Many health programs are judged on their intermediate outputs—the number of prenatal care visits or the number of vaccine doses purchased—without a direct assessment of health impact. At the same time, many low- and middle-income countries are seeing rapid improvement in other drivers of health, such as girls’ education, urbanization, and economic growth. To make sure that our investments are making a difference for health, rigorous impact evaluation is key. Why so important? Because if we knew that health would have improved even without a health intervention, the money could have been better spent elsewhere. Join Amanda Glassman, a leading expert on evidence in the health sector, who will discuss her work on Millions Saved -- gathering and analyzing 22 large-scale programs with rigorous evaluations to learn more about what works, and how evaluations have helped to grow the scale of programs and their impact.
Despite the real progress that has been made in the world of impact evaluation, many needed types of data are unavailable. For instance, cost-effectiveness is important to many donors and policymakers who want to know if the health gained is worth the cost of the program—and scarce health dollars. Yet few studies reported empirical estimates of cost-effectiveness; the Millions Saved team had to derive the other estimates from modelling and secondary sources. And some categories of intervention—for example, those against non-communicable diseases—remain woefully under-evaluated.
