Project design determines what can be evaluated. An evaluation cannot establish the differential impact of individual components of a package of interventions unless the project is designed to test different components. To do so, different pieces of the package would have to be provided to different groups of beneficiaries. If a package is provided in its entirety, the package will be evaluated and the evaluator will not be able to disentangle the impacts of individual components. This has been illustrated through the evaluation of the Technical Secondary School Strengthening. The evaluation cannot tell us if the increased enrollment is coming from improved infrastructure, better trained teachers, new curriculum, or scholarships. If, for example, scholarships had been made available to a sub-set of students in the comparison schools, the evaluation would have been able to more easily tease out the impact of the school strengthening from the impact of the scholarship. Programs that include all of these components may be more expensive than necessary; however, without evaluating the different combinations of components, the most efficient allocation of resources is unknown.
Lesson Learned