The Post-2015 Development Agenda places great emphasis on measurement and monitoring progress of the post-2015 targets, stressing the need for ‘a data revolution' for sustainable development, with a new international initiative to improve the quality of statistics and information available to citizens and governments. Similarly, there is growing recognition of the potential of longitudinal research to contribute evidence for policy, insofar as it facilitates understanding of the dynamic nature of children's development and of the diverse processes that shape their outcomes over time. Thus, there is considerable interest in establishing new longitudinal cohort studies in developing countries.
Through a series of activities, including hosting an international conference, this work seeks to share latest findings emerging from different longitudinal studies and to explore what the next generation of knowledge from longitudinal studies will look like. It will identify how cohort studies can uniquely contribute to the most important current areas for policy and research, and to identify gaps in our knowledge. It will explore the desirability and feasibility of co-production of a methodological toolkit for cohort studies and an off-the-shelf module on young people for use in nationally representative household surveys and develop further substantive papers based on findings that are common to all or most participants at the international conference. The work will share lessons on the practice of longitudinal studies and explore the determinants of their local ownership and sustainability, as well as explore the possibility of developing an expanded community of practice.
