Impact Assessment of the District Poverty Initiative Project Rajasthan

* Ensure transparency, widespread information, communication and learning about the
project’s and group’s performance, successes and failures through formal and informal
mechanisms.
The tools used to achieve these objectives are 'empowerment', 'sub project activities',
'developing capacities and skills', and 'developing abilities of institutions'. The impact
evaluation is not as much about the processes of using the tools as it is about assessing the
impact of these tools on meeting the project objectives. Thus the impact evaluation would
assess, for example, improvement of social status and how much of the same is due to
'empowerment'; increase in income and the contribution of SPAs therein; improved economic
opportunities due to skill enhancement; and so on.
Design of the Impact Evaluation Study
For providing a data base, a baseline survey was conducted in 2001-02 and afterwards a
periodical evaluation was done in middle of the project as a mid- term interim evaluation in
2004. The present impact evaluation is evaluates the impact of the project interventions upon
the socio-economic status of the targeted families of the seven selected districts of the state.
This present study aims to evaluating the household-level impact of the project interventions.
Of particular interest to the program managers is the extent to which project benefits reach the
targeted group and the impact these benefits have on their welfare. But measuring project
outcomes is not enough as there may be other factors or events that are correlated with
outcomes but are not caused by the project. And thus there is a need to estimate the
counterfactual, that is, what would have happened had the project never taken place. Impact
evaluation could also explore unintended outcomes, positive or negative. Another question of
interest is whether program design could be modified to improve impact.
Before identifying the main outcomes of DPIP, we define unit of analysis as entities from
which it is important to gather information for the purposes of this study. Each unit is
important for assessing the type of impacts and associated variables that we want to identify.
But units of analysis are also important for defining crucial aspects of the evaluation method,
for instance, the type of control group that it will use, or the level at which matching
procedures need to be made to generate good estimations of impacts. The main units of
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