Important Developments in Impact Evaluation

Right: GIDE Impact Evaluation Team: Staff & MSc/PhD Students including Dr. Alfred Latigo, now Founder & Chief Innovation Architect, GIDE/ScaleX Labs (Centre); Prof. Dr. Paul Muller (Late), Chairman, Board of Directors (left); and Dr. Paul Capstick, Deputy Executive Director (right), Nairobi, KENYA  (1994).

Important Developments in Impact Evaluation

Since 1990, GIDE's evaluation services have stayed demand-driven, shaped by the same international, regional, and national shifts toward evidence-based decision-making that continue to define the field:

  • Governments increasingly want country-led monitoring and evaluation systems, rather than donor-led ones, so that policies and programs can be judged by their real effect on people's lives.

  • The African Union's 2014 Malabo Declaration committed African countries to evidence-based planning and accountability, calling for systematic reviews of what works alongside stronger resilience to climate variability.

  • That same year, the World Bank launched its Results, Measurement, and Evidence Stream to professionalize results measurement — an acknowledgment that solid results data was still rare across the development community.

  • 2015 was declared the International Year of Evaluation, coinciding with the shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals and a growing citizen demand for government accountability, even as the country-level building blocks for comprehensive evaluation remained incomplete.

  • The Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda, and Busan Partnership established that partner countries should own and lead their evaluation systems, with donors supporting sustainable national evaluation capacity rather than substituting for it.

  • Evidence-based practice, proven first in healthcare, has since spread into education, nutrition, logistics, and emergency relief, with major institutions promoting systematic reviews and impact evaluation as the basis for credible policy decisions.

The challenge running through each of these developments is consistent: demand for credible, country-owned evidence has outpaced the capacity, tools, and resources available to produce it — especially for measuring Gender Transformative change, climate adaptation and mitigation, and the scalability of what works.

GIDE and ScaleX Labs address this gap together. GIDE undertakes the systematic reviews, performance evaluations, and environmental and social impact assessments that produce credible evidence, and has built dedicated frameworks — including the Gender Transformative Tool and the Scalability and Replicability Analysis Tool — to close the specific measurement gaps identified above. ScaleX Labs turns these frameworks into AI-aided platforms — among them GenTraQ™ for Gender Transformative design and measurement — that make evidence generation faster and less dependent on scarce specialist capacity, so national institutions can build and sustain their own evaluation systems rather than relying on donor-led processes.

The aim throughout is to strengthen national capacity, never to substitute for it — people lead, and AI strengthens.