Do we need evidence-based policy making for health and development policies?
April 21, 2012 Leave a comment
High amounts of aid are flowing from the developed to the developing world. Low overhead- and administration costs try to ensure that most of the aid really arrives in developing countries rather than petering out in (western) administrations. From this perspective, program evaluation is often seen as a squeamish scientific exercise with limited value for the real world where best-practices seem to be more important. The World Bank even published the book ‘Empowerment and Poverty Reduction: A Sourcebook’ with an extensive list of best-practices and seemingly effective poverty reduction strategies but without any evidence whether the recommended approaches actually work. A lack of program evaluation replaces evidence-based with intuition-based interventions. In the usually complex contexts of developing countries, intuition is often wrong with the result of wasted aid money in the best case and significant adverse effects in the worst case. For example, a well-meant free distribution of T-shirts can disrupt the local market for clothes ruining the local clothing industry (as happened by an initiative from Jason Sadler and also by WorldVision). Evidence-based decisions about the allocation of resources demand an investment into impact evaluation, which will improve the overall effectivity of aid.
