by Jindra Cekan | Jul 15, 2021 | Accountability, Aid effectiveness, climate change, Covid, Financing gap, Impact Guild, International aid, Monitoring and Evaluation, post project evaluation, Private sector, SDGs, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Uncategorized
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’ development goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. Some, like Oxfam, see the SDGs as a country budgeting and prioritization as well as an international fundraising tool. They cite that “government revenue currently funds 77% of spending…aligned with government priorities, balanced between investment and recurrent and easy to implement than donor-funded spending…” National investments are vital, but how much has the world used the SDGs to target investments and foster sustainable results?
Using results data such as that of the sectoral SDGs, countries can also ensure accountability for the policies implemented to reduce global and local inequities, but we must learn from the data. Over halfway to the goal, data is being collected, and while there is robust monitoring by countries who have built their M&E systems, other countries are faltering. “A recent report by Paris21 found even highly developed countries are still not able to report more than 40-50% of the SDG indicators” and “only 44% of SDG indicators have sufficient data for proper global and regional monitoring”. Further, there is very little evaluation or transparent accountability. Some of the data illuminate vitally need-to-know-for-better-programming. SDG data shows good news that Western and Asian countries have done better than most of the world 2015-19… but there is a lot of missing data while other data shows staggering inequities such as these:
- In Vietnam, a child born into the majority Kinh, or Viet, ethnic group is three and a half times less likely to die in his or her first five years than a child from other Vietnamese ethnic groups.
- In the United States, a black woman is four times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman.
So are we using the SDG data to better target funding and improve design? This is the kind of evaluative learning (or at least sharing by those that are doing it :)) that is missing. As my colleague and friend Sanjeev Sridharan writes on Rethinking Evaluation, “As a field we need to more clearly understand evaluation’s role in addressing inequities and promoting inclusion” including “Promoting a Culture of Learning for Evaluation – these include focus on utilization and integration of evaluation into policy and programs.” How well learning is integrating is unknown.
As a big picture update on the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2021, with only nine years left to the goal: It’s not looking good. The scorecards show COVID-19 has slowed down or wiped out many achievements, with 100 million people pushed into extreme poverty, according to the IMF. Pre-Covid, our blog on sectoral SDG statistics on health, poverty, hunger, and climate, was already showing very mixed results and a lack of mutual accountability.
The private sector is ever-being pushed to fund more of such development costs, only marginally successfully, as public sector expenditures are squeezed. Yet the G20 estimates that $2.5 TRILLION is needed every year to meet the SDG goals. As we have seen at Impact Guild, the push to incentivize private commitments is faltering. “To ensure its sustainability, the private sector has specific interests in securing long-term production along commodity supply chains, while reducing their environmental and social impacts and mitigating risks… The long-term economic impacts of funding projects that support the sustainability agenda are, thus, clearly understood. However, additional capital needs to flow into areas that address the risks appropriately. For example, much remains to be done to factor climate change as a risk variable into emerging markets that face the largest financing gap in achieving the SDGs.” Further, if decreased funding trends continue, by 2030, at minimum 400 million people will still live on less than $1.25 a day; around 650 million people will be undernourished, and nearly 1 billion people will be without energy access. So we’re not meeting the SDGs, they’re being derailed by COVID in places, and we aren’t beginning to cost out the need to address climate change and its effects on global development…. so now what?
From: https://www.g20-insights.org/policy_briefs/incentivizing-the-private-sector-to-support-the-united-nations-sustainable-development-goals/
To ensure that giving everyone a fair chance in life is more than just a slogan; accountability is crucial. This should include a commitment from world leaders to report on progress on “leaving no one behind” in the SDG follow-up and review framework established for the post-2015 agenda and for the private sector to loudly track their investments across the SDGs. For as The Center for American Progress wrote, money and results are key: We must “measure success in terms of outcomes for people, rather than in inputs—such as the amount of money spent on a project—as well as in terms of national or global outcomes” and that “policymakers at the global level and in each country should task a support team of researchers with undertaking an analysis of each commitment.”
A further concern. While we seem to measure the statistics periodically and see funding allocated to SDG priorities, but there are few causal links drawn between intensity in investment in any SDG goal and sustained results. To what degree are the donations/ investments into the SDGs linked to improvements? Without measuring causality or attribution, it could be a case of “A rising tide lifts all boats” as economies improve or, as Covid-related economic decline wiped out 20 years of development gains as Bill Gates noted last year. We need proof that trillions of dollars of international “Sustainable development” programs have any sustained impact beyond the years of intervention.
We must do more evaluation and learn from SDG data for better targeting of investments and do ex-post sustainability evaluations to see what was most sustained, impactful, and relevant. Donors should raise more funds to meet needs and consider only funding what could be sustained locally. Given the still uncounted demands on global development funding, we can no longer hope or wait for global mobilization of trillions given multiple crises pushing more of the world into crisis. Let’s focus now.
by Jindra Cekan | Jul 7, 2020 | Accountability, ex-post evaluation, International aid, Participation, post-project evaluation, Sustainable development
On June 24th under GLocal’s UNConference, “Co-creating our future stories of hope and action”, Jindra Cekan, Holta Trandafili, and Isabella Jean presented their work on sustainability evaluations and exit strategies via local voices. We chaired a 2-hour discussion session on the following topics:
- Sustainability of global development projects and exit from them,
- The importance of valuing local partners’ and participants’ voices,
- How to embed ex-post evaluation of sustainability into the project cycle,
- How expectations, benchmarking, and early joint planning in exit strategies, as well as considering long-term ownership & relevance will support projects to be sustained locally, including questioning who will maintain results,
- Considering power dynamics between donors and ultimate ‘beneficiaries’ and
the value of the impact of the project from a variety of perspectives, and more
Here is the recording of our presentation or see just the PowerPoint presentation. We harvested lessons from our three presentations:
Jindra Cekan:
· Fear of learning about failure in our global development industry – INGOs are “waiting for a successful enough project” to commission ex-post project sustainability evaluation
· It needs to be a culture of learning, not a culture of success.
· Lack of transparency in sharing program evaluation results with communities and local government is widespread, and even more rarely do we come back after many years and share learnings
· Participatory approaches are vital, listening to participants about sustained impacts is key
· It is never attribution, always contribution. To isolate impacts, we need to look for project sites that haven’t had multiple other organizations overlapping through all phases.
· Building sustainability planning throughout the project cycle is key – but often doesn’t happen
Holta Trandafili:
· Sustainability needs to be planned to be researched, including evaluating why or why not were project elements sustained, and why? What has the project done to enable communities to sustain improvements?
· Expectations of sustainability need to be more modest (as most results are mixed good/bad)
· We need to ask: How are you defining and measuring sustainability – for how long should the results last? Among how many participants? Have you set benchmarks for success?
· We should expand your toolbox on methodology to investigate sustainability. Stories of success are one of a myriad of methods used, including mixed-methods, cost-benefit, etc.
· Start with the need for learning not [just] accountability
Isabella Jean:
· Sustainability investigation/evaluation/learning should be mindful that this is NOT about projects. It is about people.
· We have a system that focuses on gaps and needs to be filled vs. existing capacities’ structures to be reinforced. How can our work on measuring sustainability bring this to light and call it out, so that we change the norm?
· Planning for sustainability requires the insight to integrate resources and experiences of outsiders with the assets and capacities of insiders to develop context-appropriate strategies for change
If you would like to discuss this with any of us, please send us comments and we’re happy to respond. Thanks again to the G-Local UnConference team!
Below please find our bios:
Jindra Cekan/ova has worked in global development for 33 years focused on participatory design and M&E for global non-profits. She founded Valuing Voices 7 years ago. For details, see: Valuing Voices Founder
Holta Trandafili is the Research, Learning, and Analytics Manager with World Vision US and has been leading field research, monitoring, and evaluation since 2007. She has led sustainability measurement studies for World Vision programs in Uganda, Kenya, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, and Bolivia. Her areas of expertise and interest include program and community groups’ sustainability measurements; agency-level measurements; empowerment approaches to development; integrated programming; local capacities for peace; gender analysis; and outcome monitoring. Currently, Mrs. Trandafili serves as an Advisory Committee member for InterAction’s Effectiveness and Program Evaluation Working Group and chairs one of the sub-working groups under The Movement for Community-led Development.
Isabella Jean supports international and local organizations and funders to document promising practices, facilitate learning and strengthen capacities for conflict sensitivity, peacebuilding and humanitarian effectiveness. She has facilitated action research, collaborative learning and advisory engagements in over 25 countries, and serves as an advisor to policymakers, senior leadership and program teams. Isabella co-authored the book, Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of Aid and developed practical guidance to support accountability to communities, listening and feedback loops, and responsible INGO exits. She teaches graduate-level courses on aid effectiveness, program strategies and M&E of peacebuilding at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Previously, Isabella directed training at a community organizing network and conducted policy research for the Institute for Responsive Education, UNDP, and Coexistence International.
by Jindra Cekan | Oct 19, 2018 | Doing Development Differently, Ethiopian Red Cross, European Evaluation Society (EES), ex-post evaluation, Exit strategies, foreign aid, Impact, impact evaluation, International aid, international development, NGOs, OECD, OXFAM, Participants, post-project evaluation, SDGs, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE)
Assuming Sustainability and Impact is Dangerous to Development
(+ OECD/ DAC evaluation criteria)
We all do it; well, I used to do it too. I used to assume that if I helped my field staff and partners target and design funded projects well enough, and try to ensure a high quality of implementation and M&E, then it would result in sustainable programming. I assumed we would have moved our participants and partners toward projected long-term, top-of-logical-framework’s aspirational impact such as “vibrant agriculture leading to no hunger”, “locally sustained maternal child health and nutrition”, “self-sustained ecosystems”.
INTRAC nicely differentiates between what is typically measured (“outputs can only ever be the deliverables of a project or programme…that are largely within the control of an agency”) and what is not: “impact as the lasting or significant changes in people’s lives brought about by an intervention or interventions” [1]. They continue: “as few organisations are really judged on their impact, the OECD DAC impact definition (“positive and negative, primary and secondary long-term effects produced by a development intervention, directly or indirectly, intended or unintended“) allows for long-term changes in institutional capacity or policy change to be classed as impact” [1]. Do we do this? Virtually never. 99% of the time we only evaluate what happened while the project and its results is under the control of the aid implementer. Yet the five OECD/DAC evaluation criteria asks us to evaluate relevance, effectiveness, efficiency (fair enough, this is important to know if a project was good) and also impact and sustainability. So in addition to the prescription to evaluate ‘long-term effects’ (impact), evaluators are to measure “whether the benefits of an activity are likely to continue after donor funding has been withdrawn… [including being] environmentally as well as financially sustainable” [2].
How do we know we are getting to sustained outcomes and impacts? We ask people on the receiving end ideally after projects end. It is dangerous to assume sustainability and impact, and assume positive development trajectories (Sridharan) unless we consistently do “ex-post” project evaluations such as these from our research or catalytic organizations that have done at least one ex-post. At very minimum we should evaluate projected sustainability at end of project with those tasked to sustain it before the same project is repeated. Unfortunately we rarely do so and the assumed sustainability is so often not borne out, as I presented at the European Evaluation Society conference Sustainability panel two weeks ago along with AusAid’s DFAT, the World Bank, University College London and UNFEM.
Will we ever know if we have gotten to sustained impacts? Not unless the OECD/DAC criteria are drastically updated and organizations evaluate most projects ex-post (not just good ones :)), learn from the results and fund and implement for country-led sustainability with the country nationals. We must, as Sanjeev Sridharan tells us in a forthcoming paper embed sustainability into our Theories of Change from the onset (“Till time (and poor planning) do us part: Programs as dynamic systems — Incorporating planning of sustainability into theories of change” (Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 2018).*
There are remarkable assumptions routinely made. Many projects put sustainability into the proposal, yet most close out projects in the last 6 months. Rarely do projects take the time to properly phase down or phase over (unlike CRS Niger); many exit ceremonially ‘handing over’ projects to country-nationals, disposing project assets, and leaving only a final report behind. Alternatively, this USAID Uganda CDCS Country Transition Plan which looks over 20 years in the future by when it assumes to have accomplished sustained impact for exit [3]. Maybe they will measure progress towards that goal and orient programs toward handover, as in the new USAID “Journey to Self-Reliance” – we hope! Truly, we can plan to exit, but only when data bears out our sustained impact, not when the money or political will runs out.
As OXFAM’s blog today on the evaluation criteria says, “Sustainability is often treated as an assessment of whether an output is likely to be sustained after the end of the project. No one, well, hardly anyone, ever measures sustainability in terms of understanding whether we are meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need” and “too often in development we evaluate a project or programme and claim impact in a very narrow sense rather than the broader ecology beyond project or programme parameters” [4]. In fact, most ‘impact evaluations’ actually test effectiveness rather than long-term impact. Too rarely do we test impact assumptions by returning 2-10 years later and gather proof of what impacted locals’ lives sustainably, much less – importantly – what emerged from their own efforts once we left (SEIEs)! Oh, our hubris.
if you’re interested in the European Evaluation Society’s DAC criteria update discussion, see flagship discussion and Zenda Offir’s blog which stresses the need for better design that include ownership, inclusivity, empowerment [5][6]. These new evaluation criteria need to be updated, including Florence Etta’s and AGDEN‘s additional criteria participation, non-discrimination and accountability!
We can no longer afford to spend resources without listening to our true clients – those tasked with sustaining the impacts after we pack up – our partners and participants. We can no longer fund what cannot be proven to be sustained that is impactful. We talk about effectiveness and country ownership (which is paramount for sustainability and long-term impact), with an OECD report (2018) found “increases [in[ aid effectiveness by reducing transaction costs and improving recipient countries ownership” [7]. Yet donor governments who ‘tie’ aid to their own country national’s contracts benefit a staggering amount from ‘aid’ given. “Australia and the United Kingdom both reported … 93 percent and 90 percent of the value of their contracts respectively went to their own firms” [7]. It is not so different in the USA where aid is becoming bureaucratically centralized in the hands of a few for-profit contractors and centralized hundreds of millions in a handful of contracts. We must Do Development Differently. We can’t be the prime beneficiaries of our own aid; accountability must be to our participants; is it their countries, not our projects, and we cannot keep dangerously assuming sustained impact. Please let us know what you think…
Footnotes:
[*] This paper is now available at https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjpe/article/view/53055
Sources:
[1] Simister, N. (2015). Monitoring and Evaluation Series: Outcomes Outputs and Impact. Retrieved from https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Monitoring-and-Evaluation-Series-Outcomes-Outputs-and-Impact-7.pdf
[2] OECD. (n.d.). DAC Criteria for Evaluating Development Assistance. Retrieved September, 2018, from https://web.archive.org/web/20180919035910/http://www.oecd.org/dac/evaluation/daccriteriaforevaluatingdevelopmentassistance.htm
[3] USAID. (2016, December 6). USAID Uganda Country Development Cooperation Strategy 2016-2021. Retrieved October, 2018, from https://www.usaid.gov/uganda/cdcs
[4] Porter, S. (2018, October 18). DAC Criteria: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Retrieved from https://views-voices.oxfam.org.uk/2018/10/dac-criteria-the-hand-that-rocks-the-cradle/
[5] European Evaluation Society Biennial Conference: Flagship Symposia. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.ees2018.eu/1539782596-flagship-symposia.htm
[6] Ofir, Z. (2018, October 13). Updating the DAC Criteria, Part 11 (FINAL). From Evaluation Criteria to Design Principles. Retrieved from https://zendaofir.com/dac-criteria-part-11/
[7] OECD. (2018, June 11). 2018 Report On The DAC Untying Recommendation. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-development/development-finance-standards/DCD-DAC(2018)12-REV2.en.pdf
by Jindra Cekan | Sep 10, 2018 | Aid effectiveness, ex-post evaluation, Failure, Funding, Impact, Impact Guild, impact investing, International aid, Learning, M&E, SDGs, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE), Valuing Voices
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 impact(s) through its ex-post project evaluation. Until now Valuing Voices has focused on aid donors. We are expanding to the private sector.
In my PhD I was sure it was a lack of researched and shared proof of successful prevention of famine that led to inaction. In Valuing Voices’ research on ex-post project evaluation, I again felt “if only they knew, they would act”. I pulled together a variety of researchers and consultants who (often pro-bono, or for limited fees) researched the shockingly rare field evaluations of what was sustained after projects closed, why, and what participants and partners did themselves to sustain impacts.
Sustaining the outcomes and achieving impacts, are, after all, what global development projects promise. These ‘sustainable development’ results are at the top (or far-right, below) of our ‘logical frameworks’. We promise the country-level partners, our taxpayers and donors, that we will achieve them, yet…
We have done six post-project Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations. We have created checklists on ex-post project evaluability thanks to a Faster Forward Fund grant by esteemed evaluator Michael Scriven. We have created preliminary guidance on Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE) and shared 25 such ex-post closure evaluations that we found returned to ask participants 2-15 years after close-out in (one of?) the only database on such evaluations in the world. We have drawn valuable lessons from the evaluations throughout nearly 60 blogs and presented at 10 conferences. We have found that results at the end of project are dynamic, that there can be greater failure – or sometimes greater success – than we would ever expect in our project assumptions. We have found that communities can create ‘emerging’ outcomes, adapting the activities to succeed onward with no further donor funding, and that when we design for long-term sustainability with our partners, then remarkable success can ensue. So many lessons for programming that we need to learn from, including partnering with country-nationals, focusing on youth, questioning assumptions at exit, etc.
We have applied to many grants for support, unsuccessfully, and have applied to evaluate a handful more ex-post sustainability evaluations which other consultants have won – while we were disappointed, in equal measure we are happy others are learning to do this, as we share our resources freely to promote exactly such practices across hundreds of thousands unevaluated projects! We are currently doing an ex-post project evaluation of an agriculture value chain in Tanzania, yet there are a handful done per year. At one conference, our discussant Michael Bamberger joked we were lucky not to be found dead under a bridge for taking on such a dangerous topic. We remain undeterred, and delight in colleagues we promote such work and thanking us for ours.
At the same time, several things have become apparent:
- Vital lessons for how aid can do better remain unexplored, and true accountability to our country-national participants and partners ends when fixed-time, fixed deliverable project resources are spent and proof of accountability for money and results that donors want are filed away. Sadly, while capacity building is done throughout implementation, knowledge management about results is abysmal as ‘our projects’ data almost always dies quietly in donor and implementer computer hard drives after close-out, rather than being accessible in-country for further learning. Go partner!
- We hardly ever return after all our evaluations to share with communities which speaks to ‘partnerships’ not being with the participants, and we often ‘exit’ without giving ample time to handover so that things can be sustained, e.g. local partners found, local and other international funding harnessed, etc. Learn together!
- There is a real need to fund systematized methods for such evaluations, mandate access to quality baseline, midterm and final evaluations, and mandate that all projects above a certain funding level (e.g. $1mil) include funding for such evaluation and learning 2-10 years later. Many so-called ex-post evaluations are in fact either delayed final evaluations, desk studies without any fieldwork, rather methodologically flawed comparisons or with fieldwork which doesn’t talk to the intended ‘beneficiaries’ for such pivotal ground-level feedback. Innovate by listening!
- It is unclear to us how any organization that has done an ex-post sustainability evaluation has learned from it and changed their systems, although we have been told some are ‘looking for a successful project to evaluate’, and that after a failed one, they are discontinued. We know of some (I)NGOs who are putting ex-posts into their new strategies, and two INGOs who are researching exits more – good. Be brave!
- Recently, we are delighted some new NGOs are dipping their feet into their first evaluations of sustainability, they do so bravely. The tension between accountability and learning is heightened at the prospect that implementers and donors have failed to create sustained impact. But why judge them when all the design and systems in place are to reward success while projects are running (and even those don’t always show much) so that they all get congratulations and more funding for very similar projects? Who knows who is focused on sustaining impacts with funding capacities, partnerships and country-led design, implementing with feedback loops and adjusting for the long-term, helping communities evaluate us rather than how well they are fulfilling our targets, etc. Sustaining impacts will win you funding!
- Logically, here are many indications among ex-post sustainability evaluations that profitable, but low-risk and diversified agriculture, microenterprise/ business projects are better sustained (Niger, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal, etc.). This does not mean that all projects need to be profitable, but cost-covering projects even in the health and education/ vocational training/ sectors is important as many of us know. Self-funding!
So rather than giving up on sustained impacts, we are adding another branch to the Valuing Voices tree.
My partners and I have extensively researched the need for and co-founded Impact Guild. We will work alongside NGOs and impact investors to foster:
- FUNDING: The money available from development aid donors is shrinking in volume + value, while development financing is scaling up exponentially.
The SDGs and the Paris Agreement are prompting a massive scale-up of development financing from billions to trillions of dollars into ‘sustainable development’, yet with rare Scandinavian and Foundation exceptions, donors appear to be switching from longer-term development to humanitarian aid. Further, despite decades of experience, international and national nonprofit development implementers are mostly absent in the conversation around scaling-up the flow of capital to achieve and sustain development goals. Exceptions are some in the International NGO Impact Investing Network (AMPLIFY)
2. RESULTS: Funding for projects that can show great results (e.g. Social Impact Bonds/ Development Impact Bonds, which are in fact pay-for-performance instruments), even sustained impacts from partnering with local small and medium enterprises, national level ministries, and local NGOs. Far too long, implementers have been able to get funding for projects with mediocre results; impact investors are raising the bar and even donors are helping hedge risk. This includes M&E ‘impact’ value that rigorously tracks results (savvy private-sector donors require counterfactual/ control group data, isolating results from that intervention).
3. LEARNING: Impact Investors have a lot to learn from non-profits and aid donors as well.
- They talk about impact but too often that is synonymous with generic results, while International and National nonprofits (NGOs) have detailed, grassroots systems in place;
- Most seem to be content – for now – to invest in the 17 Sustainable Development Goal areas (e.g. vetting investable projects by screening criteria of not only getting a financial return, but also by broad sectoral investments, e.g. poverty, hunger, climate etc.). Many claim they have affected change, without data to prove it. The SDGs are slowly creating indicators to address this, and investors also need to be brought along to differentiate between corporate efficiency activities for their operations and those that affect change at the output, outcome and impact levels in communities;
- There are still large leaps of logic and claims among investors and some know that data is lacking to claim good grassroots targeting and actual results that prove they are changing hunger, poverty and other sectors in Africa, Asia, Latin Americ. Good development professionals would see that the very design would make results accessible only to the elite of that country (e.g. $1 nutrition bars are inaccessible to most of a country’s population living on income of $2.00 a day)
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We will bring with us all we know about great potential sustained impacts programming, such as Theory of Sustainability, looking for emerging results alongside planned early on, learning from failure for success, partnering successfully for country-led development, etc.
So keep watching these ‘spaces’: www.ValuingVoices.com and www.ImpactGuild.org for updates on bridging these worlds, hopefully for ever-greater sustained impacts. Let us know if you would like to partner!
by Jindra Cekan | May 16, 2018 | Accountability, Aid effectiveness, CGDev, Evaluation, ex-post evaluation, Feed the Future, Feedback Labs, foreign aid, impact investing, Impact Investors, International aid, international development, Local Participants, Participants, Participation, post project evaluation, post-project evaluation, Return on Investment (ROI), SALT, Sidekick Manifesto, SUSRoi, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE), USAID, Valuing Voices
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, and project participants, their partners and governments). It’s also about us for a short time.
All too often, the measurable results we in global development aid and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funded projects that last 1-5 years track and report data for two reasons:
1) Donors have Compliance for grantees to meet (money spent, not lost, and results met by fixed deadlines of 1-5 years – look at some of the European Commission Contracting rules) and
2) Fund recipients and the participants they serve are accountable to ‘our’ donors and implementers who take what happened through their philanthropic grants as ‘their’ results.
Both can skew how sustainably we get to create impacts. An example of such strictures on sustainability from USAID. As respected CGDev Elliot and Dunning researchers found in 2016 when assessing the ‘US Feed the Future Initiative: A New Approach to Food Security?‘ the $10.15 billion leveraged $20 billion from other funders for disbursement over three years (2013-16). “We are concerned that pressure to demonstrate results in the short term may undermine efforts to ensure any impact is sustainable…. Unfortunately, the pressure to show immediate results can encourage pursuit of agricultural investments unlikely to be sustained. For example, a common response to low productivity is to subsidize or facilitate access to improved inputs… it can deliver a quick payoff… however, if the subsidies become too expensive and are eliminated or reduced, fertilizer use and yields often fall…..
With so much focus on reporting early and often about the progress in implementing the initiative, there is a risk that it increases the pressure to disburse quickly and in ways that may not produce sustainable results. For example, for 2014, Feed the Future reports that nearly 7 million farmers applied “improved technologies or management practices as a result of U.S. Government assistance,” but only 1,300 received “long-term agricultural sector productivity.” Are the millions of others that are using improved inputs or management practices because of subsidies likely to have these practices sustained? And how likely are they to continue using improved practices once the project ends?”
3) Impact investors stick to the same two paths-to-results and add a new objective: market-competitive financial returns. They also need to show short-term results to their investors, albeit with social, environmental and governance results like non-profits (future blog).
4) Altruists create things we want ‘beneficiaries’ (our participants) to have. For instance a plethora of apps for refugees cropped up in recent years, over 5,000 it is estimated, which can be appropriate, nor not so helpful. Much like #2 above, ‘we’re’ helping ‘them’ but again, it seems to be a ‘give a man a fish’… and my fish is cool sort of solution… but do our participants want/ need this?
How often is our work-for-change mostly about us/by us/ for us... when ideally it is mostly about ‘them’ (OK, given human self-interest, shouldn’t changes we want at least be about all of us?).
All too often we want to be the solution but really, our ‘grassroots’ clients who are our true customers need to generate their own solution. Best if we listen and we design for long-term sustainability together?
As the Brilliant Sidekick Manifesto stated in two of its ten steps:
a) “I will step out of the spotlight: Sustainable solutions to poverty come from within are bottom-up, and flow from local leaders who are taking the risks of holding their politicians accountable and challenging the status quo.”
b) “I will read “To Hell with Good Intentions” again and again: Politicians, celebrities and billionaire philanthropists will tell me that I can be a hero. I cannot. The poor are not powerless or waiting to be saved. Illich will check my delusions of grandeur.”
We have examples of where we have stepped away and participants had to fend for themselves. At Valuing Voices, we’ve done post project-exit evaluations 2-15 years afterward. What did participants value so much that they sustained it themselves (all about them, literally)? These Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE) also give us indications of Sustained ROI (Sustained Return on Investment (SusROI) is a key missing metric. As respected evaluator Ricardo Wilson-Grau said in an email, “I think calculating cost-effectiveness of an intervention’s outcomes would be a wonderful challenge for a financial officer searching for new challenges — if not a Nobel prize in economics!”)
Most of these evaluations are pretty bad news mixed with some good news about what folks could sustain after we left, couldn’t and why not. (These are the ones folks expect to have great results, otherwise they wouldn’t share them!) While most clients are understandably interested in what of ‘theirs’ was still standing, and it was interesting disentangling where the results were attributable by implementation or design or partnership flaws or something else, what was mesmerizing was what came from ‘them’.
The key is looking beyond ‘unexpected’ results to look at emerging impacts that are about ‘them’ (aka what we didn’t expect that was a direct result of our project, e.g. spare parts were no longer available to fix the water well pump once we left or a drought rehabilitation water project that decreased violence against women), to what emerging results are attributable not to use but only to our participants and partners who took over after our projects closed. One example is a Nepalese project ended yet the credit groups of empowered women spawned groups of support groups for battered women. Another is a child maternal health project changed how it worked as women reverted to birthing at home after NGOs left; community leaders punished both parents with incarceration in the health clinic for a week if they didn’t given birth there (wow did that work to sustain behavior change of both parents!).
Many of us at Valuing Voices are shocked that funders don’t seem that interested in this, as this is where they not only take over (viz picture, sustaining the project themselves), but they are making it theirs, not ours. Imagine assuming the point of development is to BE SUSTAINABLE.
Source: Community Life Competence
Our participants and national stakeholder partners are our true clients, yet… Feedback Labs tell us Americans alone gave $358 billion to charities (equivalent to the 2014 GDP of 20 countries) – in 2014 but how much of this was determined by what ‘beneficiaries’ want? Josh Woodard, a development expert, suggests a vouchers approach where our true clients, our participants, who would “purchase services from those competing organizations… [such an] approach to development would enable us all to see what services people actually value and want. And when we asked ourselves what our clients want, we would really mean the individuals in the communities we are in the business of working with and serving. Otherwise we’d be out of business pretty quickly.”
This opens the door to client feedback – imagine if participants could use social media to rate the sustained impacts on them of the projects they benefited from? A customer support expert wrote in Forbes, “Today, every customer has, or feels she has, a vote in how companies do business and treat customers. This is part of a new set of expectations among customers today that will only grow ... you can’t control product ratings, product discussions or much else in the way of reviews, except by providing the best customer experience possible and by being proactive in responding to negative trends that come to the surface in your reviews and ratings stronger.”
So how well are we working with our participants for ‘development’ to be about them?
What do you think?
by Jindra Cekan | Apr 6, 2017 | Aid effectiveness, Better Evaluation, Evaluation, ex-post evaluation, Faster Forward Fund, International aid, M&E, methodologies, outcomes, post-project evaluation, SEIE, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation
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 (ex-post) Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIEs) and we are doing the research now. We will be documenting methods used and discuss how best to evaluate such sustained impacts after project close-out. Very exciting stuff in this staggeringly ‘new’ field of evaluation.
During this research, a senior international development evaluation expert told us that they can’t return to evaluate now-closed projects because they aren’t the same projects anymore (after closeout) and we are no longer responsible for the results. That took my breath away.
All new projects come from old projects… we recycle old project design most of the time, occasionally making substantive changes in targeting or design but much of how we design and implement remains the same. And while we thoroughly evaluate them during implementation, learning ex-post is a key missing link which all projects in the future can benefit from as we do similar interventions and track similar outcomes year after year but we rarely know which ones were sustained or emerged anew. There absolutely are aspects that get adapted but there are only so many ways to heal the sick, improve crop growth, save money, learn to read and so on, and there is a world we need to learn about what enabled some to be sustained and even morph into new results!
This excellent article, Do NGOs (non-governmental organization) help?, notes that “due to donor pressure [NGOs] are increasingly forced to respond with a discrete project with x number of deliverable outcomes” [1]. It goes on to cite D. Sriskandarajah, the secretary-general of Civicus, a global network of civil society organizations and activists, wrote: ‘We have become a part of the problem rather than the solution… Since demonstrating bang for your buck has become all-important, we divide our work into neat projects, taking on only those endeavours that can produce easily quantifiable outcomes. Reliant on funding to service our own sizeable organizations, we avoid approaches or issues that might threaten our brand or upset our donors. We trade in incremental change’” [1].
We also settle for results while we control them, and don’t ask unpopular questions about who is to sustain these results, with what resources, and for goodness sake, why sustained impact was not funded, designed, implemented and monitored/ evaluated from the very onset in our rush to measurable results?
As this great NGO article by Dinyar Godrej goes on to say, “most media scrutiny of NGO accountability is of how they use funds, their accountability to donors. But what of their accountability towards the recipients of their interventions” [1]? They have no lobbyists to persuade our funders they would like this but nto that, and often such lobbying for their needs falls to the very NGOs that have won these large contracts and tasked with implementing a dizzying array of mandatory input, output, outcome and some impact indicators. We do care deeply about results! US State Department/ USAID has a “Standard Foreign Assistance Master Indicator List” of 2,300 lines in an excel spreadsheet [2]. (There are more indicators still– custom and cross-cutting indicators, the mind boggles).
Wow. But are we asking the right questions? Are we asking what was sustained after all this hard work was done and ended? Rarely. Who should be?! “It is perhaps unrealistic to expect such large structural changes to be delivered by NGOs when governments don’t tackle them either.”
For the rub is this. When we take development over from national governments, largely do not involve country nationals in the funding, design and M&E of projects, then how sustained can these projects still be after we go? Millions are invested, then disappear… Last year, at local debrief at the end of one SEIE Valuing Voices did, the state of affairs became crystal clear when a government official asked us “Can you ever find some funds to fund us to do our own independent evaluations? Even if it is not the projects that they did themselves? We would be happy to get that support…”
When are we no longer responsible for doing great, sustained work? Valuing Voices will let you know what we found regarding the best ways to do SEIEs more. Stay tuned.
What do you think?
P.S. This blog topic prompted me to look for statistics on the number or percentage of funded projects that were renewed. Nothing. Does anyone know how many or what % of projects were extended/ funded again after showing good results? (Often this happens in the form that a successful project in one area of the country gets either funded again or repeated elsewhere in the country or in the world, as have two of our own SEIEs, Niger and Ethiopia). For that matter, what made them so excellent to be replicated? What can we learn?
Sources:
[1] Godrej, D. (2014, December 1). NGOs – Do They Help? Retrieved from https://newint.org/features/2014/12/01/ngos-keynote/
[2] US Department of State. (n.d.). Standard Foreign Assistance Indicators. Retrieved 2017, from https://web.archive.org/web/20170404072145/https://www.state.gov/f/indicators/index.htm
