IDinsight

IDinsight is an international development organization that helps policymakers and managers make socially impactful decisions using rigorous evidence.

We carefully tailor a wide range of analytical and quantitative tools to enable our clients to design better policies, rigorously test those ideas, and take informed action at scale to improve lives. Our services include experimental evaluation methodologies – including, but not limited to, randomized controlled trials – tailored to the priorities of international development decision-makers; monitoring and performance management systems to facilitate continuous data-driven improvement; policy design consulting and scale-up support.

Our advisory teams are closely integrated into client organizations, and we strive to provide comprehensive support for clients who want to maximize their social impact through evidence-based policymaking.

IDinsight's vision is to improve millions of lives by transforming how the social sector innovates, learns and improves. In order to more fully support our clients in maximizing their social impact, we offer a range of additional services. Depending on client needs, we:

1. Diagnose social challenges in context: Understanding how to address social problems is rarely straightforward. We help managers establish the conceptual foundation to maximize impact by mapping potential theories of change, reviewing existing knowledge, interviewing stakeholders and experts, collecting data from the field, and identifying key programmatic gaps.

2. Design potential solutions: Effective interventions are rarely one-size-fits-all, so solutions cannot simply be imported from other countries. We help managers design context-appropriate interventions based on a thorough diagnosis of the challenges, and pressure-testing of potential interventions. We then work with our clients to rigorously evaluate these potential solutions to decide which should be scaled up (see below).

3. Rigorously evaluate potential solutions: In complex environments, it is often impossible to say whether a given intervention will be impactful. That is why we help our clients rigorously evaluate potential solutions to help them decide which one (if any) they should scale up. Our impact evaluations are designed to provide rigorous, actionable evidence in time to inform our clients' decisions.

4. Provide monitoring and evaluation advisory services: A rigorous impact evaluation is not always the optimal learning tool for a particular stage of a program or organization. We help organizations determine what types of monitoring and evaluation activities will best serve their organizational learning needs and help them integrate these into their operations.

5. Operationalize scale-up of high-impact interventions: Social change requires more than reports. We work hand-in-hand with clients to implement at-scale the interventions found to be high-impact by our rigorous evaluations.

As a client-service organization, we make the most rigorous impact measurement tools practical for managers while maintaining the highest ethical and professional standards.

IDinsight's team is driven by common values and capabilities which guide our actions. These are a statement of commitment to our teammates, clients, and partners.

Impact

IDinsight was founded because many reports and activities in international development fail to improve real lives.

We measure our success by the extent to which our work increases the social impact of our clients. We scrutinize and validate the assumptions behind our answer to the best of our abilities.

We continually refine our work and strategy to maximize social impact.

Service

We each put the interests of the poor, our partners, and our teammates before our own, and in every interaction seek to give more than we take.

We understand that it is a privilege – not a sacrifice – to serve a cause bigger than ourselves. We work hard to make the most of this privilege.

Humility

We often operate in someone else's home, community, office or country. We recognize the limits of our personal knowledge, especially compared to local experience, and believe that having multiple perspectives is highly valuable.

We seek to raise the profile of the organizations with whom we work above and beyond our own.

Professionalism

We bring to bear the skill and effort needed to produce work of the absolute highest quality. We work hard and efficiently. Our work is judged by our outputs, not our effort.

We are conscientious and respectful in what we say and do.

We represent IDinsight values, both on and off the job.

Honesty

We are honest with our clients and with each other.

We always share our objective findings and honest opinions with the client – even if they are unpopular. We readily share when IDinsight is not the appropriate service-provider for a given context.

We are honest with each other and are a flat organization: the best idea and evidence wins.

If we disagree with a teammate, we have an obligation to state our views.

Ownership

We act as owners of IDinsight. We don't complain. If something is broken or flawed in our organization, we proactively fix it.

We each are responsible for helping IDinsight continually innovate, learn, and improve.

Community of leaders

We are committed to enabling our colleagues to reach their full long-term professional potential. We insist that each employee constantly gain in skills and knowledge by purposefully creating opportunities and raising the bar.

We understand that we sometimes live and work in difficult circumstances. We look out for each other professionally and personally.

Systems perspective

Questioning the status quo is in our organization's DNA. We push the frontier to make the world a better place.

We understand that effective change is founded on a holistic understanding of why the status quo persists and working with others to create greater, sustained impact.

We are intellectually curious about the wider world.

Since our founding, IDinsight has pioneered the tools needed to bring the best analytical tools and data to on-the-ground decisionmakers in over two dozen countries in Africa and Asia. We have advised some of the world’s most innovative social enterprises and numerous national governments on their high priority social welfare programs. We are very proud of our team of passionate and skilled professionals who represent backgrounds in policy, statistics, economics, data science, epidemiology and policy.

We continue to strive to innovate on the best, most nimble and practical data tools to bear on the world’s most challenging poverty-related issues. At the same time, we continue to invest in our global team, to bring the best combination of skills and local context to support our partners’ missions. As we continue to demonstrate that data can inform decisions in practical, operationally feasible ways, we hope that we will also contribute to progress in integrating evidence into policy and practice.