Who's demanding impact evaluations - Building evidence for development

(Post by: Bill Savedoff, Co-chair of the Evaluation Gap Working Group)Getting people to talk to one another is a good idea. In London this week, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and CGD sponsored a meeting of European researchers and officials to discuss the best way of building evidence about what works in developing country social programs. The participants were concerned that the primary obstacle to making progress was a lack of demand for impact studies in developing countries.Fortunately, I had been attending a meeting in Mexico just last month, where officials from Mexico, Chile and Argentina were adamant about their need for international support to get impact studies started, build local capacity to do such research, and link findings into policymaking. This demand is articulated in the meeting communiqué.While demand may not be widespread, there are clearly enough policymakers out there to create some very interesting and exciting opportunities. I'm looking forward to two more meetings that CGD is co-sponsoring in the spring - one in New Delhi (April 7) and one in Cape Town (May 18-19) - to see how far this demand extends beyond Latin America, and how it might advance the ideas originally set forth by CGD's Evaluation Gap Working Group.