Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs National Care and Prevention Grantee Conference The Essence of AFL Demonstration Programs Sheraton Premiere Hotel Tysons Corner - Vienna, VA December 8-11, 2008

March 29 - April 2, 2009: Perspectives on Impact Evaluation Approaches to assessing development effectiveness Seven hundred evaluators, policy makers, donors, development practitioners and researchers were gathered in Cairo last March to share experiences and lessons learned, and guide political leaders in shaping and implementing development policies and programs that make a difference in poor people’s lives.

The global community has set itself the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 as a way to combat world poverty and hunger. In 2007, the halfway point, it is clear that many countries will not be able to meet the MDGs without undertaking significantly greater efforts. One constraint that needs to be overcome is that development interventions—projects, programs, policies—are all too often like small pebbles thrown into a big pond: they are limited in scale, short-lived, and therefore have little lasting impact. This may explain why so many studies have found that external aid has had weak or no development impact in the aggregate, even though many individual interventions have been successful in terms of their project- or program-specific goals.