Research and evaluation can identify interventions that could optimize our response to a crisis, but resources for such exercises unfortunately tend to get crunched at such times.
An often-ignored casualty of the kind of crisis we currently face is a focus on evaluations and applied research. Research that can tell us what works, for whom, how much, why and under what circumstances.
One of the most common reasons cited for this casualty is a lack of resources, both human and monetary, and a lack of data. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, was quoted in a recent Science article as saying, “Never let a crisis go waste….We are getting new information.