Chasing the Truth: Evaluating the Impact of Development Assistance where Client Implementation Monitoring has been underfunded!

Service Category: Market & Impact Research

Client Type: International Non-Governmental Organisation

Service: Our client invested 15 years in child-centred health, education and targeted sponsorship programmes in a rural area of a poverty-stressed country. To avoid dependency, it had a policy of limited term interventions and was looking to exit the region. It needed a professional evaluation of its impact on local society and the lessons to be learnt.

What we did:

We:
·      Deployed a supervisory team of FJP experts.
·      Trained 30 support researchers from the local area.
·      Deployed a two-step quantitative survey approach with a stratified sample covering all targeted local government sections (LGS) plus a randomly selected set of communities within each LGS.
·       Interviewed 600 beneficiaries for the survey, providing 99% level of confidence at a 5% margin of error.
·      Conducted qualitative research with focus group discussions and key informant interviews for rich in-depth insights.
·      Deployed our PROP®: Programme Risk and Opportunity Profiling as a tool of impact evaluation.

Foresight Created: We concluded:
·      The intervention was very relevant to the country.
·      Our client inadequately invested in internal and external monitoring & evaluation (M&E) for much of the 15 years.
·      An exit evaluation cannot make up for weaknesses in client M&E. Changes discerned in the lives of beneficiaries could NOT be definitively attributed to our client.
·      Social delinquency in communities threatened the sustainability of project outcomes.
·      The country was a very low trust society – posing material reputational risks for our client’s policy of third-party programme implementation.