The Evidence Isn't the Problem: So What Is?
About the session
The sector does not have an evidence shortage.
It has an evidence use problem.
Across global health, education, climate, agriculture, and development, we have extraordinary amounts of research, data, evaluation, and knowledge about what works.
And yet the distance between what evidence shows and what practice does remains stubbornly wide.
Proven interventions fail to reach the people who need them. Effective programs struggle to become government policy. Research accumulates in journals while practitioners make decisions without access to it. Organizations doing complex, locally rooted work are asked to demonstrate their value through measures that can capture only part of what they actually do.
The problem is not simply the quality of the evidence.
It is the infrastructure around it: who produces evidence, what gets measured, who can access it, what funders reward, which institutions have the capacity to act on it, and whose knowledge counts in the first place.
Some of the sector's attempts to become more rigorous have produced genuine gains. Cost-effectiveness frameworks and evidence-based philanthropy have forced harder questions about whether resources are actually improving people's lives.
But every measurement system privileges some things and obscures others.
What happens to work whose effects are cumulative, relational, political, or difficult to attribute? How do we compare an intervention with a clean measurable outcome against the slower work of strengthening the system that makes hundreds of interventions possible? When does a demand for evidence improve decision-making, and when does it distort what organizations do simply because some outcomes are easier to count?
There is another gap between research and practice.
Scientists across Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere are producing knowledge with direct relevance to the challenges around them. But academic incentives reward publication more reliably than translation. Findings may sit behind paywalls, be written primarily for other researchers, or never reach the governments and implementation organizations capable of putting them to work.
Producing knowledge is not the same as building a road from knowledge to action.
And there is a political dimension that cannot be ignored. Evidence does not enter a neutral environment. Research can challenge powerful interests, established policy, and comfortable assumptions. Evidence can be ignored, contested, selectively used, or attacked for reasons that have little to do with its quality.
These problems are connected.
We have invested heavily in producing evidence.
Have we invested enough in the systems that allow people to use it?
Discussion Group Leaders
Ellie Turner is Director at 60 Decibels, advancing impact measurement that strengthens decision-making across agriculture and climate.
Howard Leong is Director of Research at JA Worldwide, advancing research and evidence that strengthen entrepreneurship, work readiness, and financial capability for young people globally.
Lauren Gilliss is Senior Program Manager at Embrace Global, advancing solutions that improve newborn health and expand access to lifesaving care in underserved communities.
What to expect
A candid, cross-sector conversation bringing together people who experience the evidence system from very different positions.
The funder deciding what standard of proof to require. The practitioner trying to learn without turning measurement into a compliance exercise. The researcher whose findings need a path into practice. The evaluator trying to capture outcomes that do not fit neatly into a single metric. The government partner deciding whether evidence produced elsewhere applies locally.
Participants will examine the incentives between these actors and identify where evidence gets lost, distorted, inaccessible, or simply ignored.
The emphasis will be on what needs to change: better translation between research and implementation, more useful measurement systems, evidence requirements proportionate to the decisions being made, stronger pathways into government, and approaches to rigor capable of handling complexity rather than excluding it.
Who this is for
This session is for funders and philanthropists, researchers and evaluators, implementation organizations, government partners, evidence-based giving advocates, scientists working on research translation, and anyone who has watched strong evidence fail to change practice and wondered what happened between knowing and doing.
What you will get out of it
A framework for understanding evidence use as a problem of incentives, infrastructure, access, power, and institutional capacity
A more nuanced conversation about where cost-effectiveness and evidence frameworks strengthen decision-making and what they can leave out
Perspectives on getting research out of academic settings and into implementation organizations and government systems, particularly in the Global South
Practical approaches to designing measurement and evidence requirements that generate learning rather than primarily compliance
A sharper understanding of what it takes to protect the role of rigorous evidence when findings collide with political or institutional interests