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.

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.

Please contact devco.train@uea.ac.uk for all further information