Eric Mvukiyehe

Over the past 6 years, I have carried out a number of observational studies in Burundi (together with Cyrus Samii and Gwendolyn Taylor) and in Cote d�Ivoire and Liberia (together with Cyrus Samii). The aim of these studies has been to evaluate a wide range of international programming, using quasi-experimental methods and other techniques. In Burundi, for example, my co-authors and I investigated the effectiveness of a World-Bank-supported reintegration program designed to assist former combatants to reintegrate into society. We exploited an administrative dispute between the managing agency and implementers of the program that caused delay in the delivery of benefits to about a third of former combatants for more than a year and used a sample of these combatants as a control group to those who did receive program benefits on time. In Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, we also carried out major evaluation studies of local impacts of peacekeeping operations on behalf of the United Nations’ Inspection and Evaluation Division, Office of Internal Oversight Services (IED-OIOS). Our identification strategy for identifying peacekeeping effects consisted in using a matched pairs design to construct sets of comparable communities that should have been equally likely to receive peacekeeping deployment based on observable pre-intervention characteristics, the main difference being that one set of communities did receive an intervention while the other did not. We ascertained peacekeeping effects through systematic comparisons of outcomes of interest in the two sets of communities.