Evaluations of grant facilities pose unique challenges for evaluations and may require a different approach for evaluation design. Some grant facilities fund multiple disparate and geographically dispersed interventions that link only indirectly to a broader set of program objectives and often include designs that were proposed or decided upon only after a compact has begun implementation. This leaves evaluators with a limited amount of time between grant signing and the start of implementation for designing a prospective evaluation and conducting baseline studies. In addition, data quality often varies between grantees, and can complicate an evaluator’s ability to verify details on implementation milestones and outputs achieved based on MCA’s monitoring data or documentation. Finally, given the fixed costs of conducting an evaluation, it may not be cost-effective to evaluate many individual grant interventions.
Lesson Learned