Introduction to Impact Evaluation

An introductory module on Impact Evaluation. Currently, international development and businesses are increasingly employing data analysis to understand policies and product launches better.

The importance of impact evaluation within development economics cannot be understated — in 2019, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel memorial prize for Economics. They received the award for ground-breaking work in development economics, focusing on poverty alleviation. Use of Theory of Change framework, Statistics, Regression, Randomised Controlled Trials, and other quantitative analysis are increasingly used to understand interventions’ impact on the intended population.

In recent years, randomized controlled trials have aided in genuinely understanding how well interventions have performed. The best way to measure the effect of policy interventions is to compare the outcome post-policy intervention to that of a scenario when no intervention is administered.

Impact Evaluation (IE) helps in the following.  

• Accountability & Evidence Based Approach
• Understand development interventions
• IE is the only way to test, empirically, the extent to which project and policy initiatives produced measurable differences in outcomes compared with counterfactual estimates (i.e., in the no intervention scenario)
• Used in social sciences and policy analysis
• Usually take a long time in years.

This is a sample of the course freely available to everyone.