Measuring and Modeling Impact in Evaluations

We want to provide you some information about our course “Measuring and Modeling Impact in evaluations”. The purpose of this course is to give you a better understanding of different measures of impact that could be used in the evaluation of a program in the areas of maternal and child health and nutrition. For each of the measures presented, we will discuss current sources of data you might draw on as well as describe the methods that can be used to measure these. When we describe the methods, we also try to identify the strengths and weakness of the methods as well as their suitably for use in an evaluation. The course also discusses how modeling can be used in evaluations as either a replacement for measuring impact or to supplement measured impact. The last two lessons in this course focus on giving you an introduction and training on how the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) works and how to use it. This model can be used to estimate most – if not all – of the impact measures we describe in the course and can be an important part of both planning and estimating impact in an evaluation of a large-scale program. While this course is self-contained, it is also linked to other courses on evaluation. We developed this course for public health program managers and evaluators and assume the students in the course will have a background in public health with a focus on maternal and child health in low- and middle-income countries. The development of this course was supported by a grant from Government Affairs Canada (GAC) for the Real Accountability, Data Analysis for Results (RADAR) project.