History
GIDE's PhD and Masters Program, 1994: Dr. Alfred Latigo, Executive Director & Chair of the Academic Panel (standing) introducing students to Prof. Paul Muller (Late), Chairman Board of Directors (Seated, second on the left).
Transforming development through evidence of what works.
The Global Institute for Development Evidence (GIDE) is an international Results-Based Management and impact evaluation institute — with a global office in Honolulu, Hawaii, regional offices in Uganda and Zambia, and partners across Africa, Asia, and the United States. GIDE was founded by Alfred Latigo — a former UN Chief of Economic and Policy Analysis and Inclusive Growth, with more than four decades across FAO, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank — and is guided by a multidisciplinary Board of Directors, Advisory Council, and network of consultants.
Our History
The institute was founded in 1990 as the African Biodiversity Institute (ABI), an international impact evaluation initiative. Through the 1990s it paired impact evaluation with capacity building — short courses alongside a Masters and PhD program for African scholars, delivered with a consortium of fourteen universities worldwide and the United Nations Environment Programme, focused on environment and natural resource economics and household (gender) economics.
Over its first two decades the Institute completed more than fifty impact evaluation studies and built a distinctive body of methods — systematic reviews of what works, performance evaluation of projects, programs, and policies, environmental impact assessment and audit, natural-resource accounting, and quantitative analysis of greenhouse-gas emissions that informed climate agreements such as the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol.
From 2010, as the African Biodiversity Institute became the Global Institute for Development Evidence, its work broadened from Africa to Asia and centred on evidence-based practice for inclusive green growth — poverty reduction, gender equality, employment and entrepreneurship, regional integration and trade, agriculture, and climate change. That transformation, completed by 2014, laid the foundation for today's next chapter.
What we do
We help governments, multilateral development banks, UN and bilateral agencies, and civil society turn evidence into impact — strengthening country-led evaluation systems and building the capacity of policymakers, researchers, and civil society organizations to practise Results-Based Management. Our work spans performance and impact evaluation, systematic reviews, and environmental and social impact assessment, with deep focus on climate-resilient investment across agriculture, energy, water, industry, and transport. We also train the next generation — graduate students, and policymakers, practitioners, and consultants across Africa and Asia.
The next chapter: ScaleX Labs
The questions have never changed — what works, for whom, at what cost, and why. What has changed is our ability to answer them at speed and scale. ScaleX Labs, our Responsible AI technology and advisory affiliate, carries the institute's evidence tradition into a new era — an integrated AI platform that puts these capabilities directly into practitioners' hands, from AI-powered monitoring, evaluation, and learning to tools that strengthen gender transformative results, funding, and professional capability.
Together, GIDE and ScaleX Labs share one conviction — AI must strengthen the development professionals of the Global South, never replace them.