March 2013

Recently, CGD interviewed candidates for post-doctoral fellows and I was (pleasantly) surprised to find that many of the top candidates did empirical field research for their dissertations in the form of impact evaluations and that many of them are also from low- and middle-income countries. Capacity constraints are simply dropping at a phenomenal rate – part of the reason, I suppose, for the explosion of information available on the web these days.

So this month’s update is a “sampler” of sorts. While Valentine’s Day was over a month ago, I figure it’s never too late to make a commitment (to evaluate). If you want to speed up business startups, you might appreciate a review on business training. Then there is the difficulty of moving evidence to policy and, for a bit of color, check out Gary King’s graphical analyses.

Regards,

William D. Savedoff
Senior Fellow
Center for Global Development

Will you make a commitment to evaluation?

Are governments doing a good job of promoting and using good quality impact evaluations as recommended over the years? The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) is taking up this question through a voluntary peer learning process for its membership – which now includes public agencies from 9 high-income and 7 low- and middle-income countries. Framed in the context of assessing a “commitment to evaluation” (c2e), 3ie is beginning a series of study tours and learning events to promote good evaluation practices and to generate a common framework for measuring the production and use of high quality evidence. This month, the peer learning team visited Uganda to draw lessons from high-profile evaluations conducted by the Office of the Prime Minister.

Image: Ted Collins

Business training: a model for extracting lessons

A working Paper by McKenzie and Woodruff addresses the question “What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world?” The review finds relatively modest impacts on survival of firms or increased sales but stronger evidence that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. In addition to extracting lessons for future business training programs, the paper models the process of assessing the quality, context and character of the evidence. By discussing the results with careful attention to such things as time horizons, attrition, and statistical power, the authors not only qualify the findings but deepen our understanding of what the available evidence can tell us and show where future studies need to go.

Image: Flickr user bbcworldservice

Where evidence intersects with politics

Getting evidence to inform policy is often problematic so being persuasive requires not only good evidence but also a compelling story for politicians to see how the findings align with their goals. A recent essay by David Bornstein demonstrates one way of making such a case in a particularly poisonous political context (the United States) by showing how allocating resources to effective programs can appeal to progressives and conservatives alike. He further points out the value of promoting experimentation by subnational governments as a way not only to facilitate evaluation but also to unleash experimentation.

Image: Ted Collins