It’s been an exciting and busy year for VoxDev. Earlier this year in June, when VoxDev turned six, Tavneet Suri, Robin Burgess and Chris Woodruff announced they were handing over the reins to Michael Callen, Stefano Caria, Namrata Kala, and Robert Darko Osei.
This year we reached a number of milestones. We passed one million total users since we started in 2017, featured more articles than any previous year, and continued our weekly podcast.
We also released four brand new VoxDevLits – our wikipedia-inspired evidence summaries – and updated three more:
- Land Transport Infrastructure
- Training Entrepreneurs: Issue 3
- Bureaucracy
- Climate Adaptation
- Microfinance: Issue 2
- Mobile Money: Issue 2
- Informality
Since our first launch our VoxDevLits have been downloaded almost 10,000 times. To accompany each release we have continued hosting launch events which average around 100 live participants, and have been viewed a further 2,800 times on YouTube. We take this as evidence that these living literature reviews are useful for a broad readership.
We are thinking big with our VoxDevLits and will continue to add to, and update, our growing library in 2024 with at least eight brand new reviews. We are also developing new ways of hosting VoxDevLits to make them more interactive and accessible.
Our newly upgraded website, which went live last month, will help us make these updates and will also allow us to add policy briefs alongside our VoxDevLits - look out for these early next year. We want VoxDev to be the premier website for expert summaries of policy-relevant research and 2024 is set to be a big year for us achieving this goal.
As always, we welcome your thoughts on how we might improve VoxDev in 2024. Please do send any comments or suggestions to [email protected].
VoxDev will be taking a break from posting new content until January 2nd, when our packed schedule of articles, podcasts and VoxDevLits resumes. In the meantime, if you are looking for some holiday reading and/or listening, here are the VoxDev articles/podcasts we released in 2023 that our audience read/listened to most.
Our five most read articles released in 2023:
- How human and ecosystem health are intertwined: Evidence from vulture population collapse in India - Eyal Frank & Anant Sudarshan
- The deadly toll of marketing infant formula in low- and middle-income countries - Jesse Anttila-Hughes, Lia Haskin Fernald, Paul Gertler, Patrick Krause, Eleanor Tsai & Bruce Wydick
- Agronomy training in Rwanda had negative spillovers - Esther Duflo, Daniel Keniston, Tavneet Suri & Celine Zipfel
- The dynamic effects of cash transfers: Evidence from Liberia and Malawi - Shilpa Aggarwal, Jenny Aker, Dahyeon Jeong, Naresh Kumar, David Sungho Park, Jonathan Robinson & Alan Spearot
- Can psychosocial interventions make anti-poverty programmes more cost-effective? Evidence from Niger - Thomas Bossuroy, Patrick Premand & Catherine Thomas
Our five most listened to podcasts released in 2023:
- Political economy and development - James Robinson
- Policies to improve global learning - Rachel Glennerster
- Research into practice: Lessons from development impact evaluatio - Arianna Legovini
- Understanding rural-urban migration in the developing world - Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
- Globalisation and the ladder of development - David Atkin
For those of you teaching next term, we also thought we would draw your attention to guidance on how to use VoxDev as a teaching resource.
As 2023 comes to a close, VoxDev’s new editorial board wants to thank all of the authors who contributed articles, podcasts, and VoxDevLits. We have enjoyed learning about and sharing your work and look forward to continuing this in the year ahead. We also want to thank our readership and wish you all peace and happiness in the new year!