10-12 April 2024 | Executive seminar
This course introduces students to the challenges that public and non-profit managers (and political leaders) face to improve effectiveness and impact of public policies and investment programmes. It is designed to help you to think in a critical and creative manner about the challenges of designing, monitoring and evaluating policies.
The course covers aspects such as building a theory of change to design and evaluate policies and programmes, which data to collect, thinking about implementing evidence-based changes, differences between monitoring and evaluation and understanding the variety of approaches for assessing and improving public programmes. Accordingly, there will be discussion based on case studies.
The course will be highly interactive in its design and be run more like a workshop than a seminar. It is designed to help you think creatively and critically about designing and evaluating policies and public investments with the objective of improving their quality and effectiveness. We will cover principles of good policy design, monitoring and evaluation methods, both for short and long-term assessments to evaluate whether desired results are achieved.
Students will learn how evidence and analysis can help inform decision-making and assess different types and sources of evidence and will be equipped with tools to understand what it means to build and implement a “right-fit” monitoring and evaluation system in practice, how to do so in the most cost-effective manner and how to do so in a manner that generates feedback and allows for improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of policies and public investments.
By the end of the course, the student should be able to:
- Understand the principles of good policymaking
- Employ theory of change to design, monitor and evaluate public policies and programmes
- Make use of different types of evidence and evaluation to create successful policies, projects or investments
- Design approaches to analyse and improve the programme design of projects.
- Evaluate the design and implementation of a monitoring and evaluation system, as well as to develop evaluation designs.
- Understand the link between performance management, learning and evaluation
- Understand and employ a variety of approaches to evaluate programme performance, as well as the performance of organisations
- Learn in a practical manner how to conduct and interpret impact evaluations
- Understand how to think critically about the challenges of public policy
- Obtain a firm understanding of quantitative tools and research methodologies for conducting evidence-based impact evaluations
- Understand what constitutes high quality evidence and criticisms to RCTs
- Work more effectively with policymaking and colleagues
- Develop expertise working in teams
These practical skills and strategies should be immediately applicable to policy-related projects, or within your organisation.
Instructor
- Leonardo Iacovone , Adjunct
