Impact evaluations are an essential instrument to test the validity of specific approaches to development and poverty alleviation. Impact evaluations help those involved on a project to establish whether or not there is a causal link between an intervention and those outcomes that are of importance to the policymaker. Impact evaluations fit into the chain of monitoring and evaluation process in several ways (World Bank) namely, they help to assess the casual link between an intervention and an outcome of interest, provide baseline evidence for the effectiveness of an intervention, which can be compared with other similar interventions through this process, assist in establishing credible cost-effectiveness comparisons and can serve to build the knowledge base of what works in development. With and increasing demand for evidence of aid effectiveness, rigorous evaluations offer a method through which development successes can be highlighted.

The literature on the website should help the reader to understand the concept of impact evaluation, the various contexts in which impact evaluation studies are conducted, the ways in which the outcomes of impact evaluation can be used to promote social accountability and, importantly, how to design an evaluation that would bring out the efficacy or impact of a social accountability initiative.