This manual is designed to provide detailed step-by-step information, examples and guidelines to those interested in conducting rigorous impact assessments using the approach followed by the RIA division of IFAD.

It aims to give the reader all the instruments for assessing the impact of a given development project, and at the same time, ensure comparability across projects and countries along the entire impact assessment (IA) cycle. A standardized set of activities and procedures is crucial for research transparency, data sharing, and aggregating estimated impacts from individual projects to calculate corporate impact.

With reference to each step of the IA cycle, the reader is given all the information as well as relevant examples and template documents to be used and adapted to project context within each phase of the assessment. The sections in this manual comprise a description of all the activities to be performed, together with a series of Helpful Links placed in a dedicated section that take the reader to either publicly available websites and links, or the RIA document repository (accessible only to internal users).

The e-learning course "Impact Assessment" is a set of 10 online, self-paced e-learning modules, each lasting around 45 minutes, about conducting impact assessments of agricultural and rural development projects. It also contains additional sub-modules presenting useful resources that could be investigated when preparing and implementing an Impact Assessment.

The key objective of the training is to provide the trainee with a detailed overview of most recent Impact Assessment methodologies and explain when and how these are applied to evaluate IFAD-supported projects, and also rural development projects in general. It has been developed to train IFAD staff, project staff, local researchers, development practitioners as well as the wider public on conducting impact assessment and to make impact assessment understandable and applicable to all learners.

The Data Collection Kit is a comprehensive knowledge product to conduct rapid impact assessments, which can be used by Project Management Units (PMUs) and country offices to improve M&E systems.

Developed initially as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak, this kit can be used when local capacity for data collection is limited, and when the costs for implementing a full survey are too high. It can be used for accurate reporting on IFAD’s Economic Goals (e.g. income and assets), Strategic Objectives (e.g. productive capacities, market access, and resilience), nutrition, and other mainstreaming themes such women empowerment.

The package consists of a mix of tools, guidance documents, and analysis codes to support the user from start to finish including at the design and implementation of the survey, analysis, and report writing.

The questionnaire or survey instrument included in the Kit can be adapted to collect data on inputs, outputs, and outcomes in-line with projects’ theory of change as well as the country context including for reporting on the Core Outcome Indicators (COI). This way, the Kit reduces the time and cost of conducting an impact assessment as the project M&E team and contracted survey firm will have access to useful resources for each stage of the assessment.

GIS and remote sensing were used to enhance the rigor of the impact assessments in several ways. Primarily, the identification of a valid comparison group of households (counterfactual) is done through matching based on remote sensing data, ex ante, to identify communities that were sampled.

Using the baseline remote sensing data, observed prior to the beginning of the projects, ensured comparability of community-level variables for the IFAD project beneficiaries and comparison households (control group).

In addition, data collection teams captured GPS coordinates of household and communities during the survey interviews. These allowed for the use of a variety of secondary data derived from remote sensing, including on climate variables such as rainfall, temperature, and vegetation indexes as well as demographic and infrastructure variables such as population density, travel times to cities, road infrastructure networks, etc. These detailed variables greatly enriched the analysis. The remote sensing data were used to control for confounding factors but also for ex post matching were appropriate. In this regard, the impact assessments apply advanced GIS-Remote Sensing methodologies that significantly improve rigor in the analysis. The figure below shows the various aspects of the impact assessment methodology that leverage GIS, remote sensing and climatic data.