Building capacity to evaluate health and nutrition programs.

With the growing demand for program evaluations, governments in the developing world and nongovernmental organizations have discovered that the pool of trained evaluators is often relatively scarce. This article explains why high-quality retrospective program evaluations require highly trained evaluators and rich databases. The US Department of Agriculture's Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics program and the Global Development Network-Gates Foundation Promoting Innovative Programs From the Developing World demonstration illustrate two approaches that public and nonprofit managers have adopted to build evaluation capacity in their programmatic areas.