Designing Impact Evaluations for Early Childhood Care and Education Programmes Using Outcomes-Based Financing

EOF
11 minutes ago
2 min read

Selecting the right evaluation approach is central to ensuring that outcomes‑based financing (OBF) programmes for early childhood care and education (ECCE) are both credible and practical. Yet designing evaluations that are methodologically sound while remaining feasible in real-world contexts is rarely straightforward.

Drawing on the design of impact evaluations for ECCE outcomes funds in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa, this new technical brief explores how these challenges can be navigated in practice. It examines the key methodological decisions involved in evaluating OBF programmes, from defining outcomes that are both measurable and policy-relevant, to choosing between causal and observational approaches, selecting appropriate measurement tools, and developing sampling strategies that balance statistical power with affordability.

This brief also details how EOF navigated these trade‑offs in three distinct contexts, showing how rigorous methodologies can be adapted to the realities of variable data availability and diverse policy priorities.

These insights are complemented by an accompanying infographic, which distills the brief’s concepts into a practical overview of the challenges that emerge across four stages of the evaluation cycle: development, testing and piloting, implementation and dissemination. The infographic highlights concrete examples of how challenges were navigated in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa—such as the use of locally developed tools in South Africa, the adoption of a difference‑in‑differences approach in Sierra Leone and the hybrid sampling model in Rwanda—illustrating how evaluation design choices can be tailored to programme goals, government priorities and cost constraints.

Together, the technical brief and infographic provide policymakers, practitioners and funders with actionable guidance on how to design evaluation systems that not only verify results but also support continuous learning and strengthen the long‑term sustainability of outcomes‑based financing in ECCE.

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