Nigeria: Beyond the Status Quo - Using Impact Evaluation Research to Drive Innovation and Improve Outcomes in Health

Thursday, June 1, 2017

This week's blog was co-written by the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) team at the World Bank. Here they share their experience at a workshop in Lagos sharing how Impact Evaluation (IE) can be used to assess how intervention projects are able to affect development outcomes. IE has become an important tool in evidence based policy-making, enabling development agencies and institutions to accountably evaluate development programme outcomes and assess their impact on people's lives.
"How can we achieve better health outcomes in Nigeria?"
The simplicity of the question belies the complexity of the reality. From May 2-5 2017, the World Bank's DIME team hosted a workshop in Lagos to present new ways of thinking and practice to better address this question.
The focus of the workshop was on impact evaluations (IEs). This approach uses research methods which allow evaluators to separate the causal impact of a specific project or intervention from changes in outcomes due to other factors. IEs are a powerful tool not only to measure the true impact of policies, but also to understand how and why they work and, perhaps even more importantly, how to make them work better. When done well and in partnership with policymakers and program implementers, IEs become a tool to generate impact.
Read more: http://allafrica.com/stories/201706010187.html