What does good evidence actually look like?
The evidence chain matters, and there are several approaches a country can take to produce the needed evidence. What does building it look like in a real national context, with real constraints? Five countries did it five different ways.
"What distinguishes the stronger plans is not the volume of evidence generated but the clarity of the planning question the evidence was designed to answer: which children are we not reaching, and what is stopping us?"
"Adaptation, rather than full replication, is the appropriate transfer model. Countries applied the same core planning logic through configurations calibrated to their context."
Five country contexts. Five ways to build the evidence.
Open the countries in any order. They are not ranked. Find the one whose starting point most resembles your own and see what its evidence approach made possible.
Starting conditions
Limited disaggregated data on where children were being missed and why.
Evidence approach
A deep dive conducted with UNICEF support analysing child poverty, social exclusion and access to services, combined with a testing of models of intervention, a review of administrative data and a Children-Researchers Programme: three teams of adolescents aged 12 to 17, from three regions, trained to research their peers’ access to services.
What it made possible
Evidence that institutional actors alone could not produce; a direct line from the evidence to the plan’s target groups; a two-tier governance model and a biennial operational cycle.
"This deep dive contributed to the overall evidence base for the National Action Plan. And what was particularly important is that this analysis helped identify the main target groups of vulnerable children."
Starting conditions
A vast existing evidence base and no additional new research.
Evidence approach
A systematic synthesis of more than 120 existing sources, oriented around the planning question.
What it made possible
The most granular target-group profiling of any Member State, with 18 groups and roughly 30 sub-groups. Worth considering: it demands a correspondingly detailed monitoring framework to track.
"The evidence generation phase was conducted internally, relying on existing evidence and research. This reduces the financial requirements for the development of the plan but requires a high level of installed technical capacity to carry out the review of existing sources, analyse them and use them as the basis for the plan and its theory of change."
Starting conditions
Fragmented, non-interoperable data held sector by sector across ministries.
Evidence approach
A deep dive plus an analysis of the key figures of child poverty and the main barriers to services, a national stakeholder field survey (around 350 responses from 173 organisations), a school questionnaire answered by children, and eight focus groups with Roma children, children with disabilities, unaccompanied minors, LGBTIQ+ children and children in institutions.
What it made possible
Primary evidence from children at national scale, and a plan with a 132-indicator monitoring annex.
"We aimed for a plan that is child-centred and grounded in lived experience, not only in statistical analysis. Previous national measures were fragmented and lacking coordination."
Starting conditions
A need for the service-user perspective at scale, beyond what officials assumed they already knew.
Evidence approach
Two commissioned studies plus a large-scale representative family survey across municipalities with open-ended questions, and a Children’s Council of fifteen children aged 10 to 16 that validated the child-friendly version of the plan.
What it made possible
The lived experience of families embedded directly in the planning chain; coordination attached to an existing body for sustainability.
"That research was made directly with families, so the families were the ones who participated and gave the answer. We really took a lot from that research, because for us it was very important to have the opinion of children and families directly."
Starting conditions
A compressed timeframe for evidence generation, and not part of the Child Guarantee testing phase.
Evidence approach
A barrier analysis, with nine access barriers across five categories, applied to each policy area to surface twenty-five specific access challenges, combined with a review of existing data.
What it made possible
A coherent plan without a deep dive, and local replication through Local Child Guarantee Units mandated to repeat the barrier diagnosis at municipal level.
"From the very beginning, a lot of importance was given to the construction of a diagnosis as detailed as possible. A process of consultations and study was carried out, looking for evidence, data and information of different natures, with the aim of identifying all the available information, but also the information gaps to be worked on during implementation."
Now sequence it yourself
You have seen five ways to build the evidence. Doing it well is also a question of sequence. Below are the tasks of evidence-based planning. Place each into the phase where it belongs: tap a task, then tap its phase. Tap a placed task to pick it up again.
Tap a task to pick it up.
Foundations
Evidence design
Data collection
Analysis & targeting
The order is where countries got into trouble
Governance and child participation have to be set up early, or they collapse into symbolic validation. The evidence phase itself needs protected time before drafting begins; compressing it into the drafting timeline is what produces a plan that cannot trace its own logic.
Apply this to your context
- Which of the five starting points most resembles your own, and what would its evidence approach ask of you first?
- Thinking about your own timeline, which task are you most at risk of leaving too late?
Take this to your team
Building the evidence for a National Action Plan is not only a question of methods, but also of sequence. The tasks most often left too late are precisely the ones that cannot be recovered once the plan is drafted. Use this with your team to see where your own sequence stands.
The tasks you cannot leave late
- Convene the Steering Committee and intersectoral working group, including the finance ministry
- Engage civil society and collect input
- Identify and train children from vulnerable groups to take part
Other aspects the sequence exposes
- Ensure enough time for the evidence phase before drafting
- Build rolling, periodical implementation plans
Questions
- Which of the five starting points most resembles our country context?
- Thinking about our own timeline, which tasks are we most at risk of leaving too late?
- What would it take to move the one most-at-risk task earlier, starting this month?