Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers have needed rapid access to evidence to inform policy responses. The crisis has highlighted the need to be responsive in generating and drawing on existing high-quality evidence, while dealing with high levels of uncertainty and difficult trade-offs. It has also highlighted the importance of learning from both global and local evidence.

The 2022 CEDIL conference will feature expert speakers from around the world. They will share experiences and lessons learned on generating and using evidence during a crisis. The conference will also be an opportunity to discuss innovative approaches, methods and themes that have gained importance during the pandemic – including evaluating complex development interventions, using big data and machine learning, and developing rigorous approaches for transferring evidence and applying learning across contexts.

The conference will be held entirely online and will be free to participants. Drawing on lessons from online events over the past two years and to be inclusive of multiple time zones, there will be one conference session per day for four days.

Sessions will take place at 12:00 Midday GMT/ 08:00 EDT / 17:30 IST / 17:00 PKT / 15:00 EAT from Tuesday, 22 March – Friday, 25 March 2022.

Conference Programme:

Promoting evidence use during a crisis - Opening Plenary Session, Tuesday March 22nd - (2 Hours)

This session will focus on sharing learning about generating, promoting and using evidence during a crisis. It will reflect the viewpoints of evidence producers, brokers and users.

During this session, we will explore several questions, including

How can decision-makers be provided with rapid access to high quality evidence to inform policy responses during a crisis? What approaches have worked or not worked?
How can evidence be used to make complex decisions and assess trade-offs when there are high levels of uncertainty?
How have we overcome challenges in data collection and evidence generation?
What have we learned about drawing from both global and local evidence to make decisions?

Maintaining learning during the pandemic - Wednesday March 23rd (1.5 Hours)

COVID-19 has disrupted schooling, caused severe learning losses and exacerbated inequalities across the world. This session will focus on how to maximize the effectiveness of learning in the context of the pandemic and consider what evidence we need for informing decision-making.

Our panel of experts will discuss several questions, including:

What is being done and what else should be done to cope with, and recover from, the impact of the pandemic on schooling and learning?
What kind of evidence do we need to address these questions?
How can evidence on effective education responses be made more relevant and accessible during a crisis?

Innovations in machine learning and big data - Thursday March 24th (1.5 Hours)

Machine learning methods and the use of big data have opened new opportunities to researchers and evaluators. With data collection in the field becoming more challenging during the pandemic, these innovations have become even more relevant. A major area of research is the intersection between causal inference as practised in statistics, epidemiology and economics, and innovations in computational methods developed in computer science.

Speakers will discuss various questions, including:

What kind of contribution can computational methods and access to large datasets make to the evaluation of interventions?
What is the value of these methods to evidence users and commissioners of studies?
How can these methods be used to analyse heterogeneity of impacts?
How can we extrapolate results to new contexts?

Transferring evidence between contexts - Friday March 25th (1.5 Hours)

The demand for evidence is growing. But there are many gaps in evidence for specific interventions or for specific contexts. How can we assess and facilitate the transferability of evidence across interventions and between contexts?

Findings from single studies may not apply to other contexts. In recent years, a range of research and evaluation methods and approaches have been proposed to support the transferability of findings between interventions and contexts, and to use systematic reviews to explore programme design features and contextual factors which may moderate programme effects.

Under what conditions or circumstances might a finding from a single study be transferable to another setting? What examples are there of such transferability (or of inappropriate transfer?)

What methods or tools may be used to assess and facility transferability of study findings?

How might systematic reviews provide findings relevant to the contexts in which an intervention will or won’t work, or how it may be adapted to do so?

What lessons may have been learned from previous pandemics to inform the Covid response, and were these lessons properly utilized? Have we learned lessons from Covid for future pandemic preparedness?

Please register separately for each session you would like to attend.

If you select several sessions you can ask the form to use the same registration information for each session.

The full conference programme will be available soon at:

https://cedilprogramme.org/cedil-2022-conference

Cover photo credit: UN Women/Fahad Abdullah Kaizer

CEDIL Conference 2022