Secretary of Strategic Planning of the Ministry of Education of Peru presents EduLAB, J-PAL LAC and IPA joint initiative, at High-Level Conference on Impact Evaluation in Lima, Peru.

On March 16, took place in Lima, Peru, the “High Level Conference and Latin American Workshop on Impact Evaluation: theory and practice applied to water, sanitation, hygiene, management of hydro resources and irrigation”. The event was co-organized by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, research center GRADE and Pacífico University.

Francisco Dumler, Viceminister of Infrastructure and Sanitation of the Ministry of Housing and Jorge Mesinas, Secretary of Strategic Planning of the Ministry of Education of Peru opened the event.

Jorge Mesinas presented the initiatives that the Ministry of Education has undertaken to institutionalize evaluation and learning. In this framework, he presented EduLAB, a joint initiative by the Secretariat of Strategic Planning, J-PAL LAC and IPA Peru. EduLAB is the first innovation lab on education policy in the region established within the public sector. The lab identifies problematics and receives assistance form academics to design low-cost evidence-based interventions to address them, which are rigorously evaluated making use of the Ministry’s administrative data. The Lab’s combination of low-cost interventions with the use of administrative data offers a highly efficient scheme for innovation and design of public policies based on evidence, both in terms of resources and availability of timely results without interfering with the implementation of the Ministry´s interventions.

From the afternoon of March 16 to March 20, the subsequent workshop focused on the use of impact evaluations to inform decision-making and program design. The event, targeted at policymakers and technical experts, covered topics such as impact evaluation design and theory of change through lectures, discussion groups and exercises that put into practice the skills necessary to develop impact evaluations. IPA and J-PAL LAC contributed to the Workshop leading two sessions on analysis of impact evaluation results using statistical software STATA.