Introducing IDEAL

Welcome to IDEAL, the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library, a platform designed to extract results data from international development RCTs and make them accessible to researchers and policymakers. The project is currently in a pilot phase, during which we extract information from a curated initial set of studies and develop robust protocols to grow and maintain IDEAL in the future.

IDEAL is supported by a global consortium of institutions. Hosted by the World Bank, IDEAL will be fully open-access and free for the world to use. Users will be able to easily search, compare, and visualize the relative effect sizes of different policy interventions on a range of outcomes, across countries and contexts.

Motivation

The last few decades have seen explosive growth in randomized impact evaluations that seek to guide policy decision-making in low- and middle-income countries. IDEAL will contribute to translating the insights from multiple studies into actionable and credible policy insights by making the impact of different interventions easily comparable across studies. Beyond this core purpose, IDEAL will help guide the standardization of key information from randomized evaluations and unlock the potential to answer a wide range of methodological questions about RCTs.

Next Steps

Once IDEAL is established, we will invite others to join, guided by consistent protocols for adding new content and rigorous quality control. We will provide public access to IDEAL data, aided by a website that can filter studies by a wide range of criteria and display results immediately. We will also develop a set of pedagogical resources to make evidence aggregation methods widely accessible.

IDEAL Consortium Members