Overview
Over the course of the past ten years, the number of impact evaluations related to development interventions has increased substantially. In fact, under the leadership of leading academic institutions in the US and Europe, empirical studies based on robust comparisons of treatment and control groups have received considerable financial support from the donor community and led to dozens of publications in leading academic journals in the areas of agriculture, education and health.
At the heart of this movement has been a widely-shared idea that impact evaluations can contribute to development effectiveness by helping to determine “what works and what does not”, and that this research can be used to influence policy. Yet, despite an estimated 250 on-going or completed impact evaluation studies in Africa conducted by NGOs, the World Bank and universities, only a handful of these involve researchers from African universities. Why? And how can this be changed?
This course intends to provide African-based researchers with knowledge of the latest developments regarding both technical and topical aspects of impact evaluation. The course is also meant to help build a high-level network of local impact evaluation practitioners and partners of within the region.
course information
The course will be organized into two* one-week courses in Dakar, Senegal. Each course will be further divided into several modules focused on a particular strand of literature that is of current relevance for impact evaluations in the region, and taught by a leading academic in the field. Sector-specific topics include agriculture, education, finance, health, infrastructure and safety nets. In each module, the training will cover theoretical and empirical areas in that literature, apply that learning by replicating a real-life impact evaluation, and a discussion of a participant’s research and how these techniques could be applied.
*The first course was offered in Spring 2013. The Winter 2013 portion of the course is by invitation only.
The Winter course will be organized as follows:
Topic: Introduction and overview of the workshop
Topic: Motivation, Effort and Incentives: theory, experiments and applications
-
Theory and experiments overview
- Incentives and HIV prevention
- Incentives to learn
- Incentives to work
-
Applications
- Results replication
- What to do with experimental data
- Design
- Theory of change and measurement
- Experiment from A to Z
Topic: Recent developments in the study of network effects: theory, measurement and applications
- Introduction to network theory and new advancements
-
Identification challenges and measurement
- Econometric challenges and solutions
- Case-study exercise
- Stata exercise
-
Applications
- Overview of recent applications
- Impact evaluation design challenges and opportunities. How to leverage impact evaluations to study network effects?
- Impact evaluation design exercise
Organizer
Tanguy Bernard is a Research Fellow within the Markets, Trade and Institution Division of IFPRI, based in Senegal. Over the recent years, his research has mostly focused on producers’ organizations, their existence, their membership, their activities, and their performance in linking African smallholders to input and output markets. His works relies heavily on primary data collection and experimental tools, with a geographical focus on Senegal, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. Prior to his current position, Tanguy Bernard was a research officer at the Agence Française de Développement, prior to which he was a post-doctoral fellow at IFPRI, based in Ethiopia.
Instructors
Clara Delavallade is a Research Fellow at IFPRI (MTID) and an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town (on leave). She received her PhD in Economics from the University Paris Sorbonne in 2007 and holds a Masters in Economics and Statistics from ENSAE and a Masters in Development Economics from the University Paris Sorbonne. She was the Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia between 2008 and 2010. Most of her research derives from randomized field experiments in the health and education sector in India and South and West Africa, with a focus on gender and incentives.
Susan Godlonton is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division of IFPRI. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan and a Masters in Economics from the University of Cape Town. Previously she lectured in the Economics department at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on job-seeker and employee decision-making and behavior in labor markets in developing countries mostly in urban areas. She also studies decision-making and information sharing in the context of health seeking behaviors with a particular focus on HIV prevention. She has conducted research in Malawi and South Africa, and is also currently working in Mozambique.