Really late to this, but disappointed to see @cblatts repeating the findings from the @3ieNews meta analysis without acknowledging its serious methodological issues summarized here oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/scott-gug… facilitated by @fp2p 1/5
There’s major heterogeneity in program design and underlying country contexts, hence heterogeneity in evaluation findings, all of which the report fails to acknowledge/capture 2/5
Many evaluations did measure economic impacts of small-scale infrastructure and found them to be overall positive. Some programs, like Afghanistan’s NSP, did see impacts on social outcomes (see gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-resear…, documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/967…, and tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…) 3/5
This is not to absolve CDD practitioners of past mistakes and occasional hubris leading to bad program design (a learning process catalyzed by @bijurao’s 2012 “Localizing Development” and advanced by work such as that by Jean Ensminger in Kenya cmi.no/publications/6…) 4/5
But the 3Ie report has added little to this debate (and instead muddied the water by mixing in Social Funds), and distracted from a badly-needed forward-looking discussion on how CDD can be used as part of a policy mix to achieve outcomes such as those put forward by @cblatts 5/5
