By Gastón Gertner Back in 2010, as an Argentine attending grad school in the United States, a close friend of mine introduced me to the free text-messaging service called WhatsApp. There was only a handful of us who used it on campus. Most of my American fellow students just used regular text messages, but for me, WhatsApp offered a free way of staying in touch with my … [Read more...] about WhatsApp: A tool for development work in Bolivia
Evaluation methods and techniques
How much do impact evaluations (really) help policymaking?
by Eva Vivalt. Increasingly rigorous studies have been done on the effects of development programs with the hope that these studies' results will inform policy decisions. However, the same program often has different effects in different contexts. There are many different variables that can affect what will happen. The key question is then: to what extent can we … [Read more...] about How much do impact evaluations (really) help policymaking?
The synth_runner Package: Utilities to Automate Synthetic Control Estimation Using synth
By Brian Quistorff. The new module for Synthetic Control Methods “synth_runner” helps conduct multiple estimations, inference, diagnostics, and generate visualizations of results.” The Synthetic Control Methodology (SCM) (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003, Abadie et al., 2010, hereafter ADH) is a data-drive approach to small-sample comparative case-studies for estimating … [Read more...] about The synth_runner Package: Utilities to Automate Synthetic Control Estimation Using synth
How to increase the impact of your impact evaluation ?
Disseminating the results of an impact evaluation is key to have a real impact in development policies By Paloma Acevedo* After designing, implementing, and analyzing the data, the results of your impact evaluation are ready to see the light! After all the effort you and your team have devoted to the evaluation, you know that the intervention is twice as effective when it … [Read more...] about How to increase the impact of your impact evaluation ?
Data collection: The primary ingredient for an impact evaluation
By Gastón Gertner* Data are to impact evaluation what raw materials are to a production process. At the Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness (SPD) we encourage teams working in impact evaluations to implement best-practices in their data collection efforts to ensure high-quality evaluations. Many impact evaluations use data collected through the … [Read more...] about Data collection: The primary ingredient for an impact evaluation