Impact Assessment for Development Agencies: Learning to Value Change

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Oxfam, 1999 - Business & Economics - 308 pages
This book considers the process of impact assessment and shows how and why it needs to be integrated into all stages of development programs - from planning to evaluation. Its basic premise is that impact assessment should not refer to the immediate outputs of a project or program, but to any lasting or significant changes that it brought about.

From a theoretical overview, the book moves on to discuss the design of impact-assessment processes and a range of tools and methods, before illustrating its use in development, in emergencies, and in advocacy work. It ends by exploring ways in which different organizations have attempted to instititutionalize impact-assessment processes and the challenges they have faced in doing so.

In-depth case studies by partner organizations of Oxfam and Novib as well as by some Oxfam staff show how a variety of approaches to impact assessment - qualitative, quantitative, and participatory - in a range of situations from large-scale integrated development programs to projects involving only one community. These include impact studies undertaken by BRAC and PROSHIKA in Bangladesh, the evaluation of a post-conflict rehabilitation program in El Salvador, a long-term study of the effectiveness of environmental projects in Zimbabwe, and a retrospective review of a neighborhood project in the UK.
 

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Page v - Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts.
Page 194 - Convention at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the...
Page 216 - Friends of the Earth and the Council for the Protection of Rural England on the environment and the British Road Federation on transport.
Page 21 - Impact assessment is the systematic analysis of the lasting or significant changes — positive or negative, intended or not — in people's lives brought about by a given action or series of actions
Page 295 - Poverty Alleviation and Empowerment: The Second Impact Assessment Study of BRAC's Rural Development Programme, BRAC, Dhaka.
Page 261 - Who learns in the organisation and how? What kind of learning is rewarded? To what degree are errors admitted and analysed? What forms of knowledge are defined as legitimate, and how? What constraints are there to learning? How does information flow in the organisation? How is institutional memory constructed; how accessible is it, and for whom? What changes occur through self-learning, rather than other ways of learning? How does the organisation react to learning which challenges its assumptions?...
Page 153 - Case studies become particularly useful where one needs to understand some particular problem or situation in great depth, and where one can identify cases rich in information — rich in the sense that a great deal can be learned from a few exemplars of the phenomenon in question.
Page 163 - ... Surely it consists in just this, that, when we are faced with a choice between ultimates, it enables us to choose with full awareness of the implications of what we are choosing. Faced with the problem of deciding between this and that, we are not entitled to look to Economics for the ultimate decision. There is nothing in Economics which relieves us of the obligation to choose.
Page 4 - Many of the chapters that follow refer back to some of the basic lessons described in these chapters. Chapter 5 on impact assessment and emergencies refers mainly to one of the case studies as well as to some recent material. It explores some of the specific difficulties and challenges of undertaking impact assessment in crisis situations and compares them with the lessons described in previous chapters.
Page 110 - Simply talking, and listening, to people is probably the most common and useful way of assessing impact. This does not mean to say that it is easy. In the case studies these discussions happened in a variety of ways: individually and in groups; formally and informally; using pre-defined questionnaires, semistructured interviews, and workshops; and simply by chatting.

About the author (1999)

Chris Roche is Director of the Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

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