and new perspectives on project implementation.
  • Enhanced collaboration with USAID implementing partners, other donors, and Mexican counterparts via quarterly meetings and collaboration on activities of common interest.
  • Capacity building of implementing partners and other stakeholders.
  • Top Photo: Survey of a woman cashew grower. Credit: Irene Velez/MSI, A Tetra Tech Company
  • Bottom Photo: Course with the strategic advisors and ICM staff. Credit: Ana Tamborrel/Palladium

Report Abuse

If you feel that this video content violates the Adobe Terms of Use, you may report this content by filling out this quick form.

To report a copyright violation, please follow the DMCA section in the Terms of Use.