Private sector development (PSD) plays an integral part in the international development strategy for many governments and development agencies. Typical PSD activities include technical and financial support to small and medium firms as well as indirect support through sector organisations and governments.
PSD organisations that receive public development aid money are required to monitor and evaluate the results of their work. Ex-post evaluations are often able to track some results but tend to fail to provide credible evidence on the relevance and effectiveness of the organisations’ support interventions. Real-time monitoring and impact evaluation of these support interventions is needed but challenging.
In this seminar, new CDI Director Giel Ton will present his experiences with research design to improve real-time monitoring and evaluation in PSD organisations – Pioneering Real-time Monitoring and Evaluation in small and medium enterprises (PRIME). The seminar will look at the two organisations involved in the project, CBI (support to SMEs to access the European market) and PUM (coaching and management advice), reflect on the process of mixing methods for data collection to answer the key evaluation questions using a check for validity threats, and focus on the quantitative cohort study with a short online survey tool to monitor changes in practices and performance in yearly cohorts of supported firm. It will also explore the qualitative research method designed to find plausible enablers of effectiveness from six comparative case studies in Bolivia, Peru, Uganda, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Indonesia.
About the speaker
Since June 2017, Giel Ton has worked at the Institute of Development Studies and is Director of the Centre for Development Impact. He specialises in the design of mixed-methods impact evaluations in agricultural value chains and private-sector development. Between 2005 and 2017, Giel worked for Wageningen Economic Research as a Senior Researcher on projects relating to business training, contract farming, export promotion and certification schemes. He was leading the PRIME project, Pioneering Real-time Monitoring and Evaluation in small and medium enterprises to assess the impact of the Centre for the Promotion of Imports (CBI) and Netherlands Senior Experts (PUM). He is currently co-authoring a paper on this experience to be presented at the conference EVALUATION 2017 of the American Evaluation Association, in November 2017.
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