Kenya's Mrima Hill rare earths draw six shortlisted bidders, two American. The famous US$62.4 billion value is a 2013 estimate, not a deal price.

There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence in the evaluation world these days, and equally no shortage of evaluators quietly muttering that this, too, shall pass, like blockchain and Big Data before it. From Algorithms to Evidence: Using GenAI in Evaluation Practice, edited by Kerry Bruce, Valentine Joseph Gandhi, and Steffen Bohni Nielsen, is refreshingly uninterested in either position.

https://youtu.be/e-qw2d-dDwk?si=gV48YSqPkCgr8Vr_

The UN has endorsed a new world map using the Equal Earth projection. See how the map compares and why Africa gains the most relative size.

There is no shortage of hype about artificial intelligence in the evaluation world these days, and equally no shortage of evaluators quietly muttering that this, too, shall pass, like blockchain and Big Data before it. From Algorithms to Evidence: Using GenAI in Evaluation Practice, edited by Kerry Bruce, Valentine Joseph Gandhi, and Steffen Bohni Nielsen, is refreshingly uninterested in either position.

Microfinance, once hailed as a miracle cure for poverty, has not lived up to its transformative promise according to two decades of randomised evaluations.

Mangroves are increasingly recognized as one of the most powerful nature-based solutions we have for combatting climate change and reversing biodiversity

The European Union and the Western Balkans are not separated by a simple divide between good and bad regulation. Across countries, governments have adopted regulatory impact assessment, public consultation, digital services and administrative simplification. The more consequential difference lies in consistent implementation across the full regulatory cycle. EU Member States generally have stronger systems for designing rules, but many still evaluate existing regulation too rarely and provide weak feedback to people participating in consultations.

by Fidel Arévalo For many years, evaluation was underpinned by a powerful promise: to produce evidence on what works and what does not, in order to guide fairer, more efficient and more democratic pub...

By Anabel Marin and Santiago Cunial The global race for minerals is accelerating. Minerals like lithium, copper, and nickel are increasingly treated as the “new oil” of the energy transition and ot…

By Heiner Janus and Michael Roll Manchester embodies reinvention like few other places. It built the world’s first industrial economy, watched it rust, and recast itself as the capital of Eng…

Fewer than 30 per cent of people worldwide live in a democracy now, down from half twenty years back, and with fake news running riot, evaluation isn't just paperwork anymore, it's a proper shield for democracy. Van der Knaap says it's a two-way street: democracy needs solid, independent evaluation to keep governments honest and accountable, and evaluators need democratic freedoms like free speech and research to do their job at all.

By Ryan Briggs and Andy Sumner Development Studies is institutionally well established. The QS rankings identify over 150 universities with postgraduate Development Studies programmes across approx…

Mangroves are increasingly recognized as one of the most powerful nature-based solutions we have for combatting climate change and reversing biodiversity loss. These coastal ecosystems protect shorelines from devastating storm surges, store massive amounts of carbon, and act as a crucial link between land and ocean. During a catastrophic 2013 typhoon in the Philippines, which produced waves up to 11 metres high, communities shielded by mangrove plantations survived — a clear demonstration of how critical these trees are for disaster prevention.

With the launch of the new North-South Commission at #HSC26, Germany is attempting to reopen the conversation on global development beyond 2030. Co-chaired by Olaf Scholz and Laura Chinchilla, the independent Commission explicitly evokes the legacy of the Brandt Commission of 1980. Its success will depend not on the prestige of its members, but on its ability to create trust, shared ownership, and proposals that carry political weight across the world.

I'm heading to the Hamburg Sustainability Conference 2026 — and I'm not going there to nod along. Hamburg, 29 June 2026. Around 1,600 participants from 115 countries are descending on the Hanseatic city this weekend for the third Hamburg Sustainability Conference. German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will open proceedings, flanked by 22 ministers, 13 heads of international organisations, and more than 280 C-suite executives from the private sector.

EU’s new Evaluation Policy for External Action doubles down on accountability, learning and impact – including for Global Gateway investments. Clearer roles,

German public support for development co-operation has dropped significantly since 2022. Why has this happened? This blog outlines five possible explanations and five implications for development c…

By Nadia Molenaers Development cooperation is not simply facing another cyclical debate about effectiveness. It is facing something deeper: a crisis of the very roles through which it has historica…

Most digital government strategies start in the wrong place. They begin with services: portals, apps, dashboards. Ukraine started with people. That is the gap

Values-driven causal pathways evaluations treat rigor not as control and replicability, but as how well evidence makes complex systems change visible in

(tl;dr) The Global Evaluation Initiative has released a landmark white paper timed to Glocal Evaluation Week 2026. It gives M&E professionals a structured

(TL;DR) On 6 May 2026, the DC dVET kicked off its anniversary BarCamp webinar series with "Skills on the Move: How Migration Intersects with Dual VET".

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming

Working With Colleagues Who Don't Care About MEL Like You Do

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming (TL;DR) The EU Recovery and Resilience Facility, the EU's EUR 723.8 billion pandemic recovery instrument, is broadly on track at its halfway point. By end 2023, EUR 225 billion had been disbursed and roughly 75% of planned milestones met, with economic modelling projecting a GDP boost of up to 1.4% and employment gains of up to 0.8% by 2026.

An EADI webinar shows that a genuinely green economy in rural Africa depends on three things working together: locally affordable climate-smart practices for smallholders, coherent national and regional policies that connect research with practice, and climate finance that explicitly supports a just transition with strong community agency. It highlights how programmes like the Great Green Wall and Africa RISING can improve livelihoods and ecosystems, but also how limited reach, elite capture and underfunded adaptation threaten impact.

(TL;DR) On 6 May 2026, the DC dVET kicked off its anniversary BarCamp webinar series with "Skills on the Move: How Migration Intersects with Dual VET".

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming

(TL;DR) Germany has invested heavily in decentralization in Africa and achieved real improvements at the local level, but national power structures remain