It can be challenging to understand the impact of your programs and whether or not they are functioning as intended. The Goldilocks Initiative exists to help solve these challenges by finding right-fit monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems tailored to your organization.

However, many organizations are not well-placed to engage in randomized evaluations. Either the timing for an impact evaluation is not right, resources or sample size are insufficient, the logistics make randomization infeasible, or the question to be answered simply isn’t a question that a randomized evaluation helps to answer.

Seeing these challenges, two researchers - Mary Kay Gugerty and Dean Karlan - set out to identify a set of principles organizations could use to identify the right time to engage in impact evaluation, and – just as importantly – build systems that provide information that supports learning and improvement. The result is a set of Goldilocks principles, called the CART (Credible, Actionable, Responsible and Transportable).

Based on these principles, IPA launched the Goldilocks Initiative to complement our traditional randomized evaluation work and help find the right-fit between collecting too much data that doesn’t get used and not collecting enough, to understand how to allocate limited funding for the greatest impact. The initiative provides resources and consulting services for organizations, donors, and governments in designing and supporting the implementation of cost-effective, appropriately-sized M&E systems.