MCC-funded evaluations need to follow MCC’s evaluation standards. MCC’s Evaluation Management Guidance was developed after this evaluation started. The guidance aims to ensure MCC funded evaluations are worth their costs and protect against some challenges encountered here including, for example, issuing evaluation contracts that fail to consider or require measuring key outcomes at appropriate times and collecting primary data for an evaluation before an evaluator has been contracted. As noted by the evaluators in their revised Evaluation Design Report, the baseline household survey occurred before the evaluation team was hired. Although driven by a sense of urgency to capture a baseline, failing to fully anticipate the evaluation’s data needs ultimately served to limit the evaluation. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that evaluators guide the sampling methodology and instrument design to collect the data necessary to complete desired analysis as well as measuring key outcomes at appropriate times.
Lesson Learned