CERP Executive Education successfully concluded its annual training programme Evidence-Based Program Design 2020 by teaching more than 25 professionals from diverse industry backgrounds; academia, government, non-government and non-profit institutions.
The flagship Executive Education’s programme was a four-day event held online via Zoom from November 30 to December 03, 2020. The workshop aimed at equipping participants with the necessary tools and techniques to apply a highly structured approach to programme design and implementation while incorporating economic theory and evidence at every step of the process.
The workshop provided an experiential learning experience for the participants to learn through a blend of faculty presentations, dynamic discussions, group work and individual problem-solving exercises. During the four days of the programme, the participants attended interactive sessions on Evidence-Based Programme Design, the Theory of Change, Sampling Design, Questionnaire Design and Data Collection, How to Become a Learning Organisation, Becoming a Better user of Descriptive Evidence, Programme Design in Practice(LEAPS study), Experimental and Quasi-experimental Evaluation Methods, NonExperimental Evaluation Methods, Impact Evaluation (Harvard Digital Module) and Smart Containment with Active Learning (SCALE).
The programme sessions were led and taught by faculty members from top universities worldwide and in Pakistan. The workshop started with an inaugural session on Evidence-Based Programme Design by Maroof A. Syed, President and CEO CERP, where he elaborated on how to apply a structured approach to problem-solving all the while emphasising on the importance of iteration for an effective programme design. Dr. Asim I.Khwaja, Co-founder and Board Member CERP, discussed the importance of becoming a learning organisation and said “Be open to data – that means we need to think creatively about data. Often data is being created for one purpose that can be used for another.” Dr. Tahir Andrabi, Dr. Ammar Malik, Dr. Ali Hasanain, Dr. Hadia Majid, Dr. Farah Said, Maha Rahman, Osman Haq, Anum Malkani and Adeel Shafqat also led key sessions at the workshop.
Wajeeha Asim Khan, a consultant, commended on “how contextualised the research was, that was being presented in a lot of materials, lectures and the case studies”. She found that the programme provided “a really good structured approach all the while emphasising on how important it is to go through the process in its integrity”
The evidence-based programme design is presented in collaboration with CLEAR, EPoD and JPAL.