Over the past two decades, the volume of rigorous impact evaluation evidence has grown dramatically — a major achievement for the evidence-informed development community. Yet turning this growing body of research into clear, reliable insights for decision-making remains slower, more costly and more fragmented than it should be. To address this, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Center for Effective Global Action, Center for Open Science, IDinsight, International Food Policy Research Institute and Policy Innovation Research Center are joining forces to launch the Sustainable Evidence Infrastructure Commitment to strengthen how evidence is produced, reported, shared and synthesized.
We, the signatories, acknowledge that developing a sustainable, reliable and trustworthy evidence infrastructure is essential for supporting evidence informed decision making. Therefore, we propose an initiative for strengthening the evidence pipeline, so studies are conducted, reported and published in ways that facilitate data re-use and synthesis.
To this end we commit to working in partnership to:
- Develop, adopt and disseminate common reporting standards for impact evaluations tailored to the social sciences;
- Develop and adopt data-sharing practices that facilitate data re-use from single studies and evidence synthesis;
- Develop a federated platform of registries so that all new impact evaluation studies enter the evidence pipeline in a streamlined manner, with interoperable data.
- Establish and contribute to an open access shared ‘data store’ for analysis data from impact evaluation papers.
As part of our efforts to further the agenda of open science and evidence-informed decision-making, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) are proud to facilitate this opportunity for researchers, funders, registries and publishers to contribute to developing a modernized and dramatically more efficient evidence to policy pipeline. We commit to coordinating with the signatories – including partners in the global south – to facilitate a co-designed process and to support the implementation of commitments made here.
We, the undersigned, welcome other international development researchers, funders and publishers to join us in this endeavor to improve the evidence pipeline and create the foundations for a sustainable, reliable and trustworthy evidence infrastructure for international development.
- Edward Miguel, Faculty Director, BITSS, and Faculty Co-Director, Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA)
- Brian Nosek, Executive Director, Center for Open Science
- Marc Shotland, Chief Technical and Learning Officer, IDInsight
- Johan Swinnen, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
- Marie Gaarder, Executive Director, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
- Solomon Zena Walelign, Executive Director, Policy Innovation Research Center (PIRC)
We welcome other partners in this initiative. To express your interest in joining the coalition, please fill out the following Google Form.