The Development Impact Blog turns 10: we celebrate with a new logo!

We launched the Development Impact blog on April 1, 2011, and have published exactly 1500 posts over the past 10 years! Our goal was to have a place to discuss a broad range of issues relating to conducting development research and impact evaluations, including discussion of new research methods and papers, sharing some of the many design and methods issues that don’t often make it into either textbooks or published papers, and hopefully help both ourselves and others learn how to continue to improve our understanding of development and how to do development research. We have been thrilled by the continued support from our readers over the past 10 years, and it never gets old to hear from people in different countries who have found a post useful.

To celebrate turning 10, we decided to get rid of our meteor logo, which was not the most positive vision of impact. We are replacing it with something that better captures the idea of the intent of development research – to inform on the range of potential outcomes and choices in policy design and development processes. After a call for artists/photographers and ideas, we were delighted to hear from Mariajose Silva-Vargas (Twitter @Marijo_Silva_V), a Bolivian Photographer and Ph.D. student in Development Economics. She uses behavioral experiments and randomized controlled trials to study economic and policy questions. Currently, she is in Uganda working on interventions to integrate refugees into the labor market and projects related to land markets frictions. As for her photography, she likes to narrate fantastic stories moving beyond the stereotypical images of the Global South. You can check out her amazing portfolio here.

Our new logo image

You will now see most of our posts accompanied by the image above, which Mariajose shot at the iconic ‘Ivory Tower’ building at Makerere University, Uganda's largest and oldest institution of higher learning and research. Her vision of the image is: “As researchers in development, we are often interested in understanding which intervention or policy works best. We know that, although the alternatives might look similar, they can have different impacts on people and society. This motivates us to keep learning, collaborating, and searching for the best. This picture wants to portray exactly that: similar choices that can have very different impacts.”

We see each door as having a different potential lifepath or outcome behind it. Even amongst ourselves, we look at the same picture in different ways. A couple of us were drawn to the locks on a couple of the doors, seeing that perhaps in this draw from a multiverse of possible outcomes, some of the choices are closed to this woman (Cissy Nansera, a model and yoga instructor based in Kampala who worked with Mariajose to create these pictures). Others of us see the world as full of un-opened possibilities waiting to be explored and imagine either her to be carrying a master key and deciding which door to unlock, or that she herself is the key. Either way, we hope you find it a lot more compelling than a meteor hurtling towards Earth!

In the continued spirit of multiplicity, we had several versions taken of this same photo, and different bloggers favored slightly different versions of the photo. You may therefore also see us using the following version of the photo for variety:

A few more images for other purposes

In addition to this main logo image, we have licensed three more of of Mariajose’s other images which you will see appearing with our curated links on our webpage, and with our weekly links.

The first, which we will use for our magical collection of curated links on impact evaluation methods and other technical topics, is this picture of Players of the Ugandan Quidditch Team based in Masaka. Just remember, there are many bludgers to watch out for as you chase the golden snitch of identifying a causal impact.

The second, which we are using for our collection of curated links on survey methods, is this picture from a women’s coffee cooperative near Queen Elizabeth Park. After all, paying careful attention to quality and bean-counting are essential elements of data collection.

Finally, we haven’t completely given up on more literal images of impact. Our weekly links of fast-paced quick hits will be accompanied by this photo of young boxers at the White Collars Boxing Match in 2019, organized by the East Naguru Boxing Club in Kampala.

Thanks again for all your support, feedback, and shared ideas over the past decade, and we look forward to keeping the blog going in the coming years.