The aim was to begin building bridges between research and practice by thinking together about opportunities and challenges.

T/AI conducted a series of activities:

1.    We collated existing work (academic, grey, evaluations, applications, etc.) on supply- and demand-side T/A interventions or their linkages, and produced a list of papers and summaries of them. This list wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, but was intended to help participants account for their own experiences and needs as T/A funders, advocates, academics and so on.  

2.    We asked participants to write a very brief “think piece” to share with other participants in advance of the meeting. These  were intended to provoke thought and reflection, as well as be an opportunity to share personal opinions and critical analyses of a reading before bringing them to the roundtable. The think pieces were not formal, emotional, refined or heavily edited. Some were even be speculative.  However, they provided great food for thought. 

3.    Three volunteers – Joy Aceron of Government Watch (G-Watch; Philippines), Abhijit Das of the Centre for Health and Social Justice (India), and Gustavo Maurino of the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ; Argentina) – presented real world case studies related to the roundtable’s key issues:

• • Joy discussed G-Watch’s work in the Pilipino education sector.
  •  Abhijit presented work on the health sector in India.
  • Gustavo presented ACIJ’s work on promoting transparency in the selection of judges in Buenos Aires.

Highlights of the conversation and details of where we might go from here will feature in upcoming posts.

We are currently putting together some thought-provoking pieces that we hope will help move the conversation forward. These will also be linked to our broader discussion of TALEARN – our community of practice on impact and learning.  Stay tuned!

Florencia Guerzovich, Program Officer, Transparency & Accountability Initiative florencia.guerzovich@transparency-initiative.org 

About the Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, the environment, global development and population, performing arts, and philanthropy, and makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s assets are more than $7.5 billion, with annual awards of grants and gifts totaling over $350 million. A thirteen member Board of Directors provides overall direction for the Foundation. For more information about the Foundation, please visit www.hewlett.org.

About the Global Development and Population Program

The Global Development and Population Program make grants to improve the well-being of vulnerable people. In developing countries, this grantmaking focuses on promoting women’s empowerment, including through expanded access to high quality reproductive health care; and on promoting transparent, accountable governance to deliver social services. The program also makes grants to strengthen the capacity of research-based organizations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, to collect and use data. The Global Development and Population Program team currently consists of nineteen staff, including eleven Program Officers.

About the Position

The new Program Officer will report to Ruth Levine, Program Director, and work collaboratively with other Program Officers and Program Associates. A particular focus of this position will be on the generation, use, and communication of data to inform and influence policy decisions and to improve accountable governance. Specific roles and responsibilities include:

• Participate in strategic planning for grantmaking related to research capacity, transparency and accountability.
• Maintain current knowledge of trends, practices, technology applications, and other related aspects of the Program field.
• Review and assess grantee proposals in light of Program strategies.
• Provide assistance to grantees and other parties in the field.
• Draft proposal summaries for Board consideration and discretionary awards.
• Develop and maintain effective working relationships with colleagues in the Foundation’s headquarters, and with diverse groups of professionals and professional organizations, foundations, and funding sources.
• Make site visits, attend conferences, and represent Foundation programs to the public and to leaders in the Program area.
• Evaluate grants and Program initiatives and respond to annual grantee reports.
• Contribute to the Foundation’s interest in and practice of strategic philanthropy, including due diligence, goal setting, review of business plans, knowledge building, and evaluation.
• Represent the Foundation’s programs to a variety of external entities.
• Guide potential grantees through the Foundation’s proposal process, including its compliance-related procedures.
• Organize Foundation-sponsored meetings of grantees and field experts.

The Program Officer’s responsibilities involve working with a broad array of collaborators, including grantees, multi and bilateral donors and civil society organizations. Ideally, the Program Officer will possess knowledge of relevant international social and economic development issues. The Program Officer should bring a deep understanding of African contexts; a demonstrated track record of building and fostering sustainable partnerships at the regional and international level; an ability to work with advocacy organizations in the collection and use of data to inform key policy making actions; a strong methodological and analytical capacity; and an abundance of energy and intellectual curiosity.

Moreover, the Program Officer should possess exceptional interpersonal skills and a capacity to work in highly collaborative teams comprising colleagues as well as individuals in government, private-sector, and international institutions; public policy organizations; think tanks; and academic institutions engaged in the international arena.

The Program Officer should ideally possess the following professional qualifications and personal attributes:

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in development economics, population science, or related discipline.
• Knowledge and appreciation of transparency and accountability issues and actors, as well as issues related to the generation and use of data for research, for policy formulation and for monitoring government performance in developing countries.
• Knowledge and appreciation of approaches to mobilize citizen participation and catalyze citizen feedback a plus.
• Applied knowledge of social science methodologies in research design, data collection and quantification, modeling, and analysis.
• Relevant grantmaking experience, preferably including designing and implementing strategies, developing budgets, and managing portfolios.
• Demonstrated success mobilizing and working with multilateral and development organizations, foundations, other nonprofit entities, and academia, as well as government officials and technical personnel in developing countries.
• Excellent writing skills and capacity to distill complex ideas in simple language, both verbally and in writing.

Personal Attributes

• Deep commitment to the values and mission of the Hewlett Foundation and to the vision and goals of its Global Development and Population Program.
• Ability and flexibility to travel extensively.
• French language skills and work experience in Africa strongly preferred.
• Exceptional ability to articulate and realize a vision, to motivate others, and to work collaboratively with a high-caliber team of staff and external partners.
• Capacity to learn from experience, to adapt as needed, to generate new and practical ideas, to listen, and to work with others to shape emerging issues.
• Excellent organizational skills, with a demonstrated track record of consistently meeting deadlines.
• Natural talent for bridging differences, finding common ground, and building relationships with people at all levels of society.
• Capacity to communicate persuasively, orally and in writing, in a range of settings.
• Clear personal integrity and sense of humility.

Compensation and Benefits

The Hewlett Foundation offers an excellent benefits package and a salary commensurate with experience and education. This position is exempt and full-time.

To Apply

Please email your resume and cover letter detailing your interest in this position to Daniel Sherman, President, Explore Company: resumes@explorecompany.com. Please refer to PO/HF in the Subject line. No phone inquiries please.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and welcome a diverse pool of candidates for this search.

The Foundation uses an outside firm to check the accuracy of information supplied by applicants.

Date posted: 25 April 2013

Authors: Mark Robinson, William Evans and Kirsty Newman, Research and Evidence Division, DFID

In February 2013 DFID launched the “Assessing the Strength of Evidence” How to Note. The Note aims to help all DFID staff better appreciate the strength of the evidence that they are using to inform their policy and programming choices.

The Note builds on DFID’s commitment to use the best available research evidence to inform its spending decisions. Speaking last year, the Secretary of State noted DFID’s ambition to “…invest in what works. Where we don’t know [what works], I want to find out. It will make sure we are clearer about where we should focus our resources so we know that what we’re funding will actually work as we intend. There’s a huge amount of high quality research done into development. And I will be making the most of it to allow us to be even more targeted with our investment.”

Purpose of the How to Note

Identifying and using high quality research studies isn’t straightforward. The How to Note offers some rules of thumb, enabling DFID staff to:

• Understand different types of empirical research evidence;
• Appreciate the principles of high quality evidence;
• Consider how the context of research findings affects the way that staff might use them;
• Understand how to make sense of inconsistent or conflicting evidence.

Development of this knowledge and skills will enable staff to make more informed decisions about how DFID spends taxpayers’ money on viable development projects.

The Note is an integral part of DFID’s commitment to equipping staff with the skills to help them improve their use of evidence. It forms part of several initiatives being launched by DFID in an effort to boost the analytical skills of its staff. These include an online guide to research designs and methods; a handbook explaining a variety of research and evaluation methods; and a guide to using statistics responsibly. There are also plans to strengthen staff capacity on using evidence and research.

We hope this How to Note will be helpful to researchers and policy makers in research institutes and funding bodies outside DFID. We would welcome feedback through EvidenceHowtoNote@dfid.gov.uk although we are not able to respond to every comment or query.

What does this How to Note do?

This How to Note provides a thorough introduction to (a) the appraisal of the quality of individual studies and (b) the assessment of the strength of bodies of evidence. Specifically, this Note will help DFID staff to broadly understand the distinctions between different data collection and analytical methods, what they can and cannot conclude as a result, and establish a common language that can be used in the discussion of the strength of evidence. Assessing the strength of evidence is a challenging task which requires a combination of technical knowledge and individual judgement. It may also require consultation with research specialists within and outside DFID. Proper assessment of evidence will help staff use evidence responsibly and judiciously for the benefit of better policy.

The guidance is applicable to all categories of research and evaluation evidence used by DFID staff, especially in the social sciences. It applies to evidence generated through both quantitative and qualitative research methods. It recognises that some academic disciplines, such as medicine and the methodologies associated with them, have a stronger tradition of assessing quality of research than social science disciplines. The Note references alternative evidence grading frameworks accordingly. To ensure consistency, it also draws on approaches developed in other parts of Government to assess research and evaluation evidence.

Facing up to some critiques

During the development of this How to Note, the team behind it has received a range of comments on the approach from staff and from a number of external reviewers. While the bar was deliberately set high, initial feedback has been broadly positive and staff welcome the clarity of the Note and expectations regarding quality of evidence in DFID. We provide a response to three of the main concerns that people have raised below:

Critique 1: ‘DFID is only interested in experimental research’

DFID’s appreciation of ‘what constitutes good evidence’ and the approach used to generate the evidence is heavily dependent upon the question being asked. If you are trying to establish the existence (and magnitude) of a causal relationship (e.g. intervention ‘x’ leads to outcome ‘y’ in environment ‘z’), a randomised controlled trial (RCT) will offer you the best possible evidence of that as it allows you to isolate the impact of an intervention by comparing treatment groups with control groups. Where good RCTs are available they will form an important part of the evidence base on causality. However, there will be some questions about causal relationships where it’s simply impractical to adopt an RCT approach: after all, they’re expensive and time-consuming. In such cases, quasi-experimental research designs can provide solid evidence of likely causal relationships.

In addition, there are many important development questions that are not best answered by an RCT or quasi-experimental design. Questions relating to how a process or intervention actually works (or does not work), whether it really matters to people, whether it’s socially or culturally acceptable, whether it provides a satisfactory service to recipients, and, crucially, the socio-political context in which an intervention will be deployed are enquiries that simply cannot be answered by RCTs. Instead, a set of observational (sometimes called ‘non-experimental’) research designs, many of them applying robust and valid qualitative methods, will be more appropriate.

A great deal of DFID research aims to understand context, politics and local realities through comparative case studies. The How to Note enables us to better evaluate research which examines multiple dimensions of a particular question using a range of approaches. DFID recognises that RCTs can suffer from ‘external validity’ issues (i.e. we can’t be sure that similar causal relationships would play out in multiple contexts). That’s partly why a wider range of research is commissioned.

When it writes or commissions evidence synthesis products, DFID typically differentiates research on the basis of ‘quality’ and ‘appropriateness to the question’ rather than on the basis of design and method alone. With the launch of the How to Note, we are strongly encouraging both our staff and our partners to be clear about the type of research that they are citing in order to support particular claims. That way, the reader of any evidence synthesis (be it in a literature review or a business case) can form their own view about how appropriate is the evidence for the question at hand.

Critique 2: ‘By getting DFID staff to grade the quality of evidence, you are devaluing the peer review process’

DFID uses research evidence in a very specific way – to inform its decisions on policy and practice in order to achieve poverty reduction. While peer review is an important way of assessing research quality, the standards which a group of academic peers judge a paper will not always be the same as the criteria that a DFID adviser uses. For example, a peer reviewer may judge a theoretical discussion which introduces a new way of thinking about a certain type of intervention to be of extremely high value and it may be accepted for publication in a good journal. However, DFID aims to base its decisions on empirical evidence with practical application. A theoretical paper will not provide robust evidence about whether that intervention is effective, whether it is appropriate, how it leads to observable effects and so on. And thus a paper which is judged to be of high academic value, while valuable in its own right, will not necessarily be judged as strong evidence for DFID.

Critique 3: ‘By getting non-professionals to grade evidence, you may make inaccurate judgements about its strength or quality’

DFID staff have variable levels of familiarity with research and the designs and methods used to carry it out. Some advisory staff come from academic backgrounds, a number hold PhDs, most have post-graduate degrees, and are highly skilled at this kind of activity. Others have expertise that is much more focused on programme implementation and management. So notwithstanding the efforts that DFID is making to boost the analytical skills of our staff, this does mean that some DFID advisers may not always be well positioned (as compared to research design and method specialists) to assess strength and quality of evidence. Even if the assessments that staff make about strength of evidence are not always perfect, they are still likely to help start a discussion (with our internal experts and our external advisory partners) which will, over time, help us move towards the establishment of more effective development programmes through a more robust evidence base.

Our responses to these critiques do not mean that DFID is not open to further discussion and debate on this subject. We welcome further comment and consideration of our approach, as we seek to reduce poverty through the proper application of strong research evidence.

• Title:  DFID How to Note: Assessing the Strength of Evidence
• Author: DFID
• Year: 2013

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: 

OTHER DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

HOW TO APPLY:

Over two days, donors, civil society representatives, academics and development specialists will convene to reflect on progress made in the transparency & accountability field as a whole.  Discussions will surface where our efforts have been transformational, and where we have fallen short of our ambitions.  We’ll review how the field has shifted and how we can keep pace with the changes.  And looking to the future, we hope to identify priorities for collective action to help advance the transparency & accountability agenda. 

Please click here for more details about the workshop.  Please note that participation is by invitation only but you can follow the conversations on twitter: @TAInitiative & #TAFuture.  Discussions will also be captured and shared on this site post-event.  

Transparency and Accountability for real social change – Where do we go next?

If you have any kind of social aim – be it rights, services, development, sustainability – chances are you’ll soon find that two basic things are needed to achieve any kind of structural change. Firstly, access to information about what is really happening (transparency).  Secondly and most crucially, ways to hold decision-makers, especially the powerful ones, to account for what they do (accountability).

That’s how I got into the ‘Transparency and Accountability’ area.  Ten years ago I found myself in rural Nepal working with district health staff and local communities all battling to reduce child mortality. But we couldn’t get any information on where the drugs were actually disappearing to. And though management responsibility lay at the regional and national levels, we didn’t know how to hold the powerful to account for the mismanagement and corruption.  I’d go on to find these same information and accountability gaps again and again – emergency relief in Bangladesh, education support in Ethiopia, oil management in Nigeria, child protection in the UK…

My own examples are mirrored in the frustrations millions experience, and they cut across the ‘developing and developed world’, across sectors, across groups.

But the good news is this shared agenda is gaining ground.  In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion in levels of protest, action and funding, all aimed at increasing transparency and stepping up real accountability.

All of this is driven by people asking powerful questions: “Where is my money going?  My government’s budget, my taxes, revenues from the oil under my ground?  How can I make my voice heard in decisions that really affect me? How can I stop impunity for those above the rule of law?”

And these people are increasingly demanding powerful answers. On the ground, citizens are marching against corruption and pushing for real and constructive engagement with governments and corporates.  At the regional and international level, there are new laws and standards (against financial secrecy for banks and extractive companies for instance) and new initiatives to galvanise global action (such as the Open Government Partnership).

This Transparency and Accountability movement (T/A) has grown into a big, complex and dynamic field.  In 2010, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) was created to support action and learning across that field, in particular to link actors and issues, and increase shared thinking across sectors, groups and countries.

With so much activity going on, T/AI and its founders feel it’s an opportune time for the field to take stock of progress and ask ourselves some powerful questions: What as a field are we doing that’s working and what is not?  How has the field shifted? How are we learning from our experiences?  What are some key priorities for joint action over the next three years?

We’re convening a meeting on March 13-14 with key thinkers, activists and funders in the field.  T/AI is hosting the convening but the conversations are relevant for the field as a whole.

One of the burning issues we’ll explore starts from the bottom up: given the sheer complexity of all the factors needed to get tangible change on just one problem in one place, how do we line up work and support so there no there’s no break in the chain?  Going back to my child mortality challenge in Nepal – if I know that to get real change, I need to change citizens’ expectations about their leaders, improve information openness, and change the incentives that determine whether health managers and politician want to listen to citizens, how can I get such ‘joined up’ work across the whole T/A ‘ecosystem’?  Am I wasting my time if I work on only one area and there remain breaks in the chain?

The meeting will also centre on learning.  As this field enters its third decade, we’re increasingly asking how, when and where we can have impact, and how can we come together to apply our learning in the work we do.

Another key area will focus on the role of international initiatives.  What do we know about the impacts of initiatives like the Open Government Partnership?  Do governments treat them as a PR exercise or are there ways to support and leverage them for real impact?

Finally, as web and mobile technologies increasingly permeate all corners of the globe, how are T/A activists, governments and communities strategically harnessing the full potential of these new tools, whilst recognising the limitations and new dangers these can also bring?

The meeting in March is only the start and unfortunately we can’t get all key people in the same room at the same time. T/AI will summarise and share the discussions through a series of blogs on our and our partners’ sites after the meeting.  We’ll also capture and share out learnings through public webinars through our T/A Impact and Learning Community of Practice.

We invite all voices to weigh in on these questions as we move into our next phase.  As a field, we should never stop asking where do we go next!

Vanessa Herringshaw, Transparency & Accountability Initiative Director

The idea was to start working together on issues of impact and learning in the field of transparency and accountability and to launch a community of practice to sustain this work over time.

For three days, we worked together intensely (see a one-page summary and a longer presentation of our work in Cape Town). We achieved two goals:

1. We started building a safe space for T/A practitioners, funders and researchers learn collaboratively and on an on-going basis in ways that improve their planning and impact. This is because, for example, all can share and reflect on our experience candidly. 
2. We formed “practice groups” around five priority issues and developed learning plans to make concrete progress in each issue:

Issues identified in Cape Town by CSOs, funders, and researchers for work are:

• The transparency-participation-accountability nexus: how to better understand and leverage the connection between transparency, participation, and accountability
• The issue of context: how to analyse the context of interventions to understand how and why they do or do not transfer successfully to new contexts
• Methods and learning from failure: how to choose the right methods, metrics, and approaches to analyse interventions, evaluate impact meaningfully, and learn from both successes and failures
• Incentives for learning: how to shape funding relationships and institutional structures to promote learning within and across organizations 
• Learning how to learn: how to embed learning methods and processes at the core of our organizations and networks

For this year, T/AI will support regular web-conferences and online discussions, both for specific groups and for the whole community. Activities will include convening case clinics to support individual CSO’s approaches to link transparency, accountability and participation on the ground; collation of information about alternative methodologies for learning, monitoring, and evaluation, webinars and small face-to-face meetings to discuss what contextual factors matter or how supply and demand side interventions can be linked for T/A impact (see link) as well as a communication platform for the community.

We know that building a community will take long-term commitment, beyond a one-off meeting. T/AI is committed to help move forward the agenda set by the community. We are optimistic, among other reasons, because a number of members have come forward to provide joint leadership in taking the community through its first year.

We believe that thinking and doing as a community and placing learning at the core of our practice will far exceed the effectiveness of T/AI or any single organization’s attempt to produce knowledge alone. This has the potential to be transformative and strategically strengthen the field.

If you are a civil society organization, funder, or expert working in transparency, and Accountability and are interested in joining our community or following our work, please let us know on this form.  You can also sign up below to be included in the meeting’s newsfeed.  Your input will help shape where we go in the next phase.

Materials

• The launch of a community of practice … to transform the field (1 pager)
• The launch of a community of practice … to transform the field (Presentation)
• Bridging ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ of accountability: Strengthening state-society engagement.  Roundtable to explore ways to improve learning and impact (1 pager)
• Register your interest

The Guardian Data Blog, Google and the Open Knowledge Foundation are teaming up to find the best open government datavis out there.

There is a top prize of $2,000 on offer for the best visualisation of open government data. We want to see imaginative, clear and beautiful visualisations.

Use existing data visualisation tools or develop your own new one. We want to be wowed and educated! You need not be a developer in order to enter, the most important thing is that the data you have chosen to visualise is approached in an interesting and compelling way.

The competition is open to citizens of the UK, US, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden. The winner will take home $2,000 and the result will be published on the Guardian Datastore on the Show and Tell site as well as this blog.

Use our Data Catalogs website resource to find open government data to get you started, but of course feel free to bring your own data to the party. The most important thing is that all data used conforms to the Open Definition.

How Do I enter?

To enter fill in the form over on the Guardian’s website – feel free to ask questions about the competition via datavisualisation@guardian.co.uk.

The competition closes on 2nd April 2013

REGISTER for this webinar HERE 

Click HERE  to join the Webinar 5 minutes before the scheduled start time

Presenters

Helen Darbishire (Executive Director, Access Info Europe)

Kevin Dunion (Executive Director, Center for Freedom of Information, University of Dundee)

Sponsored by OGP Networking Mechanism (Global Integrity) and World Bank Institute

Abstract:

1. Does the right of access to information imply that governments must publish information without an access to information request?
2. Which information should be prioritized? What types of information are becoming emerging international standards as part of government obligations to publish proactive information?
3. What is the relationship between “open data” and proactively published information?
4. What are good practices from different countries around the world?
5. What should the proactive publication priorities be for countries which are members of the Open Government Partnership?

These are some of the key questions about proactive publication of information which will be discussed during this webinar led by Helen Darbishire of Access Info Europe, and Kevin Dunion of the Centre for Freedom of Information at the University of Dundee.

Helen Darbishire will review recent developments concerning the right of access to information and will summarize the global trends with respect to proactive publication with a focus on the classes of information which are being published and/or which access to information and other laws require to be made public.

In addition, she will review recent developments in the world of open data and evaluate how this relates to the right of access to information. Is there something which can be qualified as a “right to data” or is this an inherent part of the right of access to information?

Finally she will discuss advocacy strategies that can be pursued by civil society to promote greater proactive publication and how to structure dialogue with governments over how to prioritize information due for release.

Country Experience- Scottish Model Publication Scheme, by Kevin Dunion

The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 requires Scottish public authorities to proactively publish information. In particular, each authority must produce a Publication Scheme which has been approved by the Scottish Information Commissioner. In the first few years this meant hundreds of schemes, of variable quality, being submitted.

Kevin Dunion will present this case study that shows that the Information Commissioner resolved matters by producing a single Model Publication Scheme, which could be adopted by any authority. The Model Scheme describes classes of information which should be disclosed, providing a high degree of proactive openness and making it easy for authorities to comply with the law. An example of how this can be used to recover routinely available information from a public authority, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, will be presented.

Click here for more information on the Model Publication Scheme