Video: Cost-ober 2020 Webinar Series Part II: How Do Donors Think About Cost Evidence?

In October and November 2020, CEGA’s Cost Transparency Initiative (CTI) and associated Costing Community of Practice (CCoP) hosted its inaugural “Cost-ober” webinar series including virtual panel discussions with front-line policymakers, donors, journal editors, researchers, and practitioners regarding the role of cost evidence in boosting the policy relevance of impact evaluation research. Understanding the costs of a program or policy–in addition to its impacts–is critical to making informed decisions about how limited development resources are spent. Yet the supply of cost evidence in international development is low, of inferior quality, and lacking in transparency.

On October 27th, as part of the Cost-ober 2020 webinar series, CEGA hosted “Cost-ober Part II: How Do Donors Think About Cost Evidence?” Panelists from top aid agencies and foundations discussed the demand for cost evidence within their own organizations; shared examples of how cost evidence policy for funded projects could inform programming in LMIC settings, and spoke to the experience of institutionalizing cost data collection and analysis.

Moderator: Carson Christiano, Executive Director, CEGA Panelists: Ruth E. Levine, CEO and Partner of IDinsight, formerly head of the Global Development and Population Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Nazmul Chaudhury, Lead Economist, World Bank’s Operations Policy and Country Services (OPCS) Hannah Reed, Program Officer on the Agricultural Development team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Dr. Neil Buddy Shah, Managing Director, GiveWell Daniel Handel, Evaluation Team Lead in USAID’s Policy, Planning and Learning Bureau.

For more information, see the event page.