Speakers

Dr Sikandra   Kurdi
Associate Research Fellow, IFPRI

Biography:

Dr. Sikandra Kurdi is an Associate Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Cairo, Egypt.  Her research interests are child nutrition, the role of credit in rural food markets, and social protection programs.   She is currently working on the evaluation of Egypt’s national conditional cash transfer program “Takaful and Karama” and a pilot conditional cash transfer program in Yemen.  Sikandra Kurdi received a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from University of California, Berkeley.

"Using impact evaluations for improving development policies and  programs examples from IFPRI"

Impact evaluation attempts to rigorously separate out the difference in well-being caused by specific interventions from differences caused by other factors.  It is usually not correct to simply compare outcomes for beneficiaries to non-beneficiaries, because most interventions are directed towards the people who will benefit the most, so beneficiaries are different from non-beneficiaries even before the intervention starts.  Using IFPRI’s ongoing examples of impact evaluations we discuss different strategies that can be used to identify the effect of interventions.  As a first example, we discuss the evaluation of the Takaful and Karama cash transfer program which relies on a strategy for impact evaluation known as a regression discontinuity (RD) design.  RD designs can be used for impact evaluation of interventions that have strictly defined criteria for program participation.  The second example is the evaluation of the Food Security and Agribusiness (FAS) project funded by USAID which relies on a matching approach. Matching is a statistical technique that uses observable characteristics to artificially construct a non-beneficiary group that can be used to infer interventions’ effects.