This elective course introduces students to the challenges that policy makers, managers, non-profit managers, and political leaders face to improve effectiveness and impact of public programs and investments. It is designed to help you to think in a critical and creative manner about the challenges of designing, monitoring and evaluating public programs.
The course covers aspects such as building a theory of change to assess a program and improve it, 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 programs. Accordingly, there will be discussion based on case studies and the course will be highly interactive in its design and be run more like a workshop than a seminar.
The course is designed to help you think creatively and critically about designing, monitoring and evaluation, and its main principle is to assess and improve public programs and investments made by governments as well as by NGOs. It aims at equipping the students with the understanding of what does it mean to build and implement in practice a monitoring and evaluation system, how to do so in the most cost-effective manner, and how to do so in a manner that generates feedback and allows to improve efficiency and effectiveness of programs implemented by NGO or public investments made by Government. Students will gain sufficient insights to be able to understand if a MandE system is appropriate (“right fit”) for the purpose to improve the effectiveness.
Main learning objectives:
By the end of the course, the student should be able to:
• Understand the principles of good policy making.
• Employ theory of change to design, monitor and evaluate public policies and programs.
• Make use of different types of evidence and evaluation to create successful policies, projects or investments.
• Design approaches to analyze and improve the design of projects and policies.
• 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 program performance, as well as performance of organizations.
• 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 constitute high quality evidence and criticisms to randomized control trials (RCTs).
• Work more effectively with policy-making and colleagues.
• Develop expertise working in teams.
These practical skills and strategies should be immediately applicable to policy-related projects, or within your organization.
Teaching style:
The course will mix different teaching strategies. There will be lectures in a seminar style and group discussions based on case studies. The course will be highly interactive in its design and will involve significant amount of interactions with other students.