PhD students Chang He and Stephan Lefebvre have been working in the Learning Evaluation and Accountability Department (LEAD) of Oxfam America on the project “Old Data, New Ideas for Gender Justice.” The project saw He and Lefebvre reanalyze data from completed agricultural development initiatives in order to add a substantive gender component to the analysis. He completed an analysis of the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative in Senegal, a partnership between Oxfam American and the UN World Food Project, while Lefebvre produced a report on the results from a randomized control trial in Haiti on the System for Rice Intensification (SRI). They presented their work at the American Evaluation Association conference in Washington, D.C. on November 6-11, 2017.
The Emerging Evaluators Fellowship Program allowed He and Lefebvre to gain valuable experience working with practitioners and policy experts at Oxfam while contributing statistical analysis and writing policy briefs. Lefebvre noted: “This was a great fit for Chang and me, especially in light of our coursework in PGAE (Program on Gender Analysis in Economics). The team at Oxfam doesn’t shy away from the technical issues – we had many debates about different econometric approaches and robustness tests – and they also integrate feminist analysis into all of their evaluation and accountability work.” 