In partnership with: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) who has financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Coopération Globale and International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).
Executive summary
The world is facing a complex set of interconnected challenges, with many Sustainable Development Goals off-track. There is an urgent need to identify cost-effective solutions, based on evidence about what works, to improve the impact of development policy and practice.
Between 09-11 December 2024, experts and practitioners from around the world gathered at Wilton Park to consider strategies for enhancing the use of evidence in policymaking, forge partnerships, and commit to practical actions designed to increase the impact of evidence-based development efforts worldwide. Throughout the discussions, several recurrent themes emerged around which a series of action points and commitments were structured. These included the barriers to the uptake of evidence, methods and evidence generation, cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness, locally-led development, balancing context-specificity with implementation at scale, data accessibility and synthesis, and forming working relationships between evidence producers, policymakers, and global partners. Participants agreed a number of strategies to drive forward the use of evidence in global development policy, and expressed a desire to maintain the momentum gathered during this event via a series of follow-up meetings.
Introduction: the value of evidence to global development policy
High-quality evidence has the potential to significantly improve decision-making and enhance the impact of global development policy.
Evidence on what policy interventions work can enable more people around the world to live longer and more meaningful lives. This investment in evidence not only reflects our values but also helps to create stable markets, prevents health threats, and offers a cost-effective alternative to conflict: ultimately strengthening shared security and prosperity. Meanwhile, in today’s fragile geopolitical climate, evidence can enable successful programmes to adapt to changing external circumstances and allow interventions to be both scaled up and applied in a variety of contexts.
Robust evidence also fulfils a range of other key functions. It fosters accountability and transparency, demonstrating to taxpayers in donor countries that their money is being used responsibly and productively and strengthening levels of political trust. It also highlights the importance of continuing to fund global development programmes, and in the context of declining Official Development Assistance (ODA) budgets has the potential to unlock more funding for development from other sources. High-quality evidence can also create and sustain a feedback-loop, generating demand for more evidence and feeding a virtuous cycle with long-term benefits for global development policy.
Recent decades have seen a large uptick in the amount of evidence produced in the global development sphere, with a notable spike in the number of impact evaluations observable during the past five years. However, while we now know more than ever about what works and what doesn’t across a range of global contexts, evidence uptake remains low. To maximise the potential of evidence to improve lives it is vital to work together to promote the value of evidence to those with the power to make decisions, produce research that demonstrates cost-effectiveness, and facilitate successful programme implementation and scalability.