Towards better policies                      ongoing and completed

I am involved in experimental, quasi-experimental and non -experimental evaluation of policies, projects and                    interventions. 

This usually consists ofdesigning the evaluation strategy together with donor agency, government agency or implementing partner.

I also teach a course on impact evaluation for MA students in Economics at my university. 

In the course, students first take lectures (I am using Glennester and Takavarasha, Running Randomized Evaluations, 2013 as syllabus) and then design an impact evaluation. I hosted a J-PAL one-week training course at my university in 2012. Since the spring of 2017 I am co-teaching a course on impact evaluation (with Dr.Tatiana Goetghebeur) for students in a MA program in Political Economy, co-organised with Georgetown University (USA).  

In Morocco I am involved in the evaluation of a large entrepreneurship program for women, using a clustered randomized design as well as an evaluation of support to african migrants to integrate in the Moroccon labour market. Both are financed by ARES (Academie de Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur) from 2019 to 2024 with the aim to set up a Regional Centre for Impact Evaluation (CREPP) and foster research and capacity building in the evaluation of public policies. 

I am also involved in the evaluation of a cash and income assistance program for refugees in the Republic of Congo, implemented by UNHCR

  • In Burundi, we evaluated the impact of large package of assistance to improve coffee cultivation offered by the World Bank (2014-2018), with a focus on shaded coffee, using a geographic discontinuity design.

  • a rural off-grid electricity program in Burundi lead by UNICEF with a randomized assignment of village level power stations (two pictures above) from 2014 to 2017.  I added an in-house air pollution measurement component to this exercise, using a device developed by the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group (http://berkeleyair.com/). Our team was one of the first to test in-house air pollution in a sub-sahara Africa.

  • The effect of a large-scale demobilization and reintegration program of former combatants in Burundi on their welfare and the welfare of households in the villages where the combatants returned to. Here we applied a lagged depended variable model with province fixed effects to our panel data. (paper published in World Bank Economic Review, 2016);

  • The impact of access to secondary education (which runs via a competitive exam) on the age at first child in Burundi, using a regression discontinuity design;

  • with colleagues from the Netherlands, I set up a series of laboratory experiments in rural Burundi the infer the effect of civil war on social behavior, risk aversion and time preference (paper published in American Economic Review, 2012

  • I have also lead a team of four evaluators that designed an impact evaluation for the reduction of armed violence in Somali villages commissioned by DFID;

  •  I have been an expert evaluator for  a value chain project in Tanzania whereby we used a quasi-experimental approach, financed by the Belgian development cooperation;