More high quality blogging over at Bill Easterly's Aid Watch. Guest blogger Alanna Shaikh asks what the limits of impact evaluation are:
If we limit all of our development projects to those that have easy metrics for success, we lose a lot of programs, many of which support important things like rule of law. Of course, if they don’t have useful metrics, how do we know those programs are supporting the important goals?
And how meaningful is impact evaluation anyway when you consider the short time frames we’re working with? Most development programs take ten years or more to show real impact. How are we supposed to bring that in line with government funding cycles?
On the other hand, we don’t have a lot of alternatives to impact evaluation. Impact is not unimportant just because it’s hard to quantify at times. We can’t wish that away.
Shaikh's blog post raises a lot of points that overlap with the heated debates that have followed the release of randomized control trials of microfinance.
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