Biography: Amanda Glassman is executive vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and also serves as chief executive officer of CGD Europe. Her research focuses on priority-setting, resource allocation and value for money in global health, as well as data for development. Prior to her current position, she served as director for global health policy at the Center from 2010 to 2016, and has more than 25 years of experience working on health and social protection policy and programs in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.
Prior to joining CGD, Glassman was principal technical lead for health at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led policy dialogue with member countries, designed the results-based grant program Salud Mesoamerica 2015 and served as team leader for conditional cash transfer programs such as Mexico’s Oportunidades and Colombia’s Familias en Accion. From 2005-2007, Glassman was deputy director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at Brookings and carried out policy research on aid effectiveness and domestic financing issues in the health sector in low-income countries. Before joining the Brookings Institution, Glassman designed, supervised and evaluated health and social protection loans at the Inter-American Development Bank and worked as a Population Reference Bureau Fellow at the US Agency for International Development.
Glassman holds a MSc from the Harvard School of Public Health and a BA from Brown University, has published on a wide range of health and social protection finance and policy topics, and is editor and coauthor of the books What’s In, What’s Out: Designing Benefits for Universal Health Coverage (Center for Global Development, 2017), Millions Saved: New Cases of Proven Success in Global Health (Center for Global Development 2016), From Few to Many: A Decade of Health Insurance Expansion in Colombia (IDB and Brookings 2010), and The Health of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (World Bank 2001).
Title: Breakthrough to Policy Use: Reinvigorating Impact Evaluation for Global Development
Description: Better use of evidence in policymaking could improve lives and save hundreds of millions of dollars in public and aid spending each year. There has been tremendous progress in harnessing better evidence to inform public policy decision making, especially from impact evaluations of programs in low- and middle-income countries. Yet only a fraction of all development programs are evaluated, and far too often, policymakers lack the solid, policy-relevant research they could use to make better decisions. Given the potential real-world benefits, why have decision makers within governments, aid agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs not yet fully harnessed the value of evidence—including from impact evaluations—for better public policies? Looking ahead, how can the development community renew momentum and broaden bases of support for rigorous evaluations and the evidence agenda? And how can researchers foster stronger partnerships with policymakers and generate more timely and useful findings to inform policy decisions?
In response to these questions and building on progress to date, CGD launched the Working Group on New Evidence Tools for Policy Impact from 2020 to 2022, bringing together 40 policymakers and experts from 20 countries with collective experience at over 100 organizations to review progress, identify challenges, and propose recommendations to enhance the policy value and use of data and evidence for global development. The final report highlights how far the field has come in addressing persistent critiques about the scale, generalizability, and policy utility of impact evaluation methods. It also examines the importance shifting research agenda-setting power and resources to those who best specific policy contexts and decision making needs. This seminar will explore progress, challenges, and recommendations for better research funding and practice in detail, including the application of the agenda to specific target audiences such as philanthropies.
