Country-led development based on sustainability data is key to success

Valuing Voices means listening to stakeholders and collaboratively identifying what actual impact measures are. What we can learn together to improve our projects and for country-led development? We need to build an evidence base of sustained outcomes and impacts. Our projects catalyze change in-country but we need to learn what works over the long-term, what doesn’t and how to fund, design, implement, track and maintain sustained results right.

Without sustained impact results, we don’t know what to invest in that could be self-sustained. What worked best? What should we never fund and implement again? 

Now, we don’t know what has been sustained. Why? Because we have spent decades out in the field in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Through Valuing Voices’ research we know that currently, global development aid evaluates only 1% of all projects after they close for what is still standing or emerged.  $1.5 trillion of international development assistance by just the US and EU since 2000 alone is unevaluated for sustainability; we have spent $5 trillion in resource investments over the last 30 years without knowing what is standing. But Valuing Voices has spent 5 years analyzing the 1% of what has been evaluated and we have a market edge on this learning.

We need to:

* Shift the development model to learning from sustained impacts and funding what lasts and designing anew

* Learn from what communities and countries have financially sustained themselves while bringing lessons from SDGs and public donor (e.g. USAID) M&E

* Prioritizing funding and design of what has excellent, locally-sustained impacts