General overview
From virtually none ten years ago, the number of impact evaluations related to development interventions has tremendously increased over the recent years. In fact, under the leadership of leading academic institutions, empirical studies based on robust comparisons of treatment and control groups have received considerable financial support from the donor community and led to several dozen publications in leading academic journals.
Central in this evolution is the widely shared idea that impact evaluations constitute a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between researchers' and policy makers' communities, and contribute to development effectiveness through better knowledge of what works and what does not among development approaches.
Yet, despite an estimated 250 on-going or completed impact evaluation studies in Africa, only a handful involve African researchers. This course intends to contribute to bridge this gap, through hands-on training on the theory, practice and on-going debates on impact evaluations.
Outline of course (3 days total):
1) The theory of impact evaluations : Selection biases and causality
2) Various approaches to impact evaluations
- Natural experiments-based impact measures
- Matching-based impact measures
- Randomized control trials – various designs
3) Design issues
4) Exercise: Designing an impact evaluation OR Computing an impact measure (STATA-based)
5) Conclusion and further references
Instructor
Tanguy Bernard is a Research Fellow within the Markets, Trade and Institution Division of IFPRI, based in Senegal. Over the recent years, his research has mostly focused on producers’ organizations, their existence, their membership, their activities, and their performance in linking African smallholders to input and output markets. His works relies heavily on primary data collection and experimental tools, with a geographical focus on Senegal, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. Prior to his current position, Tanguy Bernard was a research officer at the Agence Française de Développement, prior to which he was a post-doctoral fellow at IFPRI, based in Ethiopia.