Since the mid-1990s impact assessment has become an established requirement for many development interventions. At the same time, its purpose, methodologies and usefulness remain highly contested. Firstly there are intense debates about 'appropriate indicators' by which complex development processes like poverty reduction or empowerment can be assessed. Even for enterprise interventions like microfinance, it is increasingly recognized that simple measures like increased income do not capture the equally important contributions to, or negative impacts on, poor people's capacity for improving livelihoods and/or managing crises and vulnerability. Economic dimensions of poverty are inextricably bound up with social and political dimensions of poverty. These also affect levels of discrimination in markets, communities and economic policymaking. Impact assessment which focuses too narrowly on easily measured economic indicators is at best only partial, and at worst positively misleading.
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