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This practical guide from the UK Evaluation Society explores how evaluators can use AI tools responsibly and transparently across all stages of the evaluation process.

Earlier this year we spoke to 102 leaders from across the globe to ask: Ten years from now, what will we regret not having done today? This framing turned out to be a powerful device for collective horizon scanning and foresight. Across every conversation there was a sense that this moment demands more from us all, along with a strong eagerness to explore what we can own and act on. More than that, these discussions surfaced direction, hope and a way forward. From CEOs, professors, PhDs,...

This paper shares an insider's perspective on the spread of Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting lessons learned along the way that are relevant even beyond the dissolution of the Agency in 2025.

The CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy commits organizational change with seven ways of working, including “Making the digital revolution central to our way of working”. In that context, Artificial Intelligence (AI), introduces both opportunities and risks to evaluation practice. Guided by the CGIAR-wide Evaluation Framework, integrating AI tools requires a governance approach to balance innovation with ethical responsibility, ensuring transparency, fairness, accountability, and...

One of the main questions evaluators have when using AI is: "How can I know if it performs well?" To answer this question, we have developed a guidance note aimed at capturing what we have learned so far about integrating AI into evaluation and to offer a framework for further exploration. Since we began our experiments with Large Language Models (LLMs) in the Spring of 2023, we have made significant progress in using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) for processing and analyzing...

Generative AI (GenAI) is evolving rapidly, and its use in violence against women research remains new and largely experimental. While researchers are beginning to explore GenAI’s potential, uncertainty around its risks, ethical challenges, and real-world application persists. Recognising the need for clear guidance, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) partnered with The MERL Tech Initiative (MTI) to develop this resource. This guide aims to provide background on GenAI, strengthen...

Relational state capacity (RSC) integrates the quality of citizen-state relationships into the concept of state capacity, emphasizing mutual recognition between citizens and state agents as foundational for societal problem-solving. Traditional state capacity definitions overemphasize technical and institutional elements, overlooking relational dynamics. RSC is a latent societal resource activated through mutual recognition in citizen-state exchanges with potential to improve outcomes across...

This paper describes, synthesises and analyses the work of 25 Action Research Groups that were the heartbeat of the CLARISSA Systemic Action Research programme. The CLARISSA programme worked to create participatory and systemic solutions to the worst forms of child labour in the adult entertainment sector in Nepal, and the leather sector in Bangladesh. The paper explores how the action research groups were set up, and how they worked through key stages of trust and relationship building,...

In an evolving international development landscape, the push for localization has gained urgency. Global South Intermediary Organizations (GSIs) are emerging as key players, offering a promising pathway to achieving localization programming. To harness their potential, it is crucial to develop a deeper understanding of their functions, structures, and strategies. However, they should complement—not replace—direct funding relationships with grassroots organizations. The Trust,...

Government offices are filled with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that strain their capacity to make decisions, use data effectively, and achieve ambitious sustainable development goals. Public investments in digital development, transformation, and infrastructure can only meet citizen needs if data and systems are consolidated and interoperable. While interoperability is a sensible approach to building digital public infrastructure, transforming existing systems is easier said...

This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence. --- A framework for embedding learning in systems change strategies and for testing strategic uncertainties. Learning and evaluation approaches that accompany systems change efforts need to fit with and support the emergent...

The Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) toolkit is a practical resource designed to help humanitarian practitioners overcome monitoring challenges in reduced access environments. Reduced access can be caused by natural disaster, conflict, political instability, or other factors, and typically makes it difficult to conduct normal monitoring of program implementation. The RAAM toolkit offers technical and managerial tools for a menu of analytical methods that can fill information gaps...

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to...

The guide begins with a section on what we at TAF have learned about practicing Strategy Testing, highlighting things that we didn’t know when we started out. Some of these lessons may seem obvious, but others may strike you as less so. In any case, we believe that, when taken together, they provide a useful reminder of some of the pitfalls that arise in efforts to practice Adaptive Management. Moreover, they help to remind us that there are multiple layers to doing Strategy Testing...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

The Program Cycle is USAID’s operational model for planning, delivering, assessing, and adapting development programming in a given region or country to advance U.S. foreign policy. It encompasses guidance and procedures for: 1) Making strategic decisions at the regional or country level about programmatic areas of focus and associated resources; 2) Designing supportive projects and/or activities to implement these strategic plans; and 3) Learning from performance monitoring, evaluations,...

Digital innovations are constantly redefining the boundaries of what is possible and, therefore, bring with them many challenges: it is important for organisations to scale impactful solutions and bring about positive change on a global level – a scaling toolkit is designed to help with this. With the Scaling Toolkit, a healthcare organisation, for example, can scale a digital health monitoring system, adapt it to the local language, and integrate it seamlessly into existing infrastructure....

The CommunityFirst Framework is intended to be implemented by field teams at MSF. The theoretical aspects and evidence presented on the importance of community engagement are intended for all MSF staff seeking to learn more about why and how to shift the way we work with communities as humanitarians. We believe this guideline, and other tools like it (including OCA’s Person-Centred Approach Guidance07, and MSF Vienna Evaluation Unit’s Guidance for Involving Communities08), to be an important...

Any mission-focused government should be well equipped to define, from day one, what outcomes it wants to bring about. But radically changing what the government does is only part of the challenge. We also need to change how government does things. The usual methods, we argue in this paper, are too prone to failure and delay. There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing...