Understanding Impact Assessment

As noted in the first report, CAF—development bank of Latin American—opened a new massive open online course (MOOC) in November 2018. This editionwill focus on an “Introduction to Impact Assessment for Public Management,” designed for public officials and the general public to learn about impact assessment fundamentals and how they can add value to their institutions by learning related strategies.

Among the different modules offered by the course, noteworthy is number five, which focuses on the technical, logistical, institutional and ethical challenges that may arise when conducting impact assessments. The importance of this course is that participants will be provided with a broad overview of what it means (in practical terms) to plan and carry out an assessment. Impact assessment implies not only coming up with a rigorous technique to learn the potential effect of a program. There are many elements that range from clearly stating the assessment question, going through the negotiations necessary to allow the assessment to be performed and the data to be shared, to handling the ethical problems that may arise during the process.  

The module dwells on explanations of how to establish the sample size needed to assess an impact statistically, how to prevent and address sample contamination and non-participation in the program to be assessed. In the logistics, institutional and policy portion of the module, emphasis is made on the need for officials to combine the technical and implementation aspects of the assessment with others of a more relational nature, with the purpose not only of performing the assessment, but building institutional capacities to learn and apply that knowledge to improve their management.

The module, as well as the entire course, seeks to improve performance of institutions, emphasizing the value of impact assessment as a tool that can help transform their reality and improve the way things are done.

Welcome to this new opportunity offered by CAF free of charge!