Marc: Now it is with my great pleasure that I introduce Nava Ashraf.

She's a professor at the Harvard Business School.

She has many accolades, but I'll tell you a little bit about
her research interests.
She offers a course on global health, and a lot of her
research is in health.
She also works a bit in finance, and then a lot in behavioral economics.
And we'll see just a glimpse of that in this next presentation.
Measurement.
Thank you.
NAVA ASHRAF: Thank you.
It's a great pleasure to be with you all today to talk about measurement.
So you have I guess talked--
oh, let me see how I can--
let's see if this works.
Professor Ashraf: We don't know whether it finished installing yet or not.
TEACHING ASSISTANT: No, it didn't.
So then I--
Professor Ashraf: It failed.
TEACHING ASSISTANT: --typed in the other one.
NAVA ASHRAF: OK.
So let's see if we can--
TEACHING ASSISTANT: Looks like it's frozen.
Professor Ashraf: Oh, good.
It's frozen.
Excellent.
NAVA ASHRAF: So maybe while they organize the slides, I think I've
memorized the beginning of the slides, so--
so you talked this morning about why do impact evaluation, and why would
you ever want to do randomized evaluation?
And today, we're going to talk about measurement of outcomes.
Why is it important what kinds of outcomes we measure?
What kinds of outcomes do we want to measure?
And you know, when you think about the word measurement, it's probably the
most boring thing that many people think they want to talk about.
But what I hope you'll see by the end of today's lecture is that actually,
the indicators you choose to decide to measure, and how you measure them are
at the core of the philosophy of why you're doing what you're doing, and
the strategy of your organization in terms of being able to have the impact
that you want to have.
So that's really what's at stake when you make the decision of what kinds of
indicators do I want to collect and how do I collect them.
And today, we're going to talk about indicators that might be hard to
measure as well.
And one of the most disappointing things to see, often-- and I see this
a lot as an economist--
is that we create a dialogue around the indicators that we
can actually measure.
That's deeply unfortunate, because there are a lot of important things
that happen that we often can't measure--
but actually we could if we put a little bit more effort
and creativity in.
But we don't then allow attention to be paid for that or dialogue to be had
around that because we think we can't measure it.
And that's also what I want to talk about today-- those kinds of
hard-to-measure things that we think are on measurable--
is there a way that we can measure them creatively?
And in the process, make them part of the dialogue, the policy dialogue, the
research dialogue, the ideas that we pay attention to.
Professor Ashraf: Sorry.
No luck on this.
NAVA ASHRAF: OK.
Great.
So that was our course overview.
And today's measuring impacts.
So we're going to talk about the case study that you read regarding reserve
slots for women.
And that's going to allow us to think about what to measure.
And again, as I mentioned, that is about your theory of change.
That's about your philosophy of why you're doing what you're doing, and
why you think you'll be able to have the impact.
And you'll see that when you decide what indicators you're going to
choose, it would actually make you as an organization--
as a leader of your organization, it's going to make you go back to your
strategy and say, is this really the best way to get those people to be
able to do what-- that indicator?
It changes the way you think about your program.
And then we're going to talk about how to measure it well.
So some of the basic things about measurement, like validity and
reliability--
the kinds of things you want in an indicator.
And then how to measure the unmeasurable.