Regional Workshop on Impact Evaluation of Population, Health & Nutrition Programs

PHFI is pleased to announce a regional workshop on “Impact Evaluation of Population, Health and Nutrition Programs”. The workshop is being sponsored by PHFI in collaboration with MEASURE Evaluation. The three-week course will be held October 5 - 16, 2009 in New Delhi.

Workshop Introduction

Every year large amounts of resources are spent implementing population, health and nutrition programs. In a context of limited resources and growing concerns about the performance of public programs, it is important for policy makers, program managers and donors to examine whether programs are having the intended impact they were designed for. Reliable evaluations play an important role by providing concrete evidence of the impact of program actions on target populations. Does a program have an impact? And, if the answer is yes, by how much? Additional questions are: Does the program have a different impact on different groups of people? Do different program components have different impacts? Those are important questions that can be answered by rigorous evaluations. In this workshop we will review methods for providing answers to some of those questions. But, how good is the answer? We will also review the limitations of the methodologies and the conditions under which they provide valid answers. Despite widespread interest in the effectiveness of health programs, there have been few rigorous evaluations of their impact on health. Yet, careful evaluation of program impact is essential if policy makers and managers are to make informed decisions about program design, implementation and modification.

Objectives

The workshop will provide intensive training in the concepts of program evaluation and in the tools and techniques for evaluating program impact.

The main workshop objectives are:

* to review the basic concepts of program monitoring and evaluation (M&E);
* to examine the main issues to consider for evaluating the impact of a program and to familiarize you with different evaluation designs for evaluating program impact;
* to review the main evaluation strategies and estimation techniques used for evaluating program impact;
* to develop criteria for choosing the appropriate estimation for evaluating impact given different scenarios of program characteristics and data availability;
* to interpret results appropriately and to examine the programmatic implications of results; and
* to gain practical experience applying the estimation strategies and quantitative tools.

Venue:
Public Health Foundation of India PHD House,
2nd Floor 4/2 Siri Institutional Area, August Kranti Marg,
New Delhi -110016, India