Evidence on program effectiveness from individual randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in low- and middle-income countries has grown over the past three decades. The power of this growth lies in not any one study but rather the broad collection. SIEF supports meta-analytic research and evidence aggregation initiatives to help answer many important questions, both for policy and for research: What does the bulk of evidence say about a particular intervention? Which types of interventions generate the highest impacts for a particular outcome? How much can findings from one region generalize to another? Do certain study designs lead to higher estimates of impact? Are there outcomes or interventions that are under or over-studied?
Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis
Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel. (2023). 2023 Cost-effective Approaches to Improve Global Learning : What does Recent Evidence Tell Us are Smart Buys for Improving Learning in Low- and Middle-income Countries?
The 2023 GEEAP “Smart Buys” report identifies the most cost-effective ways to improve learning in low- and middle-income countries—highlighting teacher support, targeted instruction, and early childhood programs as top interventions—while warning against costly, low-impact investments like hardware alone. It identifies key “Great Buys” such as structured pedagogy support for teachers, teaching at the right level, and early childhood stimulation and pre-primary programs, urging policymakers to focus on scalable interventions with proven learning impact.
Holla, Bendini, Dinarte, and Trako. (2021). Is Investment in Preprimary Education Too Low? Lessons from (Quasi) Experimental Evidence across Countries.
This SIEF funded study uses a novel global dataset of effect sizes from more than 50 studies conducted in 19 countries to examine measures of school participation, cognitive skills, social-emotional skills, and behavior, both during and after preprimary ages. Estimates from meta-regression analysis suggest both strong demand for preprimary services when offered and significant improvements in children’s cognitive skills (0.15 sd) and their executive functioning, social-emotional learning, and behavior (0.12 sd) during the pre-primary period. Moreover, cost-benefit analysis using studies from low- and middle-income countries implies benefit-to-cost ratios ranging between 1.7 and 14.2, suggesting high returns to preprimary investments even in contexts with limited state capacity.
The reproducibility package for the paper is available here.
Evidence File
Breeding and Holla. (2021). Lessons from Parenting Programs in Early Childhood.
Parenting programs teach parents techniques to stimulate their children’s brain and body development through talk, play, and frequent high-quality interactions. There is evidence that parenting programs, when implemented at a small scale by researchers and non-government organizations, can have a significant impact on children’s cognitive and social-emotional development outcomes, as well as on their future education and earnings. This brief reviews evidence from the SIEF portfolio to assess whether these successes be replicated at scale in low- and middle-income countries.
Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Libary (IDEAL)
When moving from evidence generation to aggregation, translation, and adaptation, a key challenge is the lack of standardization and comparability of the main results produced by each study. SIEF is leading an initiative to fill this gap by constructing the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL). Hosted by the World Bank, IDEAL will be fully open-access and free for the world to use. Users will be able to search, compare, and visualize relative effect sizes on a range of outcomes and of many different policy interventions across countries and contexts. We expect IDEAL to facilitate quantitative meta-analyses as well as more qualitative systematic reviews, whether such efforts are centered around an intervention, policy, population, or outcome. IDEAL will also help guide the standardization of key information from randomized control trials and develop a set of pedagogical resources for mainstreaming evidence aggregation methods across the research and policy community.
Introducing IDEAL (Website)
Tools
PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) Guidelines