[Remarks as Prepared]
DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR ISOBEL COLEMAN: Thank you Roman [Napoli] for that excellent overview of Agency Learning and Evidence Month.
I just love Learning and Evidence month. In fact, the opportunity to strengthen aid effectiveness at USAID is one of the primary reasons I joined the Agency. All our work is valuable. But, with the reality of staggering needs around the world – and limited resources to meet those needs – it’s essential that we understand how to deploy those resources most effectively so that more lives will be saved and more lives will be transformed. It is no exaggeration to say that acting on the evidence about what works can literally be a matter of life and death.
That’s why this month was so important – to help us all learn more about "What Works and Where to Find It."
Agency Learning and Evidence Month has been a rousing success – more than 1,250 members of the USAID workforce and 560 external attendees from 106 countries around the world attended our 30 sessions. We learned how readily available and easy to access evidence is directly pertinent to our work – that we can learn from programs even in fragile contexts and on outcomes that may seem difficult to measure, and that learning from our programming has become a priority across the U.S. government, our peer institutions, and local organizations.
We heard from a variety of different organizations – our own technical bureaus, NGOs, multilaterals, local researchers, and academics – who showed us some of the evidence of “What Works” that they are able to generate and employ from each of their unique positions across the development field. Hearing from them showed us some better ways to source and accept evidence from beyond our own thematic area, geography or type of organization.
Our commitment to evidence was on display from the very beginning of the month, which we kicked off by signing the Global Evidence Commitment, a pledge for leading development institutions to improve evidence culture and use in their organizations. In becoming a signatory, we are joining our peer donor institutions including the Inter-American Development Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, and Germany’s KfW Development Bank.
This month presented us with many opportunities to learn about how fellow professionals in the development field are generating and employing evidence:
Our USAID colleagues in the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization described how a coordinated, interagency monitoring, evaluation, and learning framework can leverage our work in complex and fragile contexts to inform U.S. government policy going forward.
We heard from external academics how Randomized Controlled Trials (or RCTs), jointly run with the city government of Medellín, Colombia, improved government service provision.
And we heard in a number of sessions about the best practices that teams at USAID and our partner organizations have established to harness the power of local actors in evidence generation.
For example, speakers from USAID/Morocco shared their journey to ensure that not only their Mission’s activities – but also the evaluations, assessments, and research informing future work – are led by local experts and incorporate local knowledge. They have leveraged strong local research networks to effectively conduct data collection in local languages – identified nuanced, locally-prioritized findings to inform activity design; and paved the way for an upcoming locally led ex-post evaluation using participatory methods.
The World Bank joined us to share their 2024 World Development Report, their flagship learning product, which analyzes the evidence and lays out the most effective approaches for spurring economic growth in middle income countries. The report recommendations align with our work at USAID to embrace enterprise-driven development and engage the private sector – to invest in inclusion and equity to improve aid effectiveness and create sustainable economic growth and to support our partners to address the climate crisis.
The Office of the Chief Economist showed us that thinking in terms of cost-effectiveness can stretch our aid dollars in enormous ways. We can make an impact tens or even hundreds of times more effective by reviewing RCTs, carefully selecting interventions based on those findings, and targeting the most appropriate populations. They’ve been working with Missions such as Tanzania and Mozambique, which have been sharing their experiences using cost-effectiveness evidence to understand when and why a particular “Good Buy” tends to work, and also using it to identify less familiar “Good Buys” they should consider to improve priority outcomes.
And last week, Innovations for Poverty Action highlighted for us 14 emerging innovations across ten sectors, including climate change, crime and violence, women’s economic empowerment, education and more, classified as having substantial rigorous RCT evidence behind them, but requiring additional investments in research, policy work, and coalition-building to get to scale. We’ll post a link to their report in the chat. As the world’s largest bilateral aid organization, we are in a unique position to bring these proven solutions to scale.
Our teams across USAID have the partnerships, global reach, and intellectual curiosity necessary to strengthen the evidence base for what works in international development – and our staff around the world are doing this in a myriad of sectors and geographies. We can continue to improve and innovate in this area, especially regarding our uptake and use of all of the discoveries made from our evaluations and research. And we must keep working together to better address challenges with research in difficult environments and hidden populations. We invite you to partner with USAID to find out what works, contribute to our knowledge base by sharing your rigorous analyses, and work with us to scale evidenced-backed solutions to global challenges.
The Agency Learning Agenda, led by the Bureau for Planning, Learning, and Resource Management (PLR), is moving the needle by supporting a singular focus on evidence-based decision making at USAID. PLR’s new evidence repository will be a critical resource in assisting the USAID workforce in finding and using evidence.
We look forward to carrying this energy forward and partnering with all of you as we continue to use evidence to reach more people, more efficiently, and drive the truly transformative and sustainable change we seek.