Corporate-Level Impact Measurement – IFAD’s Experience

Abstract

Assessing impact requires attribution, which refers to the ability to claim that impact on an indicator of success is the result of a particular investment. Identifying impact entails creating a counterfactual that allows comparison of what has happened as the results of an intervention and what would have happened in the absence of that intervention. As seen in the other articles in this issue, identifying impact at the project level is well understood. Experimental (randomised controlled trials) and non-experimental approaches are becoming widely used to assess impact. These approaches create a counterfactual through a combination of careful data collection and statistical methods which provide confidence that impact estimates are unbiased and thus can be attributed to the intervention.

Attributing corporate-level impact for a development institution, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), is more complicated and less straightforward. Nevertheless, bodies that govern development institutions are expanding demand for impact estimates that can be attributed to the activities of these institutions. For donor countries, corporate-level impact estimate can be crucial for justifying funding to an institution since it can address taxpayers’ and parliaments’ questions about whether development assistance is effective. For this reason, governing bodies are increasingly asking for Results Measurement Frameworks (RMFs), which lay out the indicators of institutional success and include attributable impact indicators.