Howard White, the Executive Director of 3ie (the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation),
guest blogged for the World Bank on the challenges
of evaluating development projects with a small n—that is, where there are
insufficient units of analysis to use rigorous statistical evaluation methods.
This includes projects like “support of policy reform at the national level, or
capacity building in a single agency, or indeed the assessment of whether a
particular impact evaluation has influenced policy.” While there are a number
of possible approaches for evaluating small n projects, there is no consensus
on the best way to overcome the biases inherent in relying on qualitative
methods.
In other development debates, Dave Algoso of Find What Works weighed
in on the questions Foreign Policy highlighted
last week about the “best” type of implementing agency for development
projects—contractors? NGOs? CBOs? Governments?
Brookings has launched a new
interactive tool to explore its Development, Aid, and Governance Indicators
(DAGI), which cover trends in foreign assistance, governance, and global
poverty and middle class populations. Speaking of trends in data and analysis, From Poverty to Power
provided a useful summary on recent
thinking about how to define poverty lines—the key question being whether
to use a single international cutoff, or define poverty lines at the national
level.
AidData and our CCAPS
partners participated this week in the Esri
International User Conference. Jack Dangermond, CEO of Esri, opened the
conference with a sweeping overview of ways that Esri’s GIS tools are being
used to inform policy and practice. Check out the video
of his plenary session (the maps produced by CCAPS and AidData are
highlighted just before minute 10).
Featured dataset: On the AidData
Research Datasets page, you can access the Financing Global Health 2011
dataset, created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. It
provides a comprehensive view of trends in public and private financing of
health assistance with preliminary estimates for health financing in the most
recent years.
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