International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)

24/09/2026

3ie returns to Mozambique this year to find out what happened to a generation of children nearly 20 years after a preschool program changed their early lives.

In 2008, a study by our Evaluation Director, Sebastian Martinez, found that low-cost community preschools improved school enrollment, cognitive skills, and socio-emotional development for participating children. That evidence led the Mozambican government to scale the program to 350 additional communities, and continues to shape early-childhood education debates well beyond Mozambique.

Whether those early gains hold up into adulthood has remained an open question. Our new long-term study aims to understand what happened in the lives of those former preschoolers. A pilot re-contact effort 18 years after the baseline has already tracked down 129 of 150 original participants. The full survey of around 2,000 participants begins later this year.

🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/3VNlqWA

23/09/2026

Have you received our latest newsletter?

Each month we share what our evaluations are finding, where that evidence is landing, and what we're learning about getting it used.

In this edition:
🎯 Closing the loop — returning findings to the communities in Sierra Leone and Guinea that took part in our PeaceFIELD evaluation, a step the field too often skips once data collection ends
🎯 Costa Rica — an independent impact evaluation of a decade of evaluation capacity development work, presented in San José with MIDEPLAN and DEval
🎯 India — our DAY-NRLM findings cited in a written reply to the Lok Sabha; the study covered roughly 23,000 households across nine states
🎯 Indonesia — a new MoU with SMERU Research Institute
🎯 From Nairobi and Asian Evaluation Week — on institutional incentives, and on using AI in evidence synthesis without loosening rigour
🎯 Two open calls, both closing this month

📖 Read and subscribe to the latest edition: https://bit.ly/4yXR5mN
📩 Subscribe to get next month's edition straight to your inbox: https://bit.ly/3ieNewsSignup

22/09/2026

We are excited to join the Evidence and Implementation Summit, hosted by the Centre for Evidence and Implementation, on 29 September for a session on AI and evidence: the perils and the promise.

AI is reshaping how evidence is generated, synthesized, and used. Our Director of Synthesis and Reviews, Birte Snilstveit, will join Professor Julian Elliott (Future Evidence Foundation) and Dr Serene Koh (Behavioural Insights Team), facilitated by Professor Aron Shlonsky (Monash University), to unpack:
✅ Practical tips for high-quality AI-assisted evidence generation and synthesis
✅ How to ensure transparency, critical analysis, and human oversight
✅ Opening the "black box" of AI evidence systems
✅ Emerging methods for trustworthy, equitable evidence

📅 29 September | 9:00–10:00 BST
Register here:

Bringing together experts at the cutting edge of the AI revolution, this webinar offers perspectives on how we can best navigate this new world of evidence, and what knowledge and skills are needed now and into the future.

22/09/2026

Can a decline in illegal behaviour be credibly attributed to the campaign that set out to change it?

This week's looks at a conservation marketing campaign in São Tomé, Central Africa, and at what happens when the numbers move in the right direction but several things move at once.

Tataluga — Mém Di Omali ("Sea Turtle — the mother of the sea") combined cooking contests, theatre, a football championship, billboards and radio jingles to reduce consumption of sea turtle meat and eggs. Laura Thomas-Walters and colleagues evaluated it across eight coastal communities, surveying 2,496 people before and after, and pairing that with eight years of beach monitoring data.

What they found:

Self-reported egg consumption in the intervention communities fell from 40% to 11%. Meat consumption showed no significant change. Poaching of adult turtles declined significantly — but that decline had already begun before the campaign started. And in the comparison communities, the survey technique produced design effects that made the behavioural estimates unusable.

The honest conclusion is about contribution. Enforcement of São Tomé's 2014 trade ban intensified over the same period, culminating in a major market seizure in 2017, and patrol hours rose year on year. The authors are explicit that they cannot disentangle the campaign's effect from these concurrent changes.

The lesson travels well beyond conservation. An evaluation that compared only the year before to the year after would have credited the campaign with the whole decline. By extending the time series as far back as the data allowed, the team spotted a pre-existing trend and went looking for confounders.

Read the full study on the Development Evidence Portal.

20/08/2026

How do you find the right study in a repository of 18,000?

We're testing DevChat, an AI assistant built on 3ie's Development Evidence Portal. Ask a question, get an answer grounded in rigorous impact evaluations and systematic reviews, with every claim linked to the study it came from.

Now in beta. Get in touch if you'd like to test it.

🤖 Coming soon: explore development evidence through conversation! 3ie is preparing to launch , a , generative AI-powered chatbot designed to make rigorous development evidence easier to discover, understand and use. What distinguishes DevChat from a general-purpose chatbot is...

11/08/2026

We are excited to share that 3ie and The SMERU Research Institute have signed an MoU to strengthen the generation and use of rigorous evidence for better policy outcomes in Indonesia and the region.

This partnership brings together 3ie's global expertise in impact evaluation and evidence synthesis with SMERU's deep contextual knowledge of Indonesia's development landscape. The MoU lays the foundation for a long-term partnership grounded in rigor, transparency, and a commitment to using evidence to improve lives.

🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/4cwcri0

14/07/2026

From insights on what works in climate action and migration policy to evidence on rural livelihoods and women's empowerment, our newsletter brings together research, events and partnerships that strengthen evidence-informed decision-making.

👉 Highlights from our Evidence Dialogues series on building stronger evidence for smarter climate action.
👉 New evidence synthesis exploring what rigorous research tells us about addressing irregular migration.
👉 Findings from 3ie's long-term evaluation of India's rural livelihoods program and implications for policy.
👉 Updates on new call for papers and opportunities to engage with 3ie's work.

🆕 Catch up on the latest research, events and resources 👉 https://bit.ly/4yqQuKW

10/07/2026

📢 Inviting papers for the next special issue of the Journal of Development Effectiveness on 'Rapid and Responsive Evidence Synthesis for Sustainable Development'.

We welcome submissions exploring the full range of technological, methodological, and relational innovations in evidence synthesis. We are interested in a wide range of contribution types, including but not limited to:
👉 Methods development and testing of AI tools
👉 Other methodological innovations
👉 Applied examples and case studies
👉 Knowledge translation and evidence use

📅 Manuscript submission deadline: 30 September 2026
📜 Guest Editors:
➡️ Dr Ashrita Saran, Global Development Network
➡️ Birte Snilstveit, 3ie

🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/3iewebJDEff

09/07/2026

Irregular migration is one of the most debated issues in development policy.

Over the last year, with support from IOB-evaluatie at the Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, we updated our Evidence Gap Map on migration and produced four new evidence summaries, bringing together the latest rigorous research on what influences migration decisions and what interventions actually achieve.

The findings challenge some common assumptions and highlight important gaps in what we know and where future research is most needed.

Read our latest blog ➡️ https://bit.ly/4gMYoYH

07/07/2026

⏰ 2 days to go! Have you signed up?

How do we move from just producing climate evidence to ensuring it shapes better climate decisions? Join 3ie and What Works Climate Solutions for the this week to discuss and understand how we can build stronger demand for evidence among policymakers, funders and practitioners.

📅 9 July 2026
🔗 Register now: https://bit.ly/4g3SVw8