Course Type: Short Courses
Training Provider: University of East Anglia
School/Institute/Dept./Centre: International Development UEA

The target audience for this course is early- and mid-level professionals, post-graduate students and academics with interests in or working with international agencies, governments in developing and developed countries, think-tanks, NGOs and other donor organisations which need to understand the methods used in evidence-based policy making in order to evaluate and justify continued public spending on particular projects and programmes. A working knowledge of basic statistics is strongly desirable.

Objectives

Given the need for policymakers, programme implementing and funding organisations to justify their choice of social and economic interventions, it has become increasingly important to use 'evidence-based' criteria to decide what kind of programmes work, how, for whom, in what circumstances, and at what cost. Much evidence is quantitative in nature, and this course aims to equip those working in governments, funding agencies, research and non-government organisations to understand, critique and make effective use of such evidence.

 

While the course focuses on issues of attribution - tracing out cause and effect - and quantification, it is also concerned with the context, criteria and limitations of evidence-based quantitative evaluations. Staff involved in designing and implementing development programmes often find it useful to learn from and integrate impact evaluation (IE) mechanisms in their programmes in order to learn from, measure effectiveness of, and where possible, judge the replicability of interventions. The course therefore aims to address an important prerequisite for incorporating IE into programme design: a theoretical and practical understanding of IE approaches to enable selection of appropriate methodologies, coupled with careful appraisal of the resulting evidence. Thus, participants will be introduced to current quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation techniques for impact evaluation and gain critical understanding of the roles they can play in the design and assessment of public policy and development interventions.

 

Teaching will consist of interactive lectures, group discussions and several worked-through examples where participants will analyse data from established IE examples that are drawn from the development literature and elsewhere. The course will be taught by IE experts from the School of International Development and the Overseas Development Institute with external speakers from 3ie.

 

 

Course content
 

• Theories and practices of evaluation in public policy
•  The evaluation problem
  • Attribution, selection and placement biases
• Evaluation research designs
  • Observational data, quasi-experiments and correlation studies
  • Social experiments, natural experiments and randomised control trials
  • Qualitative evaluation designs
  • Evaluation survey design
• Econometric techniques for impact evaluation
  • Revision of basic econometrics
  • Instrumental variables technique
  • Propensity score matching
  • Regression discontinuity
  • Difference-in-difference estimation
• Communication and dissemination of evaluation evidence
• Systematic reviews and meta-analysis in development
• Replication and research ethics

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Staff:
Tutors will be drawn from IE experts with many years of practical engagement with international development from the School of International Development and the Overseas Development Institute, and may include Edward Anderson, Ben D’Exelle, Maren Duvendack, Lucio Esposito, Bereket Kebede, Richard Palmer-Jones, Pieter Serneels, and Arjan Verschoor. Guest presentations include experts from 3ie and possibly other IE experts, as well as other (non-quantitative) social scientists involved in IE at UEA and representatives of agencies commissioning modern IE and evidence-based policy. This course has been developed by Richard Palmer-Jones who has long experience with evaluations in development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, especially irrigation, agriculture and poverty reduction, and Maren Duvendack who is a development economist with expertise in quantitative impact evaluations and has written a PhD “Smoke and Mirrors: Evidence from Microfinance Evaluations in India and Bangladesh”. Institutional Capability The School of International Development is particularly well constituted to provide a broad based multi-disciplinary environment in which to teach evidence-based policy because of the wide range of academic disciplines of faculty members and their intensive engagement in development practice through academic and funded research and consultancy in many development arenas and geographical regions.

Entry Requirements:
To participate effectively it is necessary to have full workshop level competence in English. It is assumed that participants have basic knowledge of elementary statistics and familiarity with the Windows operating system. Brief revision of statistics up to multiple linear regression and an introduction to the statistical software package Stata will be provided in addition to the specific impact evaluation techniques.

Intake/Applications (previous year):
20

Course Duration:
9 -20 July 2012 contact devco.train@uea.ac.uk for all further information

Language(s) of Instruction:

• English

Mode of Study:

• residential

Thematic Focus:

• Development Economics
• Development Policy and Management
• Development Studies
• Poverty Analysis
• Research Methods
• Social Policy and Development

Country(ies):

• United Kingdom

Town(s) or City(ies):
University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk,

Course fees:
£3,000 to include tuition and accommodation (but no meals)

Course's Webpage:
https://www.uea.ac.uk/dev/co/prodev/iee-bpd

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