Yesterday (January 16th) we started in Santiago de Chile an International Workshop on Surveys and Impact Evaluation. This is a joint effort of the IDB, the Public Health School at the University of Chile and Sistemas Integrales.
This workshop is also supported by the World Bank and the Spanish Fund for Impact Evaluation. The 100 participants come from more than 20 countries and 50 different organizations.
The purpose of the workshop, which will last until the end of January, is to train public and private sector professionals in policy impact evaluations and understanding survey instruments.
The seminar will cover both theoretical and applied topics in impact evaluation and surveys. In future blogs, we will be sharing the presentations from this workshop.
In these next two weeks we will try to:
- Understand the technical aspects of impact evaluation, including randomized experiments, and the most commonly used quasi experimental approaches.
- Understand the challenges facing impact evaluation in Latina America and the Caribbean
- Develop capacities to embed evidence in public decision making
- Identify the connections between program design, implementation and impact evaluation
- Understand the links between survey instruments and impact evaluation design
- Grasp the importance in developing useful data, including sample designs, instruments, and data collection quality control with the support of IT solutions
- Discuss survey stages in complex designs
Why in Chile? In October 2011the Chilean government transformed its traditional Ministry of Planning into a Ministry of Social Development, creating a Deputy Ministers Office, which focuses on impact evaluations.
This is a reflection of the high importance that the Government of Chile gives to impact evaluation since the creation of the Compass Commission, which had support from the MIT Poverty Lab.
We will blog, on the next two weeks, a bit more on the results of this workshop, and we will share all the presentations we can.
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