Impact Assessment of the District Poverty Initiative Project Rajasthan

analysis for measuring impacts in this study are: (i) households; (ii)
interventions/projects/facilities; (iii) villages.
Objectives of the Evaluation Study
The main objectives are:
To assess the changes in socio-economic indicators of welfare that are directly
attributable to project interventions, i.e., participation in sub-project activities
To examine the transmission channels through which project interventions are
hypothesized to have an impact on households (e.g., through increased in access to
utilization of economic services, credit and market; improved social capital, etc.)
Based on the above-expected outcomes and the analysis of impact channels, we are going to
prepare the main set of impact indicators for each type of subproject. The choice of indicators
is constrained by the design of the baseline survey.
Methodology
The design of the impact evaluation is not straightforward given the constraints imposed by
the design of the baseline survey. The main constraint is that almost all villages set up as
controls in the baseline survey have been already covered by the DPIP. This is because the
control villages were supposed to be those that would receive the intervention in the final
phase of the project. Instead, these have already received the project intervention and cannot
serve as true controls. As a result, the baseline sample for each DPIP district is composed of
poorest and richest villages, geographically clustered in each district, depending on the
implementation phase. This raises an additional concern regarding the representativeness of
the baseline sample at district and the project levels. In addition, at the household-level, the
sampled households in the selected villages are not entirely comparable as these include BPL
households (in principle, eligible for the program) and APL households (not eligible for the
program but likely to be quite different from the BPL households in characteristics).
Given these constraints, we propose a comprehensive evaluation assesses what components
have worked and what have not, the length of exposure to the program and the heterogeneity
across space, using a mixed strategy of quantitative and qualitative evaluation as follows.
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