Week 4: Evaluating development interventions

Introduction

Welcome to Week 4. In this final week, you will look at what alternative evaluation approaches there are by considering some qualitative methods including creative methods and critical approaches to evaluation. This moves away from conventional evaluation based on quantifiable results, which are often used to convince the public in donor countries that its money is being well spent. While it is important for aid donors to see what their money has achieved, the public deserve greater honesty. They can be trusted to consider more diverse and creative measures for evaluating outcomes and impact.

In the last couple of decades, private sector values have increasingly crept into the work of the public sector. Values like accountability, productivity and efficiency have caused a seismic shift in the public and voluntary sectors, including development management. It is arguable that these quantitative evaluation approaches are too rigid. They can miss much of the richness of development outcomes and impact because they are looking for only what they can measure: the unexpected results and impact, which are inevitable within the messy environment of development can be missed.

By exploring qualitative tools such as alternative/arts-based techniques and critical evaluation approaches there is an attempt to reconnect development management with its goals of reducing poverty and inequality. As the Princeton University psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, famously said: ‘No one ever made a decision because of a number. They needed a story.’ (Mukherjea and Mittal, 2016). The aim here is to put the story back into evaluation.

Thus, the main question this week is: How can projects/programmes be evaluated for a more holistic understanding of development outcomes and impact?