I recently viewed a video of a presentation given by Esther Duflo at PopTech 2009.  (Esther Duflo is a development economist who has garnered significant attention for her work on randomized evaluation.  She is based at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which she co-founded.)  What I found most intriguing about her commentary is the way she highlights evaluation as a way to figure out what works in development.  She starts with what we all know to be true: development problems are big, intimidating, and seemingly intractable.  But fortunately, she doesn’t stop there.

It’s pretty common for most grantmakers to track the number of lives touched and dollars distributed to grantees. Those data points are great to know and sound like they have “impact” but they don’t really help grantmakers figure out what to do next.