News & Views

When (some of) the world converged in Bath

By | 9 September 2024 | ,

It’s been an incredibly busy summer for Bath SDR, over the months when typically those of us in the Northern Hemisphere tend to try to take holidays, which makes a rush of projects all culminating at the same time even more difficult than it would be at any other time! So, a big thank you to my tiny but impressive team within Bath SDR, our many overseas research teams, and all our associate consultants who have all worked incredibly hard to deliver a huge amount of work. So far this year we have:

  • Finalised work started at the end of 2023 with Verian, contributing to an evaluation of the fourth round of the UK government’s Safer Streets Fund (publication of evaluations of all rounds forthcoming);
  • Finished a series of evaluations started in 2023 for Self Help Africa on the farmer-level impact of six different agri-businesses supported by the EU’s Enterprise Zambia Challenge Fund and AgriFi Kenya Challenge Fund;
  • Delivered a report to Trinity College Dublin, the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab and IFPRI on the findings from qualitative research on the impact of gender & relationships training alongside a cash transfer undertaken in Mauritania (triangulation with RCT and focus group interviews forthcoming);
  • Undertaken an evaluation for AgDevCo on the farmer-level impacts of Uzima Chicken in Uganda.

We are currently working on:

We have also been supporting:

  • The Young Lives team in India who used QuIP and causal mapping on a very ambitious study interviewing children and carers about what impacts school attendance and achievement
  • HERE Geneva with the data collected from in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in Ethiopia, Iraq and Morocco as part of a larger evaluation of the IOM COMPASS programme
  • BBC Media Action on a multi-country evaluation of a UNICEF project targeted at adolescent girls.

There is much to digest and learn from, but we won’t have much time for proper reflection of this extremely wide-ranging work until late October when our output slows down a little. There was, however, some opportunity for discussion and reflection at late August gatherings in Bath, UK; of the Bath SDR team for a summer celebration – bringing our most remote team members together in person for a lovely day and evening together, of the University of Bath DPRP students (many of whom we have worked with) who come from all over the world every year for an in-person week of seminars and discussion, and of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) who convened in Bath for their annual congress.

The BIEN conference offered a wonderful gathering of inspiring researchers and practitioners who offered much food for thought. I found myself rooted in the room dedicated to results from pilots around the world, fascinated by the plethora of different approaches to offering income, in many cases ‘plus’ something else – usually some sort of training, support or access to inputs. Miriam Laker, Director of Research at Give Directly, spoke frankly of the organisation’s attempts to better understand what combination of ‘cash, plus’ works in different circumstances – and how a range of evaluation methods will be required to understand what is most effective. Much of our recent work has focused on the potentially transformative role that cash transfers can play in household gender relationships, so I was particularly interested to hear presentations which referenced this from projects spanning Peru, India, Malawi, the USA, Finland and more. The varied presentations confirmed the undeniably significant impacts of cash transfers, but also that there is no ‘one size fits all’ recipe to make this work fairly and effectively for everyone; context is everything – everywhere. This challenge has given me the energy to get through the next few weeks of deadlines and see beyond that to the time when we can all reflect more widely on what these rich narratives that we are privileged to have mean for future social interventions.

If you are lucky enough to be attending the European Evaluation Society conference, where more of the world will be converging in Rimini at the end of this month, please do look out for us. Steve Powell and I will be delivering a workshop on causal mapping, and James Copestake and I will be convening a panel called ‘Empirically Informed Upgrading of Organisational Theories of Change‘ on Friday 27th September at 8.30am, bringing together a range of organisations who have embraced QuIP internally as part of their overall approach to evaluation. We also look forward to meeting our Causal Pathways colleagues for an in-person celebration of the launch of the Causal Pathways Resource Hub!

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The Assessing Rural Transformations research was sponsored by the UK Department for International Development and the Economic and Social Research Council - grant number ES/J018090/1.

The follow-up work on disseminating the QuIP was sponsored by the UK Department for International Development and the Economic and Social Research Council - grant number ES/NO15649/1.

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