On February 4, IPA Zambia and Young 1ove held a meeting with the Directorate of Open and Distance Education (DODE) at the Ministry of General Education.They discussed potential collaboration on the evaluation of a low-tech intervention that provides remedial lessons over the phone to primary school-age children from low-income families.The intervention seeks to address the learning loss from the six-month closure of schools in 2020 and the reduced school contact hours in 2021 imposed by the government’s COVID-19 guidelines.

To support the Department of Education (DepEd) in institutionalizing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities for its programs and policies, IPA Philippines partnered with the Policy Research and Development Division (PRD) to conduct a virtual M&E Capacity Building (CapB) Program from February 2 until March 12.The M&E CapB Program aims to build the capacities of the DepEd M&E personnel and program owners in establishing their respective M&E plans.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, policymakers across governments faced an urgent need to make difficult decisions in a quickly evolving environment with limited data to inform them.The evidence community scrambled to set up remote data collection to meet these critical policy demands for data and evidence.Across the globe, policymakers and research teams worked together to co-create new, often innovative ways to gather data and craft evidence-informed policy responses—in some places virtually overnight.