Rapid Evaluations for Social Program Design and Improvement

In recent decades, the evaluation of social programs has focused on measuring their impact, prioritizing effects on outcome indicators and, more recently, on intermediate indicators. This document presents rapid evaluations as complementary methods to impact evaluations, useful for improving the design and implementation of social programs. Rapid evaluations can help increase the effectiveness of interventions in a cost-effective way, through more participatory, flexible, and user- and beneficiary-centered approaches. They make it possible to verify whether each stage of implementation is producing the expected effects and provide timely, actionable evidence. These evaluations range from descriptive analyses both qualitative and quantitative to experimental designs.