The Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP) in collaboration with the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Council Secretariat (EARCS) conducted a training on; Impact Evaluation for national researchers from different agricultural research institutes from March 9 - 13, 2020. The one week training provided tools to familiarize trainees with Impact evaluation in order to help them answer key questions for evidence-based policy making. Trainees learnt about impact evaluation by examining evaluation designs and causal modeling techniques and by performing fundamental evaluation tasks.
Remarkable resources are dedicated to programs and policies aimed at improving the well-being of the world’s poor. With what degree of confidence can observed changes in an outcome be attributed to a given intervention, program or policy? What are the characteristics of evaluation designs, quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, and analyses that allow plausible cause and effect attributions to be made? The purpose of the training was to explore how questions of this kind are framed and empirically investigated. Impact evaluation is one of several types of evaluations. It is a particularly important one due to its ability to isolate the intervention's impact. Impact evaluations seek to answer cause-and-effect questions.
