UNDERSTANDING POLICY EXPERIMENTATION: AN INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP

Policy experimentation is becoming an increasingly prevalent method used by national governments and international policymakers, at organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank. The desire for evidenced-based public... [ view full abstract ]

Policy experimentation is becoming an increasingly prevalent method used by national governments and international policymakers, at organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank. The desire for evidenced-based public policies is at the heart of these developments. 

Policy experimentation typically relies on rigorous experimentation methods such as Randomized Controlled Trials which, in their essence, are simple to apply. However, since the experiments take place in a social context, evaluators and researchers face many challenges when implementing their experiments, many of which can be tough to anticipate. In this PDW we are going to present and discuss methods used in policy experiments with a specific focus on RCT in the field of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. Our goal with this PDW is to build a community of policy experimentation in Africa so that future projects can be developed and that more researchers, policymakers and practitioners can use these methods.