Adolf Mwesige, Minister for General Duties at the Office of the Prime Minister in Uganda, presented Uganda’s experiences with impact evaluations and the challenges to improving their use in policymaking. He highlighted three elements that have helped Uganda capture the gains from impact evaluations. These included the presence of a framework for determining impact, such as Uganda’s Poverty Action Plan, dedicated to reducing poverty and inequality, the provision of high quality, timely, consumable data on impact, and the stimulation ofdecision makers to access and use this information at appropriate stages in the policy cycle. Mwesige identified the need for stronger evaluation functions that draw impact and performance data together as an area that may improve the future use of impact evaluations.
Santiago Levy, Chief Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, emphasized the role of impact evaluations as useful tools for policy making. He offered two cases from Mexico to illustrate how impact evaluations can and should be used to redesign and improve existing programs. Suggestions for the most effective use
of impact evaluations in policymaking included increasing consistency, emphasizing the use of operational impacts, and incorporating the results of program evaluations into a broader development strategy.
Cheryl Gray, Director of the Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank, addressed three main questions on how to improve demand, supply and the effectiveness of impact evaluations in the policy making process. She emphasized the critical importance of increasing demand for impact evaluations, the great gains that have been made on the supply side with the creation of knowledge sharing networks and capacity building programs, and identified three areas to improve the effectiveness of impact evaluations.
Orazio Attanasio, a professor at the University College London, provided his insights on the future development of impact evaluations from his vast experience as a researcher and academic in the field. He agreed with his colleagues that academics should focus on problem-based evaluations and making results more understandable for policy-makers. On the demand side, Attanasio called for evaluation-based program designs while on the supply side, he noted the push for impact evaluations to be positive and encouraged the use of economic theory for the creation of models.
Questions from the audience included how to increase methodological diversity in evaluations, whether to build evaluation spending into design budgets, lessons from multi-country program evaluations, and how to increase demands for impact evaluations, among others.
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