Our case studies allow you to learn more about how Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) works in practice.
Navigate to our website to access cases on the following topics with more coming soon:
- Tackling the Learning Crisis in Indonesia: Indonesia is facing a learning crisis. While schooling has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, the quality of education has remained mediocre. A team of researchers affiliated with the RISE Programme at SMERU, an Indonesia think tank, adapted the PDIA approach and deployed it in four district governments.
- Educational Reform in Sobral, Brazil: For more than two decades, the Brazilian municipality of Sobral has focused intensively on improving the quality of its public education system; the resulting success has been remarkable. This case explores the transformation of Sobral’s education system through the lens of PDIA, with an emphasis on the reform period from 2000-2004.
- Improving Educational Outcomes in South Africa: Funda Wande is a non-profit organization with the goal of ensuring all students in South Africa can read for meaning and calculate with confidence in their home language by the age of 10. They develop curricula, videos, and print materials to train teachers in the fundamentals of foundational learning and have adopted a “learning by doing” strategy that is similar to the PDIA approach.
- Digital Health Systems in Croatia: The government of Croatia has been committed to adopting digital policy solutions for years. The health sector was a focal point of this commitment. As is the case in many countries, Croatia’s health system is quite bureaucratic and generates lots of data—about patients and their care—in bureaucratic silos. The scattered nature of this data has negatively affected both health care quality and cost.
- Problem Driven Project in Mozambique: This case details BSC’s experience working with a broad group of officials across Mozambique’s public financial management (PFM) sector, and donors (particularly the World Bank) between March 2010 and December 2013.
- Budget Reform in Mozambique: Mozambique’s Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) had come to the end of a ten year public financial management (PFM) reform initiative. While widely hailed as a success, some observers were concerned about compliance gaps and weaknesses in the system. Between September and December 2009, BSC worked with officials in Mozambique’s public financial management sector to explore whether a conversation about problems could spark new ways of doing reforms.
- Evolution of Export Sophistication in Costa Rica: In the 1980s, Costa Rica was a banana exporting nation that had tried to pursue other industries with little success. Following the arrival of the microprocessor giant Intel in 1997, Costa Rica saw significant growth, with real GDP per capita expanding over 20 percent from 1997 to 2004.