Despite the growing investments in livelihoods promotion through group-based development, there is little consensus on how impactful these programmes have been. 3ie, in collaboration with the Indian rural development ministry, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is working to generate rigorous evidence on the impact of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission.

Panellists will discuss the opportunities in and challenges of evaluating group-based livelihoods projects. The discussion will draw on the speakers’ experiences and lessons from a large-scale impact evaluation of this complex government programme. In addition to discussing methodological and implementation lessons, they will discuss the importance of having and verifying background and context information and outline what stakeholder engagement efforts are needed to deliver evaluation evidence that is accessible to and useful for decision makers.