London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Imagine if we had a continuously updated and well-curated portal with high-quality evidence on the effectiveness of development interventions? How would that change how researchers, decision makers and practitioners spend their time and how they access existing evidence? 

In this seminar, we will launch the 3ie Development Evidence Portal, a first and important step towards an evidence infrastructure that supports more and better use of evidence to inform decisions about policies and programmes that are designed to improve lives. The new evidence portal provides an upgraded version of 3ie’s existing impact evaluation and systematic review repositories, with improved search and filtering capabilities, and new features such as user accounts and citation downloads.  

The seminar will include an overview and demonstration of the portal’s key features and functionalities, with an opportunity for the audience to provide inputs and feedback. It will also present a summary of the ‘state of the evidence’ based on an analysis of the data from the evidence portal.       

Birte Snilstveit is a Senior Evaluation Specialist & Head of 3ie London Office. She manages systematic reviews commissioned by 3ie and other donors, provides quality assurance of systematic reviews and conducts in-house systematic review research and methods development. She is the lead author of a major systematic review on education and a co-author of systematic reviews and evidence gap maps on a range of topics, including WASH, social cohesion, and land use change and forestry. Birte has led the development of the methodology and web-platform for evidence gap maps at 3ie, manages the database of systematic review summaries and has published several papers on evidence synthesis methods. She is also an editor of the Campbell Collaboration International Development Coordinating Group. 

Mark Engelbert has been working with 3ie since 2016, and joined 3ie full-time as an evaluation specialist in 2018. He provides oversight for 3ie’s evidence programmes on agricultural innovations and immunisation. Through these evidence programmes, 3ie provides funding, quality assurance, and technical guidance on impact carrying out high-quality impact evaluations and engaging with stakeholders for maximum evidence uptake. Prior to joining 3ie, Mark worked with other organisations focused on using high-quality evidence for decision-making in global development, including AidGrade and GiveWell.

Please note that this session will NOT be live-streamed/recorded