What does more equitable impact look like?
When I started the ‘In Search of More Equitable Impact’ blog, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that we may all have different visions of what equitable impact is in a market systems development (MSD) program. But a recent conversation with Karri Goeldner Byrne, a consultant with more than 25 years of experience in Fragile and Conflict Affected Situations (FCAS), forced me to revisit this foundational question. Our discussion revealed five important takeaways for practitioners seeking to enhance impact and better serve the communities with which they work.
Center the community’s vision of impact and equity in your logic model.
Being able to bring in a community’s concept of impact and equity can be challenging, Karri explains. It requires a nuanced understanding of how the community –particularly groups like women, youth, and people with disability–defines issues like wealth and satisfaction. Karri finds that programs often overlook community definitions of equity and impact and consequently fail in the end to satisfy the communities they serve.
For example, in a lot of places Karri works, livestock is more than something you eat. It is also a form of savings and even status within a community. It is also closely linked to cultural practices which, in turn, may influence conflict dynamics. In Karamoja, a fragile and conflict-affected area that has received intense donor support for years, communities define wealth in terms of number of cattle and not by the cash they have on hand or how they dress and educate their children. According to Karri, it took a long time for development organizations to realize and accept the community’s definition of wealth. As a result, the impact for the communities in Karamoja is mixed, despite more than a decade of donor support and millions and millions of dollars worth of aid. Research by Tuft’s University (this and this) showed the importance of being able to integrate communities’ concepts of wealth into a program logic and design leads to more complexity-aware and impactful programming.
Embrace the complexity.
Organizations that are not afraid to take on complexity tend to be able to measure impact across multiple dimensions, according to Karri. In her experience, this multifaceted approach to measuring impact in FCAS can be better aligned with and better capture what communities themselves would define as important impacts. She notes that how a community defines impact doesn’t always align with how donors define and prioritize it or how development organizations want to deliver it.
“If a community has said, ‘This is what’s important to us about our livestock’, you should be measuring that.”
In Madagascar, during a recent assignment, Karri observed that the consulted communities expressed diverse interests regarding how they wanted to receive assistance. Some community members said they were happy receiving aid in the form of vouchers while others wanted cash. What was interesting was that the underlying reason was the same–convenience and choice–but what was convenient for some members who were closer to stores was not as convenient for the others who were more remote.
Karri says that often development organizations want a clear-cut answer from this type of survey, but that often does not reflect the reality. She critiques both the lack of agile systems that are able to distinguish preferences among households or communities and the attitudes of development organizations that do not want to hear about the complexities that are inherent in FCAS.
Adapt your M&E accordingly.
Karri insists on the importance of adapting a program’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to capture data that speaks to how the community defines success. Karri has noticed organizations, particularly those from a humanitarian background, trying to shift towards centering community definitions of success in their work, but has found that they struggle when it comes to M&E.
“Achieving more equitable impact is about asking better questions and using mixed methods to gather more meaningful data.”
She finds that these types of organizations tend to be more adept at collecting quantitative data. But, when it comes to bringing in more nuanced findings through qualitative data, she notices that they can be both skeptical of the validity of data and pressed for time to deeply engage with it. She finds that this issue not only impacts the work on the current programs but also future programming.
“If you don’t fix your M&E to measure the right things, then the next program doesn’t have the data it needs to be designed differently.”
Decide how the data will inform decision-making.
An important step towards measuring ‘the right things’ is thinking ahead about how the information will be used and by whom. Karri thinks that creating meaningful impact is linked to the decision you make with information.
“One of the questions I always start [an evaluation] process with is, ‘What decisions are going to be made with this piece of work and who is making those decisions?’”
Ask the next logical question.
Karri explains that the second step is asking the follow-up question. For example, if a program has evidence of a positive impact on household income, she believes the program then needs to ask the next logical question such as were the children educated because of that income, did the family eat better, etc.
“We have to look at impact, not as a set of indicators, but to inform what’s next.”
Karri admits that she is as interested in small changes as in big ones. She says that sometimes MSD programs tend to ignore changes unless they are at scale. According to Karri, this is a mistake because even if the change occurred with just a small number of households, this change can be life-changing for those families. Small changes can also yield big insights that may help a program eventually reach a larger scale and achieve greater impact.
Karri Goeldner Byrne is a Market Systems Development expert with more than 25 years of experience advising leading international development organizations and implementing programs in fragile and conflict affected situations.
This blog series is written by the Canopy Lab’s Managing Partner and Inclusion+ Practice Lead Holly Lard Krueger with the support of Affiliate Consultant, Audrey Lodes. The Canopy Lab is a Washington, DC-based consulting firm specialized in the practical application of systems thinking.
Other posts in this series:
