International headlines often make mention of side effects of international cooperation, ranging from aid-fuelled corruption to the negative side effects of volunteer tourism. The OECD Development Assistance Committee, an international forum of many of the largest providers of aid, prescribes that evaluators should consider if an intervention has unintended effects. Yet the little that is known suggests that few evaluations of international cooperation projects systematically assess their unintended effects. To address this gap in assessing unintended effects, this study develops an operational typology of 10 types of unintended effects of international cooperation that have emerged in the literature and applies this to all 644 evaluations of the Netherlands’ development cooperation between 2000 and 2020 using structured text mining with manual verification. The results show that approximately 1 in 6 evaluations carefully considered unintended effects and identified 177 different ones. With the exception of 5, these could be classified in 9 of the 10 typologies, indicating that this typology can guide international development cooperation to systematically consider and assess its unintended effects. International development planners, researchers and evaluators are recommended to henceforth make use of and improve this operational typology.

In this review paper, we explore how on-the-ground Early Childhood Development (ECD) innovators are using monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems to guide the design and implementation of ECD programs, as well as how MEL systems can influence policy and support the achievement of impact at scale. We reflect on articles in the Frontiers series “Effective delivery of integrated interventions in early childhood: innovations in evidence use, monitoring, evaluation, and learning.” The 31 contributions to the series reflect the breadth and depth of complexity that characterizes ECD, including global geographic spread, with studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Our synthesis finds that integrating MEL processes and systems into the fabric of a program or policy initiative can broaden the underlying value proposition. Specifically, ECD organizations sought to design their MEL systems to ensure programs fit the values, goals, experiences and conceptual frameworks of diverse stakeholders, so that participating makes sense to all. For example, formative, exploratory research identified the priorities and needs of the target population and frontline service providers, and informed the content and delivery of an intervention. ECD organizations also designed their MEL systems to support a shift of accountability toward broader ownership: They included delivery agents and program participants alike as subjects rather than objects, through active participation in data collection, and by providing opportunities for equitable discussion of results and decision-making. Programs collected data to respond to specialized characteristics, priorities and needs, embedding program activities into existing day-to-day routines. Further, papers pointed to the importance of intentionally involving a variety of stakeholders in national and international dialogues to ensure that diverse ECD data collection efforts are aligned and multiple perspectives are considered in the development of national ECD policies. And, several papers illustrate the value of creative methods and measurement tools to integrate MEL into a program or policy initiative. Finally, our synthesis concludes that these findings align with the five aspirations that were formulated as part of the Measurement for Change dialogue, which motivated the launch of the series.

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There is widespread recognition among scholars, international aid providers and evaluators of the need to take into account the unintended outcomes of international development efforts. Practitioners have also signed on to charters that promise they will do their utmost best to ‘do no harm’. This article focusses on the often overlooked unintended gender effects. A rigorous literature review was conducted to reveal some of the most prominent unintended consequences as documented in primary research in development studies. Five prevalent unintended gender effects were identified: (1) household dynamics, (2) anti‐foreign backfire, (3) overburdening of women, (4) human trafficking and sexual exploitation and (5) hype. While not all of the unintended gender effects are negative, most of the reported unintended effects jeopardise the intended outcomes of the interventions. This research provides both a call and a tool to analyse more systematically the unintended gender effects of international development efforts.