About the event:

The international community has rallied around the SDGs, as it did the preceding MDGs. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each to reduce child mortality, get and keep girls in school, move households out of poverty and so on. But are these dollars well spent - do the interventions they support actually work? Recent years have seen the rise of evidence-based policy and practice, with growing evidence about what works and what doesn't. Findings from these studies should be summarized in systematic reviews. The Campbell Collaboration has published around 40 reviews of different development interventions (and many more on interventions in developed countries some of which are relevant in a development setting). This talk will present some main lessons from these reviews, in particular the meta-analyses, they contain. Notable findings include that (1) many things don't work, (2) and when they do work, effect sizes are small, (3) with more rigorous studies finding smaller effects than less rigorous studies. (4) Positive effects are more likely in pilots but not at scale - efforts to scale programmes often fail, and (5) effects are smaller higher up the causal chain. The talk will conclude by showing examples of how a well-designed, mixed method synthesis, can give useful insights for programme design.

 
Speaker: Howard White, CEO of The Campbell Collaboration

 
Registration alongside tea and coffee from 4.30 pm.

Attendance is free and open to all, whether fellows of the RSS or not, but pre-registration is required.