Educational quality improvement program in Peru. Governments in Latin America spend billions on social programs each year, reaching millions of people with critical public services. But can governments identify more cost-effective strategies to deliver these services? Relying on data and evidence to improve policy design and implementation is one way to ensure … [Read more...] about Five lessons for successful government partnerships
impact
Timely thoughts on impact evaluations
Everyone has great ideas when it comes to designing development projects or policies. At the drawing board, and with a bit of ideological support, an abundance of ideas are born that could easily improve countless lives. However, these ideas, while sound in theory, don´t always work. If only there was a time machine to take us to the future to verify the effectiveness of … [Read more...] about Timely thoughts on impact evaluations
CCTs: not the silver bullet, but with long lasting positive effects
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) were a major social policy innovation in the mid/late 1990s. Instead of providing generalized subsidies, using price controls, and/or directly distributing food as means to help the poor (instruments that are inefficient, distort markets and in general are regressive), governments began to transfer cash directly to the poorest families, … [Read more...] about CCTs: not the silver bullet, but with long lasting positive effects
Do policy briefs work?
The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation just published a rigorous assessment - based on an randomized control design- that tries answer the question: Do policy briefs affect readers’ beliefs? The answers turn out to be not that … [Read more...] about Do policy briefs work?
3 good examples of the impact of impact evaluations
A few weeks ago, I published a blog post on some of the unsettling implications of this paper that suggested that some interventions lose their punch when done by public agencies. One of the takeaways was the need to “go up the bureaucratic supply chain” as nicely put by Justin Sandefur in a tweet on the post. In other words, the need to jump over the “challenge of … [Read more...] about 3 good examples of the impact of impact evaluations