Section 6: Perspectives and Insights about Impact Assessment Methodologies

In 1996, the Impact Assessment Group at Texas A&M University began to work together as an interdisciplinary group of scientists and analysts from relatively diverse disciplines to develop the integrated suite of models that we refer to in this report as IMPACT. Over the intervening three years, we have learned how to bring these disciplines into a more coherent and usable framework for impact assessment and gained substantial experience in developing and demonstrating the concepts for use in international settings. We stated in Section 1 that we regard the status of IMPACT as being “imperfect but usable.” The development of this suite of models is being continued under USAID sponsorship as part of the Global Project of the SANREM CRSP.