by Jindra Cekan | Oct 28, 2020 | Aid effectiveness, Evaluation, Impact, measuring sustainability checklist, post project evaluation, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIE)
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 after evaluating 12 projects 2 years post-closure ( https://www.fsnnetwork.org/resource/exit-strategies-study), “ Hope is Not a Strategy”, yet too often that is what projects that assume sustainability does. They/we hope. But is this good enough? For me, confirming that hope means evaluating beyond exit to ex-post, at least 2 years after donor investments end. 99% of the time, donors & development practitioners don’t return to see what lasted, what didn’t, why nor what emerged from people’s own effort. Yet we implement similar programs over and over onward, not learning lessons from the past. Sigh.
We need to evaluate what we expected to remain from our implemented projects. We also need to learn from what evaluator Bob Williams calls, “the sustainability of the idea that underpinned the results (even if the results were no longer evident)”. This is often beneath what emerged: Our projects catalyzed the local’s desire to sustain activities: taking new ways, that are locally manageable (changing how the development idea is implemented onward) or even having entirely new initiatives emerge from the participant groupings — from their own priorities, not ours. (For more on emerging impacts: https://www.betterevaluation.org/en/themes/SEIE)
Evaluation leaders talk about power, they talk about the environment. After 7 years of researching and evaluating projects ex-post evaluations, I have found there are no brilliant 100% sustained + projects nor are there any 100% abjectly scorched earth ones either. Our results are middling at best. And therein lies the rub. Projects are what donors want to give. Sometimes that overlaps with what recipient countries want, sometimes not. Most of the time the resources to sustain our multimillion-dollar, -euro, -yen, etc., investments aren’t there. We can use incentives (e.g. food aid or cash) that can bolster short-term success while we spend, but once phased out, can lead to sustainability sharply falling off as early as 2 years after we exit. It’s because while ‘development’ is about ‘our’ spending on ‘our’ programs, about short-term success while we’re implementing, rather than our equal partners’ priorities and ability to sustain it. We misuse our power. We care about ourselves far more than the people we ostensibly went there to ‘save’.
And as esteemed evaluators Andy Rowe/ Michael Quinn Patton noted, given climate change we need to question even more assumptions about how sustained and resilient our programming can be, by evaluating the natural environment on which our programming relies pre, during & implementation, at exit and ex-post closure. (More on sustained environment: https://valuingvoices.com/sustaining-sustainable-development/)
It also means we need to talk to those to whom we will eventually hand over early on to make sure we’ve built-in resilience to the climatic, economic shocks we know of so far. I recommend my colleagues Holta Trandafili and Isabella Jean’s presentations on partnering we did a couple of months ago: https://valuingvoices.com/sustainability-ready-what-it-takes-to-support-measure-lasting-change-webinar/
Finally, I have come to see that to make sustainability more likely for years to come, we must fund, design, implement, and monitor/ evaluate For Sustainability throughout the project cycle. I have come to see that folks need guidance to help support their integration of sustainability throughout, including environment & resilience, benchmarks, and more. We can learn from what ex-posts teach. Join me please, to help craft more sustained development:
Upcoming Sustained Exit Webinar: 6 Nov 2020, 14:30–17 CEST, 8:30–11 EST
“Sustained Exit? Prove it or Improve it!” Interactive webinar discussion of ex-post sustainability evaluation lessons and how to integrate into ongoing #aid programs. On Zoom, participants get resources: checklists, slides, recording, Join us to #sustain #impacts! Register, sliding scale: https://sustainedexit.eventbrite.com
by Jindra Cekan | Aug 2, 2017 | evaluability checklist, ex-post evaluation, Faster Forward Fund (3F), measuring sustainability checklist, Participation, post-project evaluation, Project cycle, SEIE, Sustainability, Sustained and Emerging Impact Evaluation (SEIE), Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, Valuing Voices
Building the Evidence Base for Post Project Evaluation:
A report to the Faster Forward Fund
We are delighted to share Valuing Voices’ report on the value added of post-project evaluation, which compares findings from eight end-of-project and subsequent post project evaluations [1]. Many of you are aware of how rarely post project evaluations are undertaken. As a result, there is little real evidence about project impact on long-term sustainability. Valuing Voices received a grant from Michael Scriven’s Faster Forward Fund to begin to address this gap.
Our findings show that post project evaluations can contribute to better understanding of sustainability impacts, and reveal unexpected and emerging outcomes years after project close. They also indicate ways in which we can design and implement for sustainability.
Finding suitable projects for this review was difficult because so few post project evaluations are done, fewer are publically available, and fewer still had comparable final evaluations and included local voices. Agencies that fund post project evaluations offer a range of reasons for doing so: to learn, to promote a success, to inform replication or scale, to provide justification for future funding, to promote accountabilities. However, many funding agencies consider post project evaluation a luxury or not necessary. JICA and OECD are notable exceptions in this regard.
Highlights include:
- The review highlights the range of methods that have been used in post project evaluations, and point to the advantages of planning for sustainability measurement from the outset of the project.
- The cases reviewed in the study highlight the (sometime dramatic) difference between the anticipated trajectory of a project, what is happening as the project ends, and what actually continued, was adapted, ceased or changed course after close out.
- Taxonomies, knowledge management about evaluation, data retrieval/ retention, analysis, use and dissemination are elements of sustained impact evaluation that require attention.
- Little documentation is available about how post project evaluations have actually informed and influenced organizational learning, sectoral dialogue or future programming.
- Post project evaluations shed particularly interesting light on what emerged post-project that was entirely due to the efforts and resources of participants and partners after project investments stopped. More on these Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluations (SEIEs) at Better Evaluation.
As part of this report, Valuing Voices created an evaluability checklist for assessing whether a post project evaluation is viable, as well as a checklist for measuring sustainability starting at the beginning of the project cycle [2].
We welcome your comments on this report and checklists, and encourage you to share it in your networks and get us feedback on their use. Please use the report and findings to advocate for more post project sustainability impact evaluations which will contribute to greater evidence-based learning about project sustainability. Valuing Voices is among a handful of organizations who do post-project evaluations and we can either conduct one or refer you to another who does.
Thank you,
Laurie Zivetz, MPH, PhD and Jindra Cekan, PhD, with Kate Robins, MPH, PhD of Valuing Voices
The full report is available here:
https://valuingvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-case-for-post-project-evaluation-Valuing-Voices-Final-2017.pdf
Sources:
[1] Zivetz, L., Cekan, J., & Robbins, K. (2017, May). Building the Evidence Base for Post-Project Evaluation: Case Study Review and Evaluability Checklists. Retrieved from https://valuingvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-case-for-post-project-evaluation-Valuing-Voices-Final-2017.pdf
[2] Zivetz, L., & Cekan, J. (n.d.). Evaluability Checklists. Retrieved from https://valuingvoices.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Valuing-Voices-Checklists.pdf
