IQBAL DHALIWAL: Welcome to the J-PAL 101x course,

which will help you learn why randomized evaluations matter

and how they can be used to rigorously measure
the social impact of development programs.
I'm delighted to be with you to share with you this lecture on,
why evaluate?
I'm Iqbal Dhaliwal, the global executive director of J-PAL.
I joined J-PAL at MIT in 2009, where
my work has spanned research, training, and policy outreach
around RCTs.
But I began my career in public service
in the government in India, first implementing
programs in the field and then formulating policy.
So I deeply appreciate the importance
of evaluating programs and policies,
both from a researcher and practitioner view.
And hopefully, in today's lecture,
I can bring in both perspectives.
The plan for the next hour or so is
for me to start by motivating why
we think it is important to evaluate
the impact of your programs.
I will then speak about the prerequisites for a good impact
evaluation.
Next, I will take you through a case study
to highlight the different steps,
from identifying a poverty or development
challenge in the field, designing a program
to tackle that challenge, and evaluating
whether it works or not.
We will end with an outlook on the use of evaluations
in evidence-informed policymaking.
So let's get going with the motivation for impact
evaluations.
Despite progress over the last decades,
the world still faces many challenges.
And often, these can seem insurmountable.
For example, in 2018, nearly half of the world's population
lived on less than $5.50 a day.
To put this number in perspective,
that would be like the population of three Indias.
688 million were hungry in 2019.
And that is like the entire population of two United
States going hungry.
And in 2017, almost 1.6 million people
died from diarrhea globally, a third of whom
were children under the age of five.
That is like the entire population
of two Bostons being wiped out every year from an easily
preventable disease.
There are also new challenges coming up.
According to a recent study, an estimated 85%
of the world's population has already
been affected by climate change, though I
would argue at this point, 100% of us are affected by it.
Each of these challenges requires action.
The dilemma is that each policy challenge has
many seemingly good solutions.
For example, how do you improve school enrollment
and attendance?
Should you focus on the demand side--
that is, making sure that children are healthy enough
to go to school and the parents have enough information
about the value of education?
Or should you focus on the supply side,
perhaps by providing school inputs like blackboards
and buildings or teacher motivation, pedagogy,
or training?
In an ideal world, you would just do it all.
But in the real world, not only is funding limited,
but the capacity of governments or NGOs
to effectively implement programs is also very limited.
So how do you choose between seemingly good program options?
One way to do it is to first pair knowledge
of local conditions with rigorous evidence
from around the world to design your program.
For instance, you may find that school buildings are
in great shape, and teachers are coming on time.
And yet, children's attendance may be low.
In such a situation, there may be no point
at all trying to add more school inputs like one
laptop per child or investing more in teacher training.
But unfortunately, this is what often happens instead
of focusing on the demand side.
Once you bring in this local knowledge, for example,
through qualitative surveys, looking at administrative data,
and talking to people, you pair it with evidence
from around the world.
For instance, numerous studies have
shown that information campaigns on returns to education
or simple programs, like deworming
to tackle health problems, can lead to large improvements
in school attendance.
Next, once you have chosen a set of program options,
how do you know whether they really work or not
in your context?
This is where evaluations come in.
You can use data and impact evaluations
to test different solutions and see whether they
have the intended effects.
You can then compare the different solutions
in terms of their cost and magnitude of impact
and scale the most cost-effective ones.