The Role of Impact Evaluation in Improving Development Effectiveness
Speaker: Arianna Legovini, Head of Development Impact Evaluation Initiative, The World Bank.
The last decade has seen a remarkable increase in demonstrating value for money and effectiveness in developmental programs run by the World Bank and other multilateral lending and grant making institutions. The standards for demonstrating impact of developmental projects have also been raised significantly. Rigorous and well-designed impact evaluation can help answer the what and the how of economic development and help design better policies. The Development Impact Evaluation Initiative (DIME) is the World Bank’s flagship initiative to generate knowledge on critical questions in the area of economic development and for evidence based policy making. With 170 completed and 280 active studies in 72 countries to date, DIME is the largest initiative in the world designed to systematically learn from development experience on the basis of rigorous impact evaluation. Arianna Legovini shared insights from many of these projects and identified missed opportunities and policy errors that can result without rigorous impact evaluation.