Course content
The course is broken down into manageable, weekly teaching sections although you can study it at your own pace. It is designed to accelerate your learning through diverse learning activities:
Week 1: What is a development intervention?
This week discusses the nature and variation of development interventions in order to establish why they need managing. It will then introduce the project cycle which is the main way development projects are planned from beginning to end.
Week 2: Designing an intervention
Here we look at how to design an intervention. Development interventions need to respond to and fit into the different contexts within which development happens. We introduce the adaptive management approach which encourages flexibility and agility in order to arrive at innovative solutions to development problems.
Week 3: Introducing monitoring and evaluation
This week introduces monitoring and evaluation, two key elements of the project cycle, in which the progress and impact of an intervention are assessed, and decisions made about future directions. This week raises questions about the purposes of monitoring and evaluation, how they might be distinguished from one another, where and with who our priorities should lie when trying to account for success.
Week 4: Evaluating development interventions
In this final week we take a closer look at how to evaluate a development intervention. It focuses on qualitative tools particularly creative methods in order to build a more holistic and comprehensive evaluation that reconnects the management of development with the goals of reducing poverty and inequality.
A Statement of Participation is available at the end having completed the course.