Workshop Materials: Impact Evaluation of Population, Health, and Nutrition Programs

Author(s): MEASURE Evaluation

Year: 2017

Abstract:

Many governments and international organizations have established improving people’s health as a key objective of their actions. To that end, it is important to know whether these programs are having the intended impact they were designed for. Good evaluations play an important role by providing evidence of the impact of program actions on target populations. Does a program have an impact? By how much? Does the program have a different impact on different groups of people? Do different program components have different impacts? Why and how does the program have an impact?

Those are important questions that can be answered by rigorous impact evaluations.

In this workshop we will review concepts and methods for providing answers to some of those questions. But, how credible are the answers? We will also review the limitations of the methodologies and the conditions under which they provide valid and credible answers.

Most of the material presented here comes from the 2016 impact evaluation workshop held in Accra, Ghana in collaboration with the University of Ghana and GEMNet-Health institutions. The material built on the experience of numerous workshops conducted over the years with the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico, the Public Health Foundation of India, Addis Continental Institute of Public Health, and University of Pretoria. We have collected all workshop materials to be used as a resource to review the main methods for evaluating program impact and to increase participants' ability to design and conduct impact evaluations of health programs. The main workshop objectives are as follows:

• to understand the basic concepts of program evaluation
• to define the impact evaluation questions and to examine the main issues to consider for answering those questions in a valid way
• to review the main evaluation designs and estimation techniques used for evaluating program impact
• to develop criteria for choosing the appropriate estimation strategy given different scenarios of program characteristics and data availability
• to interpret results appropriately and to examine their programmatic implications to gain practical experience applying the estimation strategies and tools.

The workshop materials in the zip file are listed in order by workshop day. Some files require STATA software to run. The collection is also available online at https://www.measureevaluation.org/resources/training/capacity-building-resources/workshop-on-impact-evaluation-of-population-health-and-nutrition-programs