Beneficiary-Driven Impact Evaluation: The Way Forward for Impact Investors
With impact evaluation central to a social impact fund or a non-governmental organization’s ability to attract a continuous flow of funding, best-practice ways of collecting data on their impact are always at the forefront of any development project’s attention.
A Subtle Change of Focus on Impact Evaluation
Development projects typically spend between five and eight percent of their budgets on impact evaluation, either by mandate or by choice. But is all of that spend actually effective? What impacts are measured and evaluated? Who conducts those evaluations?
More focus appears to be turning toward beneficiary-driven data: feedback from a program’s beneficiaries on that program’s effectiveness and impact.
The value of beneficiary-driven data cannot be understated. In the Chicago school system, the Network for College Success launched a scheme to track the progress of students in their high school freshman year — identified as a pivotal year in a student’s likelihood of high school success.
The beneficiary-feedback driven program proved an immense success. According to Gates Notes, the ‘on-track’ rate for Chicago high school freshmen was just 56% in 2000. By 2017 it had surpassed 85%. High school graduation rates followed suit, leaping from 51% in 2002 to 74% by 2015.
The difference? Schools had access to beneficiary-driven data and reacted according to that data to intervene and help students found to be at risk of failure or dropping out. (Bill Gates, On the right track in Chicago, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/On-the-right-track-in-Chicago?WT.mc_id=03_06_2019_09_Chicago2019_BG-%20LI_&WT.tsrc=BGLI&linkId=64436956)
As Bill Gates stated:
“By embracing data, research, and the collective knowledge of their local community, schools have an opportunity to help students succeed in high school, college, and beyond. It’s an approach that empowers schools to identify their most pressing challenges and the tools to design the right solutions.”
Antiretroviral Stock-Outs in West Africa Call For Stronger Community Feedback Mechanisms
The International Treatment Preparedness Coalition recently measured stock-outs of 9% for HIV test kits, 24% for ARVs, and 17% for viral load supplies in West Africa. They advocate for empowering communities to monitor themselves as a way to enhance health outcomes. (International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, RCTO-WA (July 2017–June 2018), Data For A Difference).
According to their findings:
“Community-based monitoring and feedback creates greater transparency and accountability. It also sheds light on myriad other dimensions of progress: funding, efficiency, surveillance mechanisms, people’s motivation and understanding, demand, quality of care, use of new technologies, human rights- and gender-related barriers to access, emerging issues, unanticipated bottlenecks, inequities, inequalities, and much more. Put simply, you get insight into why things are working (or not working).”
Beneficiary-Driven Monitoring Successes Proving Their Worth
Others have reported similar findings. Community-based monitoring was found to be a successful accountability tool in rural health services in 2012 in Maharashtra, India.
Community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in 2009 in Uganda was deemed a significant contributor to “large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes — reduced child mortality and increased child weight.” (Björkman, Martina, and Jakob Svensson (2009). “Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124, 735–769, https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/124/2/735/1905094?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
Havuta Brings a Renewed Focus on Beneficiary-Driven Data
A new Geneva-based blockchain startup, Havuta, is bringing beneficiary-driven data collection capabilities to the development sector with its native app that enables development actors to measure their impact, over the long-term, with the direct feedback of their beneficiaries.
Havuta’s elegant solution to the data collection challenges faced by NGOs and social impact funds pairs the efficiency and immutability properties of distributed ledger technology to empower actors to access what is becoming recognized as the best source of intervention impact data — the beneficiaries themselves.
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