Right after finishing college I had an offer to work as a research assistant but heard of an offer to work as an intern for the very prestigious IPA in an education project. Two weeks in, I was offered a payed salary for working closely with Government for producing impact evaluation. The project was called “Comisión Quipu”. The goal of the CQ was to promote evidence-based policy through a series of meetings between highly respected local and international academics and government officials. The end goal project and these meetings was to execute the proposals to test a theory of change within the Social Programs.

It failed.

When the proposals were executed, I was to become the Project Associate for said evaluation.

It didn’t happen.

On paper the idea sounded great. Everyone was excited. IPA put a lot of resources both human and financial into making this project happen.

The first warning sign should’ve been how excited the Government was as well.

Our first obstacle when preparing for the meetings was when we found out that the Ministry had strong recommendations of who the academics should be. IPA had selected 6 highly respected PhDs but had to compromise 3 in order for there to be room for those recommended by the Ministry. The cost that it came with was having 3 people with long trajectory in working with the Government but had no idea what an impact evaluation was. This also implied that our team had to work harder than we thought because we had to start by giving a very brief course on impact evaluations and why they were important. Something that wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

Every week the academics had a deliverable, that started with pitching ideas to the government officials and getting feedback, and ended with the final report about the chosen evaluation. Given that some were not verse in impact evaluations we had to give a lot of feedback and comments to each document. More so than initially planned.

As the meetings started, it was increasingly clear that the Government was distancing itself from the CQ. They called it a good initiative or a starting point. They also said how the evaluations could be executed somewhere in the future. (Not the immediate future as we hoped.)

It is important to know that it was the year the Ministry had just been created by the new Government so their priorities were not focused on testing new ways of reducing poverty (although it should’ve been, in my opinion) but to roll out already thought out Program’s themselves and improve the process. They also were under the public eye because the Ministry had been one of the President’s promises during his campaign.

Now it seems pretty obvious that under those conditions the Government wouldn’t agree to start trying novel things right away, but this was a new type of project in IPA and in Peru so the steps that had to be taken were very unclear. It had never been done before and everyone got carried away with the novelty that no one stopped to try to assess how likely would it be for the Government to finance one of the evaluations.

The Government didn’t want to or couldn’t commit to funds to evaluate certain projects or to launch a pilot just because IPA went to all the trouble to bring international academics to sit with them and discuss ideas – including the founder of IPA. Especially because some of the things we wanted to test had never been implemented before, which made a new Government very uncomfortable. If they failed, they would’ve been greatly criticized. Maintaining the status quo of rolling out programs was much easier for them and less risky. At least that was my impression.

Looking back, it could’ve taken us probably two or three weeks to figure out that the CQ was not going to lead where we wanted it to. Given the political context, especially. But as I said, it had never been done before. IPA wanted to show that they were the leading organization in advocating for evidence-based policy with Governments. And the Government was trying to give an image of being a technically correct institution to its critics.

All that was left of CQ was the paper trail, and a valuable lesson for IPA and myself about how good intentions in Government are nothing more.  

You would think that after that, there would be no more CQ. You’d be wrong.

One year later, they did a second version of CQ. Why? I have no idea. What was the result? Same as before.

I have no (more) words.