Using AI to Democratize Impact Evaluation: Opportunities and Risks for Youth‑Led and Community‑Based Organizations

This session will take the form of an interactive workshop exploring how AI can help democratize impact evaluation for youth led and community-based organizations, while safeguarding rigor and trust. It will first show how generative AI and related tools can make experimental and quasi experimental methods more accessible to researchers and practitioners, for example through protocol assistants, questionnaire generators, and guided analysis workflows that reduce technical entry barriers without oversimplifying designs. Through live demonstrations and small group exercises, participants will work with concrete cases to use AI to co-design tools, then critically review and improve what the tool produces.
The workshop will then examine the policy conditions under which these tools support, rather than undermine, national priorities avoiding “automatic evaluations” disconnected from country strategies and embedding AI enabled practices within national M&E systems, standards, and ethics frameworks. Finally, it will present real world examples where small youth, gender, and climate organizations use AI to co design data collection tools, clean and analyze their own data, and better communicate with government and funders. By bringing together researchers, policymakers, and civil society actors in an interactive format, the session will identify practical opportunities, risks, and safeguards to ensure that AI enhances locally led evaluation, amplifies marginalized voices, and strengthens evidence informed decision making instead of creating a new digital divide.