Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

When does rigorous impact evaluation make a difference? The case of the Millennium Villages

Contents:

Author Info

  • Michael A. Clemens
  • Gabriel Demombynes

Abstract

When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? The authors study one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa. They illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation in this setting by showing that estimates of the project's effects depend heavily on the evaluation method. Comparing trends at the MVP intervention sites in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria with trends in the surrounding areas yields much more modest estimates of the project's effects than the before-versus-after comparisons published thus far by the MVP. Neither approach constitutes a rigorous impact evaluation of the MVP, which is impossible to perform due to weaknesses in the evaluation design of the project's initial phase. These weaknesses include the subjective choice of intervention sites, the subjective choice of comparison sites, the lack of baseline data on comparison sites, the small sample size, and the short time horizon. The authors describe one of many ways that the next wave of the intervention could be designed to allow proper evaluation of the MVP's impact at little additional cost.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19439342.2011.587017
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Taylor and Francis Journals in its journal Journal of Development Effectiveness.

Volume (Year): 3 (2011)
Issue (Month): 3 (September)
Pages: 305-339

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevef:v:3:y:2011:i:3:p:305-339

Contact details of provider:

Order Information:
Web: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.asp

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Bruhn, Miriam & McKenzie, David, 2008. "In pursuit of balance : randomization in practice in development field experiments," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4752, The World Bank.
  2. Kibaara, Betty & Ariga, Joshua & Olwande, John & Jayne, Thomas S., 2008. "Trends in Kenyan Agricultural Productivity: 1997-2007," Food Security Collaborative Working Papers 56117, Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics.
  3. Michael Woolcock, 2009. "Towards a Plurality of Methods in Project Evaluation: A Contextualised Approach to Understanding Impact Trajectories and Efficacy," Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper Series 7309, BWPI, The University of Manchester.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. Chapter II : Is Jeffrey Sachs in a highway to hell?
    by Dany Jaimovich - Bakary Baludin in Development Therapy on 2012-05-11 08:40:00
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Maria Carmela Lo Bue & Stephan Klasen, 2012. "Identifying synergies and complementarities between MDGs: Results from cluster analysis," Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers 126, Courant Research Centre PEG.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jdevef:v:3:y:2011:i:3:p:305-339

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Michael McNulty).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.