The last few decades have seen explosive growth in the number of impact evaluations— randomized evaluations in particular—that seek to guide policy decision-making in low- and middle-income countries. However, 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.
The World Bank is excited to collaborate with a global consortium of institutions 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.
The IDEAL team is currently in a pilot phase, during which we will extract a minimum set of fields for a curated initial set of studies and develop protocols for the library’s ongoing growth and maintenance. Once established, we will invite others to join, guided by consistent protocols for adding new content and rigorous quality control. If your organization is interested in contributing to IDEAL, please email siefimpact@worldbank.org with “IDEAL” in the subject line.