Impact Evaluation

Governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations and the private sector throughout the world are increasingly looking for credible evidence on whether their policies, programs and interventions work. For example, funding institutions of agri-environmental schemes; climate adaptation and mitigation, agricultural extension, marketing and commercialization, watershed management, environmental and biodiversity protection programs; and food safety and sustainability standards may require an evidence that these interventions “caused” an improvement in a set of specific outcomes such as income, consumption, productivity, health and environmental indicators.

This course covers experimental and non-experimental impact evaluation methods such as randomized controlled trials, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity design, instrumental variable approach, and matching methods. The course will emphasize on the challenges involved in designing, identifying and analyzing causal relationship between a program or an intervention and its outcomes while providing students with a practical experience on evaluating programs using existing data and designing impact evaluation proposals.