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On December 2, 2024, David Miliband, President and CEO of the ̽����ѡ (̽����ѡ), delivered a keynote at the UNICEF and WFP Global Impact Evaluation Forum. He highlighted the ̽����ѡ’s commitment to addressing global humanitarian challenges through innovation, evidence-based solutions, and strategic partnerships. Key issues included malnutrition, women’s health, climate resilience, and education in conflict zones.

With over 300 million people in need of aid and 120 million forcibly displaced, Miliband called for stronger collaboration among NGOs, donors, and UN agencies to maximize the impact of every dollar spent. 

Read the full transcript of his speech below, showcasing ̽����ѡ's leadership in driving real change through evidence and impact evaluations.

Transcript

I am grateful for the chance to share the experience of the ̽����ѡ (̽����ѡ) today.  We are an international humanitarian aid and refugee resettlement agency focused on helping people whose lives have been shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and rebuild their lives.

My case today is simple: that a flammable world of growing crisis, more civil wars and more refugees, more protracted conflicts and complex crises, as well as growing contest of the case for aid programing, needs a new level of focus, commitment and fidelity from donors, UN agencies and NGOs to making and using evidence, to driving the innovations that offer the greatest hope of improvement in people’s lives, and then to linking that evidence to clear outcomes that serve the interest of affected populations. 

Founded at the call of Albert Einstein, the use of evidence is in ̽����ѡ’s DNA and at the core of our theory of change. Our vision is not just to deliver highest quality programs; it is also to build the case for the impact of our sector by producing, using and sharing rigorous evidence– including and especially through impact evaluations.

As frontline implementers, we know the real challenge is finding the best ways to scale our impacts within finite resources.  Impact and reach cannot be a zero sum game.  We have to drive them in tandem.

Our aspiration is that every humanitarian program we deliver is either evidence based or evidence generating, and ideally both. This has meant conducting impact evaluations in fragile settings not just to improve our programs, but to help improve the sector. By 2022, we accounted for around 3 per cent of the global humanitarian budget, but had conducted 30% of impact evaluations in humanitarian settings.  We also have done 400 cost effectiveness and cost efficiency studies.

This work drives our programing, and has helped our clients.  From a simplified protocol for diagnosing and treating acute malnutrition, where we showed that it was was at least as good at helping children recover as the standard approach that uses multiple products and complex weight based dosing, as well as achieving costs 20% less per child treated, to the cost effectiveness of large scale delivery in cash assistance, to the prevention of gender-based violence, to a remote early learning program that helps refugee children stay on track with respect to overall early childhood development, literacy and numeracy, we count the fruits of our commitment to following the evidence and counting cost in lives improved around the world.

The case for impact evaluation 

I know this is a conference of people committed to impact evaluation.  But we need to recognize the new context in which we are working, and how the case for impact evaluation needs to be re-made.

It starts for us with the moral case for impact evaluation.  The world’s most vulnerable people need the benefit of high impact interventions more than any of us.  At ̽����ѡ, and across many of the UN, donor and partner agencies represented here today, we have been sounding the alarm. 300 million in humanitarian need, 120 million forcibly displaced, 250 million living at IPC 3 or above levels of food insecurity.

Next week, our team at the ̽����ѡ will release our annual Emergency Watchlist: A World Out of Balance. It is a list of 20 countries that our data and people suggest will be most vulnerable to crisis next year. More than that, it is an analysis of why these 20 countries comprise only 11% of the population, but around three quarters of all people in humanitarian need. And it will show how great is the gap between humanitarian need and humanitarian funding - in fact greater than ever.

The moral case for impact evaluation is quite simply that there is not enough money to go around so we need to make sure every dollar is not just well spent but spent as well as possible.

We acknowledge and embrace that the ethical base for running experiments with people who are already vulnerable needs to be strong. The protection of human beings is always paramount, and we must have well established systems and procedures for this. However,  where we don’t know what works, or where we have innovations that may dramatically improve reach and results, it is unethical NOT to test rigorously for impact.  The medical field has long held this principle. 

I also want to make the political case for impact evaluations.  Let’s be honest: international aid is under scrutiny as never before.  Often it is under attack, direct from those skeptical of aid, and indirect from those who see other priorities closer to home. 

And the cheapest shot is that what the aid sector does not “work”.  Impact evaluations are the best shield against that.

Impact evaluations allow us to show that our programs can improve – and even transform – the lives of individuals and the fates of communities. They also help us steer the course, optimizing the impact of every dollar spent – for the greatest cumulative effect. For this reason, we should embrace and share our null findings as readily as our breakthroughs.

This is why our research agenda is inseparable from our innovation agenda – research should show us where we’re falling short, where further innovation is needed. And innovation in turn should give us new solutions to test. 

From our point of view, our sector needs to step up with new vigor and new rigor.  Here are four critical next steps in the effort to make evidence an effective driver of improvement in people’s lives.

 The 4 critical next steps 

First, we have to zero-in on the areas where there is greatest gap between needs and provision, and between needs and evidence of what works. At ̽����ѡ we have chosen four priorities.

Over the last five years, we have had a particular focus on building evidence on: malnutrition, women's health, education and climate. We have developed innovations for the last mile treatment of deadly malnutrition, for better serving women and their children through community-based and self-administered healthcare, for leveraging technology to bridge gaps in education in conflict settings and for engaging community leaders to promote high quality indigenous seeds that are resilient to climate events like flood and drought . We have either completed or are in the process of launching impact evaluations on each of these innovations.

Second, to fuel this effort, we need to make much more mainstream the idea that research and impact evaluation needs to be a core part of programing, and a core part of learning within and between organizations. 

We urge donors to fund impact evaluations in conjunction with all major projects, but also to consider the examples of the UK Government’s What Works and USAID’S Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE) which provide significant sustained funding for evidence generation and impact evaluations across the sector.

̽����ѡ leads the What Works 2 consortium on the prevention of violence against women and girls which aims to  systematically design, implement and rigorously evaluate a range of approaches to scaling up violence prevention efforts. And we are supporting the PILCEE consortium to extend their work into humanitarian settings where we have networks and presence.

The determination of USAID leadership to appoint Dean Karlan, who I understand is here this week, and empower his Office of the Chief Economist with a mandate to drive cost effectiveness and cost efficiency is exactly what we need. We are likewise delighted by the opportunity to work with NORAD, also well-represented this week, as they strive to ensure high-quality evidence generation and uptake under a new expanded mandate that includes humanitarian assistance. 

Towards the aim of sharing what works, ̽����ѡ maintains our Outcomes and Evidence Framework as an interactive public good. It allows program planners to explore actionable, accessible evidence summaries that are aligned with theories of change for each of the outcomes we aim to achieve.

Third, we need to radically expand the production and reporting of COST data across the sector. At ̽����ѡ, we’ve set a goal that every impact evaluation should include cost analysis by default. Over time we’ve developed both the tools and the muscle memory to make this a reality.

We also invite all partners here– especially UN agencies– to join us in building a movement that produces and shares cost data rigorously and transparently. In 2018, we distilled our cost analysis methodology into a software tool called. Dioptra uses project data and program staff knowledge to calculate the cost per output of any intervention.

What started as an internal resource is now a consortium and a community: Eight organizations with a combined $7 billion annual budget have adopted Dioptra and come together to share findings as the Dioptra consortium. But if we want to stretch humanitarian dollars further across the sector we need many more partners.

Fourth, we must continue pushing the envelope to form innovative partnerships across frontline agencies, like the ̽����ѡ, and academic institutions globally, not just in the global north.

Traditional partnerships that combine academic expertise with frontline contextual and operational knowledge are key. But we also have experience with the Zollberg fellows partnership with the New School that brings fellows with unique skill sets to sit in our innovation lab.

We have partnerships with Global South universities that create multinational research teams as well as unprecedented opportunities for graduate students from the countries where we work.

Conclusion

My approach to this is simple, not complex.  We have a critical responsibility to come together to advance a clear agenda. As we do that, we should see impact evaluations as a “public good”. Like any public good they require common investment – an investment of funding no doubt, but also an investment of leadership and political will. An investment of intellectual energy and perseverance. All with the aim  to bring rigor to the contention that our work as a sector can drive transformational change for the most vulnerable people in the world. 

Discover the ̽����ѡ’s dedication to evidence-based humanitarian efforts through our and the Dioptra Consortium. 

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