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• Impact is a multi-dimensional concept. Some definitions focus on very precise understandings of impact, while others cast a much broader net. • How impact is defined and used has a significant effect on the design, management and evaluation of development programmes. • Development programmes should hold explicit conversations with different stakeholders about how impact is used and understood, in order to come to a shared understanding. • There are six dimensions of impact that may...

Doing things differently: Rethinking monitoring and evaluation to understand change Learning paper Over the past four years, Saferworld has put in place a way of monitoring, evaluating and learning from our work focused on behaviour and relationship change. This paper outlines the process we have gone through to adapt, embed, and embrace an approach inspired by Outcome Mapping and Outcome Harvesting (OH). Key benefits of our monitoring, evaluation and learning approach are: It is simple,...

Time and budget constraints often mean that organisations are unable to evaluate all of their programmes, and large programmes, operating in multiple locations, are unable to evaluate all project sites. This tool introduces two sets of criteria to support evaluators and programme managers to select case studies or programmes for evaluation: i) information about how relevant or feasible evaluation is for individual programmes, and ii) across the overall portfolio, strategic thinking around...

The Collaborating, Learning & Adapting (CLA) Maturity Tool has been used by USAID operating units since 2015. The tool enables staff to self-assess their current CLA practice and plan ways to improve their internal and external collaboration, organizational learning efforts, and adaptive management practices. Recently, SI built on this resource to create the CLA Maturity Tool for implementing partners (IPs) to provide a version that speaks more directly to the experience of international and local organizations. Learn more here.

Based on Michael Quinn Patton's best-selling Utilization-Focused Evaluation, this briefer book provides an overall framework and essential checklist steps for designing and conducting evaluations that actually get used. The new material and innovative graphics present the utilization-focused evaluation process as a complex adaptive system, incorporating current understandings about systems thinking and complexity concepts. The book integrates theory and practice, is based on both research...

Gender and sexuality are intimately entwined; we must not lose sight of the ways in which gender affects non-heterosexual people, transgender people and people who do not identify as either male or female. • Gender and gender-related injustice is a feature of all interventions, whatever the focus, be it agriculture, capacity building, disaster management, education, health, peace building, water, sanitation and hygiene, or other. • Showing an increase in the number of women participants in...

Evaluative Tools for Improving Campaign Effectiveness Public health campaigns aim to control disease or deliver essential health services and products through time-limited and periodic channels. Many countries use campaigns to augment or replace routine service delivery, to target certain populations, or to accelerate progress towards coverage targets. The Root Cause Analysis and Rapid Evaluation, Action, and Learning toolkits present a systematic but flexible approach to identifying the...

• This paper revisits how existing advocacy evaluation frameworks classify people and activities, and define and assess outcomes. We discuss how assessments could be more specific and propose bounding the scope of inquiry in one of four ways: strategy specific, outcome oriented, actor-centric or system-wide. • In classifying activities, the same action or event may be situated at different phases of the change pathway – in some cases used as a tactic to influence a policy outcome, and in...

Multi-project programmes can serve different purposes. For instance, they may coordinate multiple implementing entities; standardise management and technical support; compare intervention approaches across different contexts; enhance leverage through joint action; or foster sustainability by building relationships among organisations. • At the same time, multi-project programmes are costly, potentially duplicate other mechanisms that fulfil similar functions, and can dilute focus and create...

Over the last half century, repeated calls for adaptive learning in development suggests two things: many practitioners are working in complex situations that may benefit from flexible approaches, and such approaches can be difficult to apply in practice. • Complexity thinking can offer useful recommendations on how to take advantage of distributed capacities, joint interpretation of problems and learning through experimentation in complex development programmes. • However, these...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted the context in which aid and development is being delivered. The global scale of the pandemic and the speed at which it is spreading mean that the ‘normal’ economic, ideological and organisational influences which shape (if not determine) aid delivery are in flux. This means that – for a relatively short-period – there is scope for aid actors to work collectively to embed more locally-led, politically-informed and adaptive forms of MERL in aid...

This report explains how public organizations can combine big data and thick data to transform public services delivery—a strategy called mixed analytics. Governments can greatly enhance the value of big data by combining it with “thick” data—rich qualitative information about users, such as their values, goals, and consumption behavior, obtained by observing or interacting with them in their daily lives. Big data holds great promise for improving public services delivery and innovation in...

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

Summary There is growing recognition within the international development sector that there is a need for a new, more effective approach to engaging in public sector reform. This article builds on an emerging body of work that advocates more entrepreneurial and adaptive public sector reform programming. Drawing on knowledge and theory from public sector management, psychology and entrepreneurialism, this article aims to understand what motivates public sector workers to work...

For organizations committed to social change, advocacy often figures as a crucial strategic element. How to assess effectiveness in advocacy is, therefore, important. The usefulness of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) in advocacy are subject to much current debate. Advocacy staff, MEL professionals, senior managers, the funding community, and stakeholders of all kinds are searching for ways to improve practices – and thus their odds of success – in complex and contested advocacy...

• Donors are increasingly using portfolio-based programmes that embrace ‘good failure’ and adaptive, political programming. • However, measuring the impact of these programmes is challenging, especially for those working on policy influence and building country systems; not only do you need to measure the positive and negative impact of the overall portfolio, but also the different pathways tested. • Programmes, therefore, need a light-touch monitoring and evaluation system that allows...

Many rural poor and marginalized people strive to make a living in social-ecological systems that are characterized by multiple and often inequitable interactions across agents, scale and space. Uncertainty and inequality in such systems require research and development interventions to be adaptive, support learning and to engage with underlying drivers of poverty. Such complexity-aware approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluating development interventions are gaining strength, yet,...

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

The UNDP has been exploring new approaches to M&E to better understand and address complex systems challenges. Traditional linear project-based planning and evaluation methods are insufficient for dealing with the unpredictable nature of such systems. The UNDP’s new Strategic Plan calls for a shift in M&E practices to align with the complexity of today’s global challenges. Key points from the blog post include: Learning and Adapting: There’s a need for continuous learning and adaptation in...