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Over the last decade, Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become one of the most widely adopted anti-poverty initiatives in the developing world. Inspired particularly by Mexico's successful program, CCTs are viewed as an effective way to provide basic income support while building children's human capital. These programs have had a remarkable global expansion, from a handful programs in the late 1990s to programs in close to 30 countries today, including a demonstration program in the United States. In contrast to many other safety net programs in developing countries, CCTs have been closely studied and well evaluated, creating both a strong evidence base from which to inform policy decisions and an active global community of practice. This paper first reviews the emergence of CCTs in the context of a key theme in welfare reform, notably using incentives to promote human capital development, going beyond the traditional focus on income support. The paper then examines what has been learned to date from the experience with CCTs in the South and raises a series of questions concerning the relevance and replicability of these lessons in other contexts. The paper concludes with a call for further knowledge sharing in two areas: between the North and South as the experience with welfare reform and CCTs in particular expands, and between behavioral science and welfare policy.

Several developing economies have recently introduced conditional cash transfer programs, which provide money to poor families contingent on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers. The approach is both an alternative to more traditional social assistance programs and a demand-side complement to the supply of health and education services. Unlike most development initiatives, conditional cash transfer programs have been subject to rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness using experimental or quasi-experimental methods. Evaluation results for programs launched in Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkey reveal successes in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance, such as weak poverty targeting, disincentive effects, and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from the first generation of programs in Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua in increasing enrollment rates, improving preventive health care, and raising household consumption. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including the potential of conditional cash transfer programs to function well under different conditions, to address a broader range of challenges among poor and vulnerable populations, and to prevent the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Despite the importance of knowing whether development programs achieve their objectives, impact evaluations remain rare in developing economies. This is unfortunate. With the growing use of results-based management by governments, determining whether goals have been attained and convincingly linking changes to specific programs has become increasingly critical. Tracking such outcomes as gains in school enrollment or reductions in infant mortality is indispensable. But simply gathering good data on outcomes sheds little light on why objectives have or have not been met. For this reason, impact evaluations should be a key instrument in policymakers' monitoring and evaluation toolbox.

On the basis of the baseline data collected for the evaluation of the Bolivian Social Investment Fund (SIF) this paper assesses (1) the benefit incidence of the SIF and (2) the quality of the evaluation design. We find that the benefits in education are most equally distributed over the population, the investments in health and sanitation favor those relatively well off. For the education component of the SIF, control groups of schools which will not receive benefits have been included in the survey. In one region theseschools where selected on the basis of matched comparison on the basis of observed characteristics, in the other region by means of randomization. We compare control and treatment groups and conclude there is a systematic bias in favor of treatment schools in the first region. We propose to use instrumental variables to control for the non-random selection. With the pre-intervention data we can test whether an instrument is valid. We find that among several candidates the number of NGOs (non governmental organizations)in the community is a valid instrument. Next, we investigate the possible loss of efficiency in the estimate of the impact due to the non experimental control group design.

The main focus of the social protection and labor portfolio is on strengthening client's institutional capacity in the design and implementation of programs, but projects are not well equipped to track progress in this area. Correspondingly, there is a need to strengthen approaches to measuring and monitoring a 'missing middle' of service delivery, precisely those areas for which counterpart institutions are responsible during the course of a project. In particular, better measures of the primary functions of social protection and labor agencies are needed, such as identifying and enrolling beneficiaries, targeting, payment systems, fraud and error control, performance monitoring of service delivery providers, responsiveness to citizens, transparency, efficiency, management information systems and monitoring and evaluation systems. New World Bank initiatives particularly standard core indicators by sector and the introduction of results based investment lending call for substantial improvements in the use of monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Impact evaluations are included in about half of projects and should continue to be used selectively and strategically, particularly when the program is innovative, replicable and/ or scalable to reach a broader set of beneficiaries, addresses a knowledge gap and is likely to have a substantial policy impact. Structuring evaluations around core themes with common outcome measures is fundamental to building a global knowledge base on development effectiveness.

This book offers an accessible introduction to the topic of impact evaluation and its practice in development. While the book is geared principally towards development practitioners and policymakers designing prospective impact evaluations, we trust that it will be a valuable resource for students and others interested in using impact evaluation. Prospective impact evaluations should be used selectively to assess whether or not a program has achieved its intended results, or to test alternatives for achieving those results. We consider that more and better impact evaluation will help strengthe

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- About the Authors -- Abbreviations -- PART ONE. INTRODUCTION TO IMPACT EVALUATION -- Chapter 1. Why Evaluate? -- Evidence-Based Policy Making -- What Is Impact Evaluation? -- Prospective versus Retrospective Impact Evaluation -- Efficacy Studies and Effectiveness Studies -- Complementary Approaches -- Ethical Considerations Regarding Impact Evaluation -- Impact Evaluation for Policy Decisions -- Deciding Whether to Carry Out an Impact Evaluation -- Chapter 2. Preparing for an Evaluation

This paper assesses how household context and characteristics shape the welfare trajectory and more specifically the accumulation of productive assets among beneficiaries of the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in Rwanda, the government's flagship social assistance program. The analysis is based on a unique data set combining panel household survey data with in-depth qualitative interviews of a subsample of male and female beneficiaries from the survey data collected between 2009 and 2015. By combining quantitative and qualitative information, the paper draws a more nuanced picture of how household characteristics—structural and temporal—contextualize opportunities for poor men and women and their households and shape how well they can leverage access to the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme to accumulate productive assets. The mixed method analysis reveals that household composition, gender power dynamics, disability, care responsibilities, marital arrangements, intrahousehold communication, and access to other social programs and institutions play a crucial role in access to the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme and related asset accumulation. The findings suggest that households would benefit from a broader definition of the eligibility criteria and the availability of flexible and complementary programming, to reap the benefits of the income transfer received from the program.