Skip to content
Skip to main content

About this free course

Become an OU student

Share this free course

Global challenges in practice: designing a development intervention
Global challenges in practice: designing a development intervention

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

Summary of Week 3

This week you have looked at how development actors often have to juggle the competing demands of what funders and donors want in terms of accountability, what benefits those who they are trying to help, and what enables learning and organisational development.

You have also gained an understanding of how gathering monitoring data is critical to effective evaluation but this raises many challenges as to what kind of data should be collected and if indeed it is possible to collect the desired data. Intangibles (such as changes in well-being, a sense of safety or coping abilities) are impossible to measure directly and there is the added issue that longer-term impacts (e.g. links between educational provision and the realisation of job opportunities) are difficult to relate directly to a programme or project’s activities. Rafts of proxy measures have been devised to measure the unmeasurable, but this causes even more doubt as to whether what is being measured reflects the reality of people’s lives.

Despite such contradictions and challenges, evaluation practice has a critical role to play in providing evidence of the utility and need for investment in development work and in enabling practitioners to assess what they are doing well and what could be changed.

Now go Week 4 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .