Blog: Aid Effectiveness
The Contentious Power of Evaluations, Guest Blog by Hanneke de Bode
THE CONTENTIOUS POWER OF EVALUATIONS or why sustainable results are so hard to come by…. A while ago, I reacted to a discussion among development aid/cooperation evaluators about why there are so few NGO evaluations available. It transpired that many people do...
Can We Assume Sustained Impact? Verifying the Sustainability of Climate Change Mitigation Results (reposting a book chapter)
So excited to have our chapter verifying the 'sustainability' of the Global Environment Facility Trust Fund (GEF) funded projects through examining two tranches of evaluations. My co-writer colleague Susan Legro did a brilliant job pointing out GreenHouse Gasses (GHG)...
5 Ways to Foster Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Change
5 Ways to Foster Sustainability and Resilience to Climate Change by Omar Abdou, M.A. and Jindra Cekan/ova, Ph.D In the global climate change graphic, the blue are countries that contribute very few emissions to #climatechange. They are also those who suffer the most...
Aid providers: More puzzle pieces, including unexpected outcomes; ours is not the whole picture
Aid providers: More puzzle pieces, including unexpected outcomes; ours is not the whole picture When we did our first ex-post evaluation/ delayed final evaluation in 2006 in Niger for Lutheran World Relief (LWR) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (pg75...
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Funding and Accountability for sustainable projects?
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Funding and Accountability for sustainable projects? What are Sustainable Development Goals? " the United Nations adopted the new post-2015 development agenda. The new proposals - to be achieved by 2030- set 17 new 'sustainable'...
Reblog:Ex-post Eval Week: Are we serious about project sustainability and exit? By Abu Ala Hasan
Ex-post Eval Week: Are we serious about project sustainability and exit? By Abu Ala Hasan Published on the American Evaluation Association AEA365blog series:...
Interactive Webinar: Sustained Exit? Prove it or Improve it! (Nov 6 2020)
Sustained Exit? Prove it or Improve it! (reposted from Medium https://jindracekan.medium.com/sustained-exit-prove-it-or-improve-it-702ac507e2a5) Do we exit global development projects knowing our impacts are sustained? We hope so. As Professor Bea Rogers of Tufts said...
Sustaining “Sustainable Development”
Sustaining "Sustainable Development"? As a global development industry, we have almost no evidence of how (un)sustained the outcomes or impacts of 99% of our projects because we have never returned to evaluate them. But from early indications based on...
Learning from a river of ex-post project evaluations, tools and guidance… Thanks USAID!
Learning from a river of ex-post project evaluations and tools... Thanks USAID! Dear ex-post aficionados. It's raining ex-post project evaluations. Here's hoping learning from such evaluations in water/ sanitation, maternal/child health and even capacity building/...
Public and Private paths to Sustained Global Development Impacts
Public and Private paths to Sustained Global Development Impacts (Reposted from: https://medium.com/@jindracekan/public-and-private-paths-to-sustained-global-development-impacts-9b7523891fce) Six years. That’s how long ago I began researching proof of sustained...
Setting a higher bar: Sustained Impacts are about All of us
Setting a higher bar: Sustained Impacts are about All of us Global development aid has a problem which may already affect impact investing as well. It is that we think it's really all about us (individuals, wealthy donors and INGO implementers) not all of us (you, me,...
Investing in Youth for Project Effectiveness and Sustainability
Investing in Youth for Project Effectiveness and Sustainability One out of every six people on earth is between the ages of 15-24, says the UN. That is 1.2 billion youth. As one young leader says, “if the world’s problems are to be solved, it’s not going to happen...
Local Accountability and Transparency… During and Post Project?
Local Accountability and Transparency... During and Post Project? Local development partners? Check. Long-term transparent and accountable investments through them as “local solutions” partners? Not so much. While President Obama and former United States...
Can’t wait to learn from post-project sustainability evaluation? If not why?
Can't wait to learn from post-project sustainability evaluation? If not why? A colleague who has been promoting ex-post sustainability evaluation in her organization questioned my claim that doing them had “benefits” for future programming. It was an...
How ‘new’ are our projects… and who is aiming at the right outcomes?
How 'new' are our projects... and who is aiming at the right outcomes? Valuing Voices exciting news is we have received research grant funding from the esteemed evaluator, Michael Scriven's Faster Forward Fund. We're looking into the value-added of...
Leading in Challenging Times: Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation (SEIEs)- reposted from Medium.com
Leading in Challenging Times: Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation (SEIEs) Some American organizations are retrenching, focusing more attention on domestic rather than international programming. Some are pulling back from critique of international...
Making up your mind. Prioritizing and making it happen
Making up your mind. Prioritizing and making it happen * As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness". ...
Embedding Sustainability Everywhere – All Five Slices Now
Embedding Sustainability Everywhere - All Five Slices Now It has been a tumultuous year, and next year does not look like we will have much stability as a respite. As domestic concerns grow larger in two huge economies, US and UK, the question of the...
Maximizing what we’ve got… Time is now!
Maximizing what we've got... Time is now! We had a stirring conversation here in D.C. with someone very knowledgeable about sustainability; this person is a strong proponent of local ownership of all development. They also said...
What happens after the project ends? Country-national ownership lessons from post-project sustained impacts evaluations (Part 2)
What happens after the project ends? Country-national ownership lessons from post-project sustained impacts evaluations (Part 2) In Part 1 of our blog on lessons learned from post-project evaluations, we explored: How we do it matters for great results...
What happens after the project ends? Lessons from post-project sustained impacts evaluations (Part 1)
What happens after the project ends? Lessons from post-project sustained impacts evaluations (Part 1) We talk a lot about impact of our interventions, but far less is analyzed about the sustained impact of our work in the years after projects close out....
Learning about Sustainability and Exit Strategies from USAID’s Food Assistance Projects
Learning about Sustainability and Exit Strategies from USAID’s Food Assistance Projects USAID overall and Food for Peace (FFP) specifically have become far more progressive in the Obama Administration and under Administrator Rajiv Shah, with a much...
Sustained Impact post-project (ex-post)? Little proof at 3ie
Sustained Impact post-project (ex-post)? Little proof at 3ie Surely an organization that has received tens of millions of dollars of funding must track 'impact' as the actual long-term impact of projects. That is what I thought when I first began...
Face our fears! Learn from failure…
Face our fears! Learn from failure... Global Giving has a nice example of getting participant feedback success/failure of a project their fundraising funded. The organization failed, which was sorrowful to the players in West Africa and funders worldwide (I, too am a...
Altruistic Accountability… for Sustainability
Altruistic Accountability... for Sustainability Many of us in international development feel a sense of responsibility for others to be well, and for our work to improve their lives as well as for the work to be done in good stewardship of aid resources and optimizing...
It’s not just Me, it’s We
It's not just Me, it's We Many of us want to be of service. That's why we go into international development, government, and many other fields. We hope our words and deeds help make others' lives better. For 25 years I've written...
When Funders Move On (Originally published by Stanford Social Innovation Review 03/15)
When Funders Move On: Donors and nonprofits need to learn more about how to help program participants keep progressing after the support ends. Imagine standing in Detroit or South-Central Los Angeles. A team of experts has come to help you out of grinding poverty....
Are We Done Yet?
Are We Done Yet? When are we off the hook, so to speak, for the well-being of the participants whom we said we'd make healthier, better fed, more educated, safer, etc? America’s Agency for International Development (USAID) is the main channel for...
Can development projects be sustainable? Reblog from www.evaluace.com…
Can development projects be sustainable? (Reblog http://www.evaluace.com by Inka Pibilova and Marie Korner) What remained of Mongolian kindergartens In 2012, we have ventured with my colleague Marie Koerner through steppes of Mongolia to learn what remained of...
Listening better… for more sustainable impact
Listening better... for more sustainable impact Are we listening better? Maybe. As Irene Gujit states on Better Evaluation, Keystone’s work on ‘constituent voice’ enables a "shift [in] power dynamics and make...
Czech it out! Great evaluation happening in the Czech Republic
Czech it out! Great evaluation happening in the Czech Republic One of the delights of living in another country is the surprises one encounters. For me, coming back to our second 'home', it was an evaluative surprise. For by connecting to the Czech Foreign...
Walking in our participants’ shoes, Doing Development Differently
Walking in our participants' shoes, Doing Development Differently You and I like to make informed decisions. We go to restaurants recommended by Yelp or Facebook friends. We refer to Consumer Reports' rankings before we buy appliances and read Amazon...
What should projects accomplish… and for whom?
What should projects accomplish... and for whom? An unnamed international non-profit client contacted me to evaluate their resilience project mid-stream, to gauge prospects for sustainable handover. EUREKA, I thought! After email discussions with them I...
See how it turned out! Feedback loops for implementation and sustainability
Reposted from Feedback Labs: http://feedbacklabs.org/see-how-it-turned-out-feedback-loops-for-implementation-and-sustainability/ See how it turned out! Feedback loops for implementation and sustainability When I met Aminata in a central Malian village, she asked...
Jindra Cekan, Ph.D. has used participatory methods for 30 years to connect with participants, ranging from villagers in Africa, Central/ Latin America and the Balkans to policy makers and Ministers around the world for her international clients. Their voices have informed the new Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, other M&E, stakeholder analysis, strategic planning, knowledge management and organizational learning.