SPP Runs Course for Project Evaluation Practitioners

SPP in cooperation with The Human RightS Initiative (HRSI) presented a short course for project evaluation practitioners over three weeks in April.

Delivered online by Alexis Diamond of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation through a series of video conference workshops. Offered to the entire CEU community as well as staff from Budapest-based NGOs, the course was designed for practitioners rather than theoreticians with the goal of providing a general introduction to the topic, and also gauging the degree of possible interest from CEU students. 

“I had anticipated that several Public Policy graduate students would attend,” Diamond says, “but the class composition turned out to be a cross-section of the university, drawing primarily but not exclusively from the social sciences.  I was delighted that we also attracted a fair number of non-students who were working for local NGOs and needed to understand and use evaluation for their professional duties.”

Course participants learned several forms of evaluation: “Your evaluation design should be fit for purpose to address the key questions you want to answer,” explains Diamond. “One lecture was dedicated to impact evaluation, and the takeaway message there was that understanding impact requires consideration of the counterfactual, i.e. what would have happened in the absence of the intervention being evaluated.“