What is the counterfactual or baseline?
Impact assessment attempts to identify what difference a project, programme or policy has made or will make. To do this, a judgment has to be made about what would have happened if the intervention had not happened (or what will happen if the intervention does not happen). This is known as the counterfactual or baseline. It is important to realise that this baseline is different from that baseline which refers to the situation at the start of the intervention. It is of course very important to understand the exact situation that you are starting from and indeed the lack of this sort of information often causes problems for impact assessment. Depending on the size and complexity of the impact assessment it may be advisable to get external help to collect baseline data at the start of the intervention. However the baseline which is used to assess impact is the best estimate of what the situation would have been if the intervention had not happened. The fact that it is impossible for any
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