When Does Rigorous Impact Evaluation Make a Difference? The Case of the Millennium Villages
When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? This Paper studies one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained lo...
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20101115114009 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3959 |
| Summary: | When is the rigorous impact evaluation
of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? This
Paper studies one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages
Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package
intervention to spark sustained local economic development
in rural Africa. it illustrates the benefits of rigorous
impact evaluation in this setting by showing that estimates
of the project's effects depend heavily on the
evaluation method. Comparing trends at the MVP intervention
sites in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria to trends in the
surrounding areas yields much more modest estimates of the
project's effects than the before-versus-after
comparisons published thus far by the MVP. Neither approach
constitutes a rigorous impact evaluation of the MVP, which
is impossible to perform due to weaknesses in the evaluation
design of the project's initial phase. These weaknesses
include the subjective choice of intervention sites, the
subjective choice of comparison sites, the lack of baseline
data on comparison sites, the small sample size, and the
short time horizon. The authors describe how the next wave
of the intervention could be designed to allow proper
evaluation of the MVP's impact at little additional cost. |
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