Impact Evaluation Methods for Social Programs

Impact evaluation is an indispensable tool to assess whether a program is achieving its objective, how the beneficiaries’ situation changed as a result of the program and what the situation would have been without the program. Moreover, if an impact evaluation is carried out at an intermediate stage of project execution, very important lessons can be learned on how the program design and/or the project execution can be modified to improve the effectiveness of the intervention. The definition of program objectives and targeting mechanisms might also be improved by planning an impact evaluation at an early stage of project design. While the design of an impact evaluation can be time and resource intensive, the costs are very often small relative to the scale of a transfer program (particularly if in-country resources in terms of available data and data processing skills are used). The returns in terms of increased effectiveness of social spending and greater accountability are very high.