Summer school 2025 in Dakar: an intensive training in public policy evaluation

The “Development Methodologies” Summer School is organized in partnership by the Fund for Innovation in Development (FID), the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and the African Center for Higher Studies in Management (CESAG), as part of the “Development Methodologies” Chair led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-founders of J-PAL, and recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics.

The summer school provides a space for skills development and aims to foster exchange between academics and practitioners, including public stakeholders, in the field of impact evaluation. In 2025, the event brings together three different participant profiles, all with a shared goal of building expertise in evaluation methodologies and specific needs based on their roles and activities:

• African researchers, both French- and English-speaking, looking to integrate impact evaluation methods into their academic work.
• Project leaders aiming to measure the impact of their innovations for potential scale-up.
• Public sector partners — high-level officials and institutional representatives — who wish to use impact evaluations to improve the design and implementation of public policies.

The training kicks off on July 7 with a high-level conference that gathers Senegalese authorities, regional partners, and all participants to discuss major challenges surrounding public policy evaluation on the African continent.

Three modules allow participants to follow a tailored path:

• The academic module: led by J-PAL, focuses on deepening knowledge of rigorous evaluation methods.
• The project incubator: led by FID and comprising teams funded by FID and invited by the partners, supports project leaders in designing an evaluation approach suited to their goals.
• The “public policy transformation” module: led by the AFD, explores how evaluation methods, tools, and results can be used to assess public policies and inform decision-making.

The incubator module, organized and facilitated by FID and J-PAL, targets innovative teams either engaged in or seeking to engage in an impact evaluation process, primarily from organizations funded by FID or supported by the summer school’s partners. This module aims to help them structure their approach from the outset: how to prepare for an impact evaluation, identify the most appropriate methods, and build partnerships with research teams. It provides a framework for reflecting on methodological choices, causal identification issues, and operational feasibility — all to lay a solid foundation for a rigorous and useful evaluation for the participating organizations.