Meeting the moment: CEGA’s strategic priorities in a changing global development landscape

How is CEGA preparing for this new era in global development aid and philanthropy? Carson Christiano (Executive Director) and Lauren Russell (Director of Operations and Strategy) share the center’s top priorities for the new fiscal year (2025-2026), developed to endure policy swings and divestment from foreign assistance while continuing to achieve impact for the global development community.

A lot has changed since the last time we developed annual goals: divestment in foreign aid by the US, UK, and EU; the end of USAID; overhauls to the NIH, the NSF, and other federal agencies; shifting philanthropic priorities; and considerable lingering uncertainty. This dynamism requires flexibility as well as careful strategic planning to ensure that CEGA can continue to drive impact despite shrinking budgets, political swings, and evolving dynamics in the evidence-based policy ecosystem.

For over fifteen years, CEGA has supplied decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with rich evidence, insights, and tools they can use to identify cost-effective solutions for reducing poverty and improving lives. With so much on the line, this mission is more important than ever.

To meet the moment, CEGA is leaning into our comparative advantages in data science, cost-effectiveness, capacity development, and open science. Our priorities include:

1. Leverage nontraditional data and methods.

Governments, NGOs, and others interested in improving outcomes for people living in poverty tend to work in data-sparse environments. Often, they are forced to make highly consequential decisions about the delivery and design of public infrastructure, social safety nets, financial services, and other critical benefits without clear visibility into local needs and conditions. Meanwhile, survey data is expensive and difficult to collect, and cash-strapped ministries seldom have the capacity to obtain it within a reasonable time frame. CEGA will lean into our comparative advantage in data science and support researchers and decision-makers to harness nontraditional data passively collected through mobile devices, satellites, and other decentralized sources to rigorously track and measure outcomes and evaluate development interventions.

2. Institutionalize cost-effectiveness evidence.

Shrinking aid budgets mean that the global development community must do more with less. But how can leaders make decisions about which programs to continue, scale, or sunset without credible cost-effectiveness estimates? Unfortunately, spending decisions are often based on shaky estimates of cost. This year, CEGA will build on the cost-effectiveness standards and tools we have already developed to consistently and reliably predict intervention costs and help to design programs that hit well-informed cost-effectiveness targets. Beyond improving development programming, investments like this can dramatically improve both the quality and usefulness of academic research.

3. Scale effective capacity-building models.

Cultivating the capacity of LMIC scholars and policymakers in the generation of data and evidence for decision-making is core to CEGA’s work. Whether building capacity in-country through the Togo Data Lab, or training African social scientists at UC Berkeley through one of our fellowship programs CEGA’s capacity building partnerships are grounded in mutual respect and co-creation. Far beyond building capacity, these programs allow CEGA to be more responsive to local needs and support governments and other development actors to own and scale solutions to self-identified priorities. This year, CEGA aims to expand our fellowship programs to meet growing demand, and scale our Togo Data Lab model to other countries.

4. Make practical insights available to decision-makers.

CEGA’s flagship open science initiative, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), shifts research norms towards greater standardization while building infrastructure to support the seamless translation of evidence to policy. As governments, foundations, and others “staying in the game” of foreign aid try to do more with less, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to decipher academic research when they make tough spending decisions. This year, the Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP), Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL), and Reporting Guidelines and Publication Bias (RGPB) project all promise to advance the standardization of results reporting and facilitate efficient synthesis of research. Meanwhile, we are working with peer centers to ensure that these platforms incorporate costing and cost-effectiveness analysis, to easily, consistently, and accurately determine intervention ROI.

5. Advance methods for measuring livelihoods.

Income is a key indicator of effectiveness for a wide range of development programs—from those that provide cash to agricultural inputs and human capital development. Yet there are few standardized tools or guidelines for the measurement of income, making it difficult for funders and policymakers to track the progress of their grantees and make sense of the growing evidence base. This year, CEGA is working to improve the measurement of income and other livelihood-related outcomes in LMICs by working with partners to map existing tools and analytical approaches, develop and validate new ones, and help to facilitate the adoption of the most promising tools by researchers and practitioners. In doing so, we can dramatically improve the relevance and quality of income data, and thus the ability of funders to make smart resource allocation decisions.

Now is the time for organizations across the global development ecosystem to assess where they can add the most value vis-à-vis others, by bolstering existing efforts and considering new approaches. In the face of an uncertain funding and political landscape, CEGA will continue to drive evidence-based change by leveraging several of our long-standing comparative advantages, while exploring opportunities to meet this moment by applying our assets in new and strategic ways.