Impact Evaluations

This course trains participants in the conduct of rigorous evaluations of the impact of social policies or programs on targeted populations. Through either an experimental or non-experimental approach, trainees will learn to collect and compare data on both treatment and control groups, to ultimately produce crucial empirical evidence on the actual efficiency/success of specific policies and/or program interventions in achieving their expected outcomes.

Policy Impact Evaluation Research Initiative

In recent years, among various methodological trends in the field of development research, that of impact evaluations has certainly gained the most attention - and popularity - amongst policymakers and program implementers in developing countries.

With the implementation, in 2007, of the Policy Impact Evaluation Research Initiative (PIERI), PEP was one of the first organizations to promote the conduct of such evaluations by teams of local researchers in the South. As such, its expertise in the application of the related methods is now valued by other institutions, researchers and research-users worldwide.

Program’s objectives

The participants will:

• learn methodological and practical aspects of policy impact evaluation research;
• understand the advantages and challenges of each of the techniques involved in impact evaluation research;
• be able to choose the appropriate evaluation approach in different contexts;
• interpret and communicate the evaluation results to both academic and non-academic audiences

The course involves:

• An introduction to the micro-econometric approach to impact evaluation, the notion of counterfactual, the parameters of interest
• An introduction to social experiments: theory and practical issues
• An introduction to non-experimental impact evaluation: difference-in-difference, matching and regression discontinuity techniques

For information on past editions of PEP Schools in Impact Evaluations, follow the links below:

• Mali 2011