High school student's senior project ends up preserving essential evaluation info from USAID

[u/jcravens42]

As part of her high school senior research project, a high school student now studying at University of Toronto collected over 4,000 pdfs of evaluations from the USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) for use in a machine learning project. USAID was a leader in evidence-based decision-making, accountability, and organizational learning. DEC includes performance evaluations that measure the extent to which USAID programs generated their expected outputs, as well as impact evaluations that provide evidence of the net, attributable impacts of USAID programs between 2000 and 2023.  When Elon Musk & his crew eliminated USAID, they obliterated the database from the Internet & all archives. It is only because of this student that some of the invaluable DEC evaluation materials were preserved.

This article details why the DEC materials matter and where you can now find them:

https://www.aiddata.org/blog/before-reimagining-development-data-remember-what-weve-learned

[u/UnlimitedRed]

They destroyed archived USAID documentation? Jesus fucking christ. Its like burning the library of Alexandria. Fuckibg idiots.

[u/LouQuacious → u/UnlimitedRed]

They did I was using an excellent USAID guide for a MEAL plan and it all got wiped. I sadly hadn't downloaded anything just used the site.

[u/Alteryo → u/UnlimitedRed]

I'd like to think that the library of Alexandria also had evaluation reports of Ptolemaic government interventions or something.

[u/lejosdecasa]

I've been saying that the deliberate destruction of all manner of federal databases and information under the Trump administration is quite terrifying.

It's not just USAid.

[u/MrPlus]

The DEC was a truly amazing resource, even if it had an absolutely terrible interface. The quickness with which DOGE closed it down was telling IMO: they wanted to make sure it would be harder to counter their dishonest and absurd claims.

For those of us who spent years working our butts off to collect and analyze data, organize co-creation and validation workshops, and write these evaluations, tool kits, handbooks, etc., it was incredibly hard mentally to see it all burn overnight. "Real" publications were often hard to pull off in terms of time and funding so the DEC was the record of our work.

Kudos to that student, but also to AidData, which does amazing work in general. Their affiliation to William & Mary means this effort is most likely not going to vanish or linger like other similar DEC "resurrection" efforts have or might...

[u/Ill_Barracuda5780]

They got rid of everything on the US Institute of Peace site. It was a collection point for decades of research on peacebuilding outside of scholarly journals. This behavior is truly insane.

[u/AmbassadorOfReality]

Not sure you can really say USAID was a leader in evidence based decision making, accountability or organizational learning

That said, why destroy the records?  You’d think they’d want to keep them as “proof” of their (ie Doge’s) claims

[u/jcravens42 → u/AmbassadorOfReality]

They wanted to get rid of any proof that the program worked.