NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, April 21, 2014

As development institutions like the World Bank look for ways to make their projects and interventions more evidence-based, development practitioners have run into a problem faced by doctors a generation ago.

While there may be a plethora of primary source studies on the effectiveness of an intervention, studies use different data and methodologies and often come to differing — and sometimes conflicting — conclusions.

In an effort to make the medicine more evidence-based, medical researchers came up with “systematic reviews” of the research literature in the 1990s. The reviews are meta-analyses of data from a range of studies that have been screened for quality. Today, systematic reviews — known as “Cochrane reviews” — for the nonprofit that oversees them — are seen as a gold standard in judging the effectiveness of medical interventions.