USAID Agency

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USAID

Challenge

USAID needed to assess its capacity to manage and use evidence, including identifying effective practices, gaps, and challenges agency-wide as mandated under “The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.”

Undertaking these activities contributes to USAID’s overall Evidence Capacity Act Assessment submission to the OMG and propel USAID’s reflections on current practices, priority-setting, and capacity-building for evidence management and use. The assessment analyzed to what extent USAID incorporated evidence into its programmatic work; what ways agency staff access and facilitate use of evidence and which ways were the most effective; and, what approaches did USAID use to build staff capacity in evidence management and use including identifying which were the most effective. Assessing the above activities would allow USAID to obtain a baseline against which senior Agency officials can measure improvements to the coverage, quality, methods, effectiveness, and independence of their agency statistics, evaluation, research and analysis.

IT Shows helped USAID meet a congressional mandate to assess its data, evaluation, and evidence capability.

Solution

A highly qualified team of staff and consultants were deployed to conduct a rigorous assessment in 83 countries presenting their findings and recommendations to Agency officials.

As the first evidence capacity assessment of its kind, IT Shows was able to provide a comprehensive baseline for USAID of its data and evidence capacity. To accomplish this, IT Shows focused on five capacity areas and 13 sub-domains that we identified as the most critical to USAID’s evidence management a use. Using a mixed-methods approach, IT Shows was able to draw quantitative and qualitative data from 44 key informant interviews, 637 survey respondents, and 13 workshops held with personnel across USAID’s Missions, Bureaus and Independent Offices. By the end of the contract, IT Shows was able to provide USAID with a comprehensive understanding of its capacity to manage evidence and use, key gaps to be addressed to strengthen capacity, and recommendations for integrating evidence-based approaches into their future programming.

More
Cases

Kenya

Evaluating USAID’s Health Portfolio

Zambia

Country Development Strategy Evaluation

USAID Washington

Assessing Multi-Country Evidence Capacity

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