FOR
DEVELOPMENT practitioners, it’s important to find out what programs work and
what don’t. This is where impact evaluation comes in.
Doing
impact evaluation is crucial to assessing the effectiveness of antipoverty or
development interventions and determining whether such efforts should be scaled
up or expanded.
Effective
ways of evaluating impact were discussed in a seminar hosted by PIDS and
international nonprofit organization, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) –
Philippines, last Sept. 10 at the Romulo Hall of NEDA sa Makati Building, as
part of the observance of the 11th Development Policy Research Month.
Nassreena
Sampaco-Baddiri, IPA country director, said impact evaluation has gained new
importance amid questions over the government’s use of development funds.
Jessica
Kiessel, IPA director for country programs, said impact evaluations “tell us if
we are on the right track and how we can improve.” Impact evaluation is also
necessary for accountability and for taking stock of lessons learned.
“Instead
of asking ‘Do development programs work?’ we should be asking ‘Which works
best?’ and ‘How we can scale up what works?’” said Kiessel.
Kiessel
stressed two important things. Impact evaluation should involve a comparison
between a treatment group and a “counterfactual” or control group to determine
if there has been an impact. Also, randomized experiments are more effective in
conducting evaluations.
“We
need to make comparisons. If the counterfactual group can’t be observed, we
need to ‘mimic’ it…randomization is needed to make sure the counterfactual
group matches what the treatment group would look like without the program,”
she explained.
Kiessel
noted that in Ghana, three randomized evaluations found low-cost, remedial
education programs to have quick, positive impacts on literacy and numeracy.
Moreover,
randomization helps ease tension between treatment and control groups.
“If
properly designed and conducted, randomized experiments are the most credible
method to estimate impact of a program,” Kiessel said. “The bottom line here is
that the math that we use does matter.”
PIDS
President Gilberto Llanto said impact evaluation is becoming important with
researches needing more rigor. Impact evaluation is also needed now that the
government has decided to incorporate performance measures in the budget
process, he said in his closing remarks.
PIDS
and IPA have agreed to a partnership to disseminate the results of impact
evaluations to policymakers and the public, Llanto said.
IPA,
established in 2002, ties up with researchers and organizations around the
world to study which social and economic programs work and which don’t. IPA has
14 country programs, including IPA Philippines, and more than 350 research
projects completed or ongoing in over 40 countries across Africa, Latin
America, and Asia. IPA has been conducting research in the Philippines since
2003. (Philippine
Institute for Development Studies)
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