Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL)
Motivation
The last few decades have seen explosive growth in the number of impact evaluations—randomized evaluations in particular—that seek to guide policy decision-making in low- and middle-income countries. However, there are important gaps in translating this ever-expanding wealth of knowledge into actionable and credible policy insights. When moving from evidence generation to aggregation, translation, and adaptation, a key challenge is the lack of standardization and comparability of the main results produced by each study.
Activities
CEGA is excited to collaborate with the World Bank as part of a global consortium of institutions to fill this gap by constructing an Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL). Hosted by the World Bank, IDEAL will be fully open-access and free for the world to use. Users can easily search, compare, and visualize relative effect sizes on a range of outcomes and of many different policy interventions across countries and contexts. We expect IDEAL to facilitate quantitative meta-analyses as well as more qualitative systematic reviews, whether such efforts are centered around an intervention, policy, population, or outcome.
Importantly, IDEAL will help guide the standardization of key information from randomized evaluations, enabling more meaningful comparisons across studies while unlocking the potential to answer a wide range of methodological questions.
The IDEAL team will begin with a pilot phase, during which we will extract a minimum set of fields for a curated initial set of studies, and develop protocols for the library’s ongoing growth and maintenance. Once established, we will invite others to join, guided by consistent protocols for adding new content and rigorous quality control. Ultimately, we aim to scale across many sectors and programs in global development and develop a set of pedagogical resources for mainstreaming evidence aggregation methods across the research and policy community.
If you are interested in learning more about CEGA’s contributions to IDEAL, and how to support and/or collaborate with us, please contact Sarah Stillman.
