Impact Evaluation of the National Rural Livelihoods Project

Abstract

The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) promotes evidence-informed, equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. We support the generation and effective use of highquality evidence to inform decision-making and improve the lives of people living in poverty in low-and middle-income countries. We provide guidance and support to produce, synthesise and quality assure evidence of what works, for whom, how, why and at what cost.3ie impact evaluations 3ie-supported impact evaluations assess the difference a development intervention has made to social and economic outcomes. 3ie is committed to funding rigorous evaluations that include a theory-based design and that use the most appropriate mix of methods to capture outcomes and are useful in complex development contexts. About this report3ie accepted the final version of the report, Impacts of electronic case management systems on court congestion in the Philippines, as partial fulfilment of requirements under grant PWP.03.SC.IE awarded through Country Policy Window -Philippines. The content has been copy-edited and formatted for publication by 3ie.The 3ie technical quality assurance team for this report comprises Stuti Tripathi, Rosaine Yegbemey, Tara Kaul, Kirthi V Rao, Sayak Khatua, an anonymous external impact evaluation design expert reviewer and an anonymous external sector expert reviewer, with overall technical supervision by Marie Gaarder and Emmanuel Jimenez. The statistical analysis code used in generating the results in this study is available on 3ie's Harvard Dataverse. We are unable to make the datasets publicly available due to confidentiality requirements agreed between the Supreme Court of the Philippines, 3ie and the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). However, 3ie has reviewed and quality assured replication for datasets used in this evaluation. The 3ie editorial production team for this report comprises

Women’s economic status and son preference: empirical evidence from private school enrolment in India

“…Given this, the institutionalization of SHG groups has proved to be difficult, either with respect to sustaining an SHG at all, or in a group moving from an initial, low level equilibrium of meeting regularly and receiving the initial funds from the state, to one in which there is a participatory institution leading to expanded collective and individual agency for the women who are members. While functional groups are connected with VO's (consistent with the quantitative findings in Kochar et al 2020), both NRLM guidelines and field reports suggest that VOs are formed once functioning SHGs are established, with a 'funneling' of better groups and systematic exclusion of lower quality groups. For the cases studied, there was no evidence that VOs, even less CLFs, provide the types of direct support to recover defunct SHGs or take the functional SHGs to the next level, or equilibrium.…”

“…Some of these come from studies of NGOfostered SHGs, such as PRADAN; others from research on the SRLM in specific states. 1 The context for this study was provided by a national quantitative survey of SHGs in the NRLM system covering almost 5000 SHGs and associated VOs and CLFs in seven states of the country (Kochar et al 2020). This found some gains in income (though from wage as opposed to enterprise sources), increased savings and use of formal credit, and improvement in some measures of confidence; it did not find evidence of increases in agency within the household.…”

Literature review on selected factors influencing Iron Folic Acid Supplementation in Kenya and East Africa

“…For example, reflecting the fact that programme implementation started in the largest villages within any cluster, treatment SHGs are located in larger villages that are closer to block capitals. These villages are characterised by lower scores on decision-making indices (Kochar et al 2020), a finding that correlates with lower female labour force participation rates in urban relative to rural India.…”

“…As a consequence, it was not possible to construct common baseline measures across surveys, even for basic outcomes such as measures of women's empowerment, expenditure or even household demographics. These studies could therefore not be combined for an overall evaluation study.16 The study report provides extensive details of the survey design and the methodology(Kochar et al 2020).17 Later rounds of SHG formation within the same cluster were undertaken to ensure universal coverage of households in each village. The programme strategy, which stated the number of days to be spent in each village, meant that additional rounds were required for universal coverage, particularly in large villages.…”

Assessing the Impact and Cost of Economic Inclusion Programs: A Synthesis of Evidence

“…This seems to hold in Côte d'Ivoire's SSN-plus public works-plus program (PEJEDEC) as well, which has substantially higher treatment effects on income and savings for youth at the top end of the distribution relative to those at the bottom, though these differences are muted after the program closed (Bertrand et al 2017). With respect to other dimensions of social exclusion, the picture may be more nuanced, especially in community-based programs (Kochar et al 2020).…”