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Development economics is split between macro-development economists - who focus on economic growth, international trade, and fiscal/macro policies - and micro-development economists - who study microfinance, education, health, and other social programs. Recently there has been substantial convergence in the policy mindset exhibited by micro evaluation enthusiasts, on the one hand, and growth diagnosticians, on the other. At the same time, the randomized evaluation revolution has led to an...

Questions of cause and effect are critical to assessing the performance of programmes and projects. When it is not practical to design an experiment to assess performance, contribution analysis can provide credible assessments of cause and effect. Verifying the theory of change that the programme is based on, and paying attention to other factors that may influence the outcomes, provides reasonable evidence about the contribution being made by the programme.

CABUNGO, a Malawian NGO, recently evaluated its own performance using the Most Significant Change approach. Rebecca Wrigley describes how, with the support of stakeholders,CABUNGO learned to improve its services.

How do we move from identifying ethical principles to enhancing development practice? How can donors and NGOs move beyond the reporting of technical outputs to explore less tangible aspects of their health projects: contributions to rebuilding trust, promoting social cohesion, and enhancing good governance at community level? This article considers these questions in relation to health and peace-building activities in conflicted settings. It describes difficulties facing practitioners and...

This paper outlines the background and philosophy of Collaborative Outcomes Reporting (COR) and Performance Story Reporting (PSR), providing an overview of these emerging techniques and showing how they can be used as a framework for reporting on contribution to long-term outcomes (or targets) using mixed methods and participatory process. The report serves as an introduction to these approaches in evaluation and discusses their bias, limitations and where they might best be applied.

These three videos from Sarah Earl provide an introduction to the concepts of Outcome Mapping

As educators increasingly are held responsible for student achievement, school personnel struggle to find ways to effectively document student responsiveness to interventions and track progress toward important outcomes. While many educators focus on high-stakes tests as a means of documenting student achievement of important outcomes, other assessment approaches may be better suited to assessing student progress. Assessment that can be used to adapt teaching to meet student needs is called...

Key points • ART has restored the health of many people living with HIV, but their livelihoods lag behind • Good nutrition is important for people on ART. Food supplementation can help, but is no substitute for sustainable livelihoods • The livelihoods of people on ART can be bolstered through skills, livelihood networks, assets and cash or food transfers

Exploring the Future The future is ‘terra incognita’: although we may be able to guess the outcome of events that lie close to us, as we project beyond this we enter an unmapped zone full of uncertainty. Paradoxically, the range of options this reveals can seem paralysing. No one can definitively map the future, but we can explore the possibilities in ways that are specifically intended to support decision-making. At Shell we use scenario building to help us wrestle with the developments...

We describe the use of Outcome Mapping to guide the design of a rural telemedicine consultation system in South Africa. While Outcome Mapping was not primarily intended to guide design, we show that it tied in well with a cyclical participatory design method for an Information and Communication Technology for Development project

The U.K. Ministry of Defense (MoD) has mandated the development of a network enabled capability (NEC) across all of defense, aimed at producing agile military and nonmilitary effects via a network of networks. This paper provides an overview of NEC, representing it as a complex human activity system of systems (SoS), analysis of which cannot rely on purely traditional reductionist engineering approaches, requiring instead a soft-systems engineering approach. A literature review is then...

PRA (participatory rural appraisal) and the more inclusive PLA (participatory learning and action) are families of participatory methodologies which have evolved as behaviours and attitudes, methods, and practices of sharing. During the 1990s and 2000s PRA/PLA has spread and been applied in most countries in the world. Among the multifarious domains of application, some of the more common have been natural resource management and agriculture, programmes for equity, empowerment, rights and...

This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the rationale for the use of randomization, as a solution to selection bias and a partial solution to publication biases. Second, it discusses various ways in which randomization can be practically introduced in a field settings. Third, it discusses designs issues such as sample size requirements, stratification,...

An institutional history is a narrative that records key points about how institutional arrangements – new ways of working – evolve over time creating more effective ways to achieve goals. It can be used to document institutional innovations in projects and to highlight barriers to change. An institutional history draws out and synthesizes lessons for research organizations and partners as well as for others in similar circumstances.

Empowerment evaluation entered the evaluation lexicon in 1993. Since that time, it has attracted many adherents, as well as vocal detractors. A prominent issue in the debates on empowerment evaluation concerns the extent to which empowerment evaluation can be readily distinguished from other approaches to evaluation that share with it an emphasis on participatory and collaborative processes, capacity development, and evaluation use. A second issue concerns the extent to which empowerment...

This blog, by Dr David Fetterman, provides a range of resources on empowerment evaluation theory and practice. The blog includes links to videos, guides and relevant academic literature that provide a detailed analysis and discussion of using empowerment evaluation.

Identification and reporting of critical success factors and program impact in an efficient, yet comprehensive manner is an inherent difficulty facing many evaluators of large-scale evaluations. This paper details how two evaluators encountered such problems in the initial review of a large-scale initiative and then successfully addressed these issues through the application of the Success Case Method in a subsequent evaluation of the same program. The Success Case Method is a down-to-earth...