This week, we share a Q&A with IDinsight’s East Africa Regional Director to find out what drives and inspires her to do this work. Frida Njogu-Ndongwe is a medical doctor and public health and development specialist. She currently leads IDinsight’s team and operations in East Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya…

A new helpdesk developed by 3ie and IDinsight provides West African policymakers with evidence to inform their policies. By Paul Thissen, Evaluation and Communication Specialist, 3ie In the countries where the West Africa Capacity-building and Impact Evaluation (WACIE) program works, the gaps in evaluation experience are stark, as the program’s…

In this Q+A, IDinsight’s Marc Shotland, Director of the Research, Evaluation, and Data Team, shares evidence on what makes distance learning programs successful and the factors that contribute to their failure. The COVID-19 pandemic caused school closures worldwide, forcing educators to find innovative ways to teach students away from the…

A “mystery shopper survey” can assess trainees’ skills on the job, providing insight to strengthen employment readiness programs. By Christy Lazicky, Torben Fischer, and Michael Otieno In communities with high youth unemployment rates, technical training programs can seem like an effective path to prepare young people for the workplace. But…

By Sid Ravinutala We recently rebuilt our machine learning (ML) model for Educate Girls (EG). Though part of the motivation was paying down some tech debt (fixing shortcuts), the main reason was to incorporate all the feedback and learnings on the performance of the ML model from the last few…

Ruth Levine, IDinsight’s CEO, gave a keynote speech entitled “The Promise and Pitfalls of Co-creation” at the Evidence and Implementation Summit on March 30, 2021. Below are her prepared remarks. Link here to the video. It is a huge pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with this audience today…

How (and why) we use GitHub Actions to help us deploy new surveys even faster. By Jeenu Thomas and Sid Ravinutala At IDinsight, we do a lot of surveys. Informing decisions often means collecting primary data. For example, last year we ran 21 survey campaigns where we reached over 100…

On International Women’s Day, IDinsight CEO Ruth Levine reflects on the multiple ways we must disrupt gendered behavior and structural bias. By Ruth Levine I once asked a gender studies historian what we could learn from our past progress on women’s rights to help us focus our attention now: Should…

As Chris Chibwana, IDinsight Partner and Head of Africa, departs the organization, he shares five valuable lessons on evidence-informed policymaking. This week is my last at IDinsight, an organization I joined in October 2017 after spending seven years at USAID. When I joined the organization, I had no idea what…