Lost Opportunities and Constraints in Producing Rigorous Evaluations of USAID Health Projects, 2004-7

Impact evaluation is often seen as a central building block of results-based management. But in USAID rigorous impact evaluations have been crowded out by the drive to outcome-monitoring in the name of the results agenda. Other constraints on adopting quantitatively well-designed impact evaluation designs have included a lack of the required technical skills amongst those charged with conducting evaluations, the lack of incentives to produce quality studies - including the desire to avoid uncovering weak performance - and hence a lack of political will to expand the impact evaluation programme. The article proposes a new evaluation agenda to address these deficiencies. Adapted from the source document.