Causal Design

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CategoriesBlog Post Opinion

Evaluation in the Age of Climate Change

Between Greta Thunberg’s Time ‘Person of the Year’ awards, and almost concurrent end to a do-nothing UN climate talks in Madrid (to borrow from our US Congress lexicon), two things were reinforced, again, these past weeks: the urgency of climate change, and our inability to address it, at least from on-high.

Remarkably, however, for an industry that is rooted in evidence, which examines disparities in health and well being across time and space (and especially among groups and sub-groups), and which holds dear an ethical mantra of ‘do no harm,’ Evaluation has done little to either mainstream the role of climate in our own practice, nor to ameliorate the industry’s impact (because, while disparate and far flung, we are an industry).

CategoriesBlog Post Opinion Research

DAC Coherence First Thoughts

The OECD-DAC recently added to its list of evaluation criteria—the de facto norm through which organizations like Causal Design frequently organize evaluations and reporting. Specifically, after a multi-year process of considering how to best adapt its existing criteria, OECD added Coherence: How well does the intervention fit? to the existing and remaining five criteria.

Reactions around our proverbial dinner table were appropriately mixed: How does this further a wider learning agenda? How does this differ from the existing Relevance? (which at times already overlaps with Sustainability) What does “fit” actually mean, and how do we use it, and meaningfully?

CategoriesGraduate Fellow Opinion

Grad Fellow Notes: Data Science & Development

According to a 2015 report by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, 2/3rd of global internet users come from the developing world. In some countries, like India, mobile phone use is as high as 75%. These trends are generating large amounts of data, which present a new opportunity for tech-savvy development practitioners. Governments and NGOs can utilize the data to make well-informed decisions and provide more effective services at a cheaper price. The question however, is how to do this.

CategoriesCommunity Opinion

Shift to Emperics

I was just forwarded a Bloomberg article by a good friend along with a note that she finally understood -kinda- what it is we do. Many, my own family included, believe that economists spend their days coming up with theoretical models for what could happen in the market. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to explain […]

Thoughts on External Evaluations

Let me preface this by saying that these thoughts have been brewing for a while; they do not refer to any specific client or individual experience… /*Begin Rant The industry of evaluation is interesting.  Most of our team comes from a research background. While we do program evaluations, we approach it with the tactics of a […]