Impact Evaluation in Africa: Introduction to the Special Issue

Impact evaluation—the causal evaluation of government and privatesector policies—has increasingly taken on a central role in microeconomic work in development economics. The influence of this research on governments and other policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa has, arguably, been limited to date. This is partly a question of time, as demand for rigorous policy evaluation has been building gradually in many parts of the world. It may also be a result of the geographic and research focus in the first wave of experimental studies. Much of the pioneering work to develop prospective, experimental methods was conducted in a limited number of locations and with NGOs rather than government partners. The number of large-scale, randomised, controlled trials of government policies in Africa remains limited, but it is growing. The leading examples to date have been undertaken in Latin America. This special issue showcases the scope of impact evaluation methods in Sub-Saharan Africa today. Two features are evident from the collection of papers presented here. First, as illustrated by the diversity of topics covered in this volume, evaluation methods can be applied to a broad range of policy questions. Such questions range from microeconomic and localised policies, such as in health and education, to policies with potential for general equilibrium and market-wide effects, such as migration and entrepreneurship. Second, while modern impact evaluation studies share a concern for the identification of causal policy parameters, they employ a broad range of