The Tao of Impact Evaluation
Is in danger of being messed up. Here is why: There are two fundamental reasons for doing impact evaluation: learning and judgment. Judgment is simple – thumbs up, thumbs down: program continues or not. Learning is more amorphous – we do impact evaluation to see if a project works, but we try and build in as many ways to understand the results as possible, maybe do a couple of treatment arms so we see what works better than what. In learning evaluations, real failure is a lack of statistical power, more so than the program working or