March 2023​

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Expanding access to quality and affordable child care offers to be a beneficial investment for countries as it helps improving children’s foundational skills while also enhancing women’s empowerment through enabling women to participate in the labour force. Over the last decade, Development Analytics has carried out several studies looking specifically at childcare policies and programmes and their ability to improve the overall well-being of children and their families. These studies were carried out for partners and clients including the World Bank, UNICEF, AfD, Foundation for the Support of Women’s Work (KEDV) and The Mother-Child Education Foundation (AÇEV). 

February 2023​

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As the Development Analytics Team, we are deeply saddened by the devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria last week. The scale of the tragedy and the size of the area covered is huge and in terms of the estimated death toll reaches 200,000 - though official figures at the moment are a fraction of this level. The population affected by the earthquake has immediate shelter and food needs. Turkey Mozaik Foundation works with local NGOs in the field to provide this support. 

January 2023​

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Dropping out of school is often not a sudden action but a culmination of various factors pushing children to leave school. For this reason, it is very important to pre-emptively identify students at risk and take preventive measures to improve school retention rates over time. Especially in modelling early warning systems, machine learning has recently proved to be a promising approach to identifying students at risk of dropout and informing preventive policy interventions for education staff and policymakers. However, the current focus on using administrative data with ML applications also restricts the scope of these applications in data-scarce countries, where data collection and management systems are relatively more prone to financial and technical constraints.

September 2022

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The report, “Evaluative Learning Study for Phase III of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) Assistance for Refugees in Turkey”, prepared by Development Analytics for The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), documents the livelihoods and vulnerabilities of refugees in Turkey and focuses on the period between October 2018 and December 2021.

August 2022

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Development Analytics studied the feasibility of using digital ID and alternative data sources to support the financial inclusion of refugees in Turkey through a project financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The project "Exploring the Use of Digital ID and Big Data for the Financial Inclusion of Refugees in Istanbul" aimed to raise awareness of the key stakeholders among Turkish authorities and financial institutions to incite action that enhances Turkey's refugee response to financial inclusion, examined their approaches and provided alternative digital identity solutions to overcome challenges with the support of frontier technologies. 

July 2022

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Development Analytics has recently entered a Long-Term Arrangement (LTAS) with UNICEF on the Provision of High-Quality Technical Expertise on Child Poverty and Social Protection. Under this LTA, we stand ready to support UNICEF Country Offices in the period 2022-2025 on analytical work related to Integrated Programme Areas and Inclusive Social Protection.

March 2022

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Our article “Cash transfers: learning from the EU programme in Turkey”, distilling Development Analytics’ learnings from the projects carried out since 2017 related to the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) cash transfer in Turkey, is published in the Forced Migration Review (FMR). Published by the Refugee Studies Centre in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, FMR is the most widely read publication on forced migration globally. In recent years, in Turkey, Development Analytics has taken key roles in several programme evaluations related to the ESSN: the mid-term evaluation of the Facility for Refugees in Turkey (the Facility/FRIT) (2019-2021), mid-term evaluation of the ESSN transfer (2017-2018) and mid-term review of the ESSN transfer (2019-2020). Our work in this context resumed this year as well through two different research studies carried out for The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) and related to ESSN Phase III.

September  2021

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Our associate Didem Pekkurnaz, and the Development Analytics team members Meltem A. Aran and Nazli Aktakke have published an article entitled "Does quality matter in determining child care prices? Evidence from private child care provision in Turkey". The paper was published in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy in September 2021.

July 2021

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Development Analytics has recently concluded three microsimulation projects to allow decision-makers to forecast the possible outcomes of various policy scenarios to alleviate the negative impact of the COVID pandemic. In this capacity, our team worked with a number of UNICEF country offices, including Georgia, St Lucia, and Turkey, to estimate the pandemic’s impact on the monetary poverty of children and possible poverty reducing impact of alternative cash transfer scenarios. Development Analytics provided UNICEF country offices with interactive dashboards as well, that makes it easier to see the results in a dynamic way and increases the usefulness and effectiveness of the research for government counterparts.