Evidence-Based Child & Youth Development

Partnerships Provide External Insight

Compassion maintains academic research partnerships to advance global and local understanding of child and youth development in diverse contexts.

These partnerships help provide a significant measure of external insight into our Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning activities. These activities ensure our global programs are as effective as possible in releasing children from poverty.

• Compassion is working with Tufts University and others on a counterfactual, comparative, longitudinal study of positive youth development among some of the world’s poorest youth in El Salvador, Rwanda and Uganda. From 2016 on, this work has resulted in more than 20 academic publications on child development theory, models and tools.
• Tufts academic partners provide ongoing guidance on research design and analysis as well as scientific review of completed studies for Compassion’s impact research and MERL team effort.
• Tufts and other academic partners provide input to help us continually improve our child and youth development theory of change and operationalize the program cycle in the field.

Compassion uses a Needs Dashboard that enables local church partners to conduct data-driven, locally owned needs assessments.

Based on standardized data collection and tools, the dashboard generates evidence of local needs to power locally led design and adaptation across the program cycle.