Impact Evaluation for Development Projects: From Why to How
Learn why rigorous impact evaluation is the backbone of effective development work — and gain the practical skills to design and carry one out yourself.
Perfect for: Development practitioners, program officers, M&E professionals, policy analysts, and graduate students working in or entering the international development sector — especially those who need to design, commission, or critically appraise impact evaluations without necessarily having a deep econometrics background.
Development projects attract millions in funding every year. Yet a surprising number of them never answer the most important question: Did it actually work? Impact evaluation is the discipline that closes that gap — turning good intentions into credible evidence, and evidence into better decisions.
This school gives you both the why and the how. You'll start by understanding what impact evaluation really measures (hint: it's not outputs or reach), why donors, governments, and NGOs increasingly demand it, and what's at stake when it's done poorly. You'll come away with a clear, principled case you can make to any stakeholder — funder, partner, or colleague — for investing in rigorous evaluation from day one.
Then you roll up your sleeves. You'll work through the core methodologies — randomised control trials, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, and more — learning not just what they are but when to use each one, and what the trade-offs look like in real-world conditions. Every concept is grounded in concrete examples drawn from health, education, agriculture, and economic empowerment programs across low- and middle-income countries.
By the end, you'll be equipped to scope an evaluation, choose the right design for your context, navigate common data and ethical challenges, and communicate findings in a way that actually influences decisions. Whether you're building a career in development or leading programs from inside an organization, this is the skill set that separates good intentions from demonstrated impact.
What you'll be able to do
- Articulate clearly what impact evaluation is, how it differs from monitoring and other forms of evaluation, and why it matters for development effectiveness
- Explain the fundamental evaluation challenge — the counterfactual problem — and why it makes rigorous design essential
- Compare the major impact evaluation designs (RCTs, DiD, RDD, PSM, IV) and select the most appropriate method given a project's context, timeline, and data constraints
- Design a credible theory of change that links program activities to measurable outcomes
- Develop an evaluation plan including research questions, key indicators, data collection strategy, and sample size considerations
- Identify and anticipate common threats to validity — spillovers, attrition, contamination, and ethical risks — and build mitigations into the design
- Interpret and critically appraise impact evaluation results reported in research papers and donor reports
- Communicate evaluation findings to non-technical audiences, including funders and policymakers, in a way that drives decisions
Curriculum
6 modules · 19 lessons
Your teacher
Olivier Mumbere Muhongya
I've spent over a decade working at the intersection of development programming and rigorous evidence — designing evaluations, advising NGOs and government ministries, and reviewing impact studies for major funders. I've seen firsthand how a well-designed evaluation can redirect millions of dollars toward what actually works, and how a poorly designed one can give false confidence in a program that's doing nothing at all. I built this course because I kept meeting smart, committed development professionals who had never been given a clear, practical grounding in impact evaluation methods — not because they didn't care, but because the training simply wasn't accessible. This course is my attempt to fix that. I'll guide you through the concepts I wish someone had laid out for me early in my career, with the real-world messiness left in.
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