Leveraging Data to Set Objectives and Make Decision: What Can We Learn from Impact Assessments? The Experience from IFAD

Rural development program formulation and project design need solid evidence, especially from rigorous impact assessments of previous projects. Among multilateral development institutions, measuring results achieved at the project and corporate level is of utmost importance to maximize the effectiveness of the funds invested and to ensure their value for money. Impact assessment is an approach to measure outcomes and impacts achieved by development projects and to understand the specific mechanisms that led to the attributable impacts. IFAD is committed to ensuring objective and evidence-based assessment and reporting of results, with associated documentation of lessons and good practices learned from IFAD-supported projects that target remote regions of developing countries and fragile situations. IFAD’s impact assessment not only assesses the impact of individual projects but also of the institution as a whole. In addition, IFAD supports key actors use survey data in more and better ways in partner countries to inform rural development policies through the 50X2030 initiative.