Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog

The 113^th congress will be sworn in on January 3, and – thanks to term limit rules, and a number of election losses and retirements – several important committees will see major shake-ups in leadership.  In the Senate, most committees will have new ranking members, and in the House seven panels, including Ap­propriations and Foreign Affairs, will get new chairmen.

In my first blog on recently published impact evaluations by the MCC, I argued that MCC has established a new standard for systematic learning about development programs. In my second blog, I addressed questions related to the design and use of impact evaluations.

MCC recently published five impact evaluations on farmer training programs – the first of many because MCC, unlike most other development agencies, is conducting such studies for about 40 percent of its portfolio. I would argue that this makes MCC the biggest experiment in evaluation: an entire agency committed to seriously produce impact evaluations on a large share of its operations and publicly disseminate them.

It’s not about the grade, it’s about the learning say Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) officials as they prepare to release the US government’s first five* independent development impact evaluations tomorrow. Results will be mixed. They should be. But if the MCC and other development policymakers pay attention to what the impact evaluations tell them—and the MCC keeps its commitment to independent, rigorous evaluation across the rest of its programs—it will be really good news.