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monitoring and evaluation

Benchmarking rural water systems by a simple score

Kristoffer Welsien's picture
Improved water supply in Kipanduka village, Tanzania
Photo: Alessandra Argenti/ World Bank

Can the ability to sustain rural water systems be captured by a simple score? A new multipurpose four-page tool seeks to measure the likelihood of sustainability by assessing the capacity of a village water committee. Previously, such tools were often either too lengthy and academic or the assessment was left to the discretion of local officials with the risk of omitting critical components. Now a more practical model has been developed that aims to be user-friendly but detailed enough to detect gaps and prioritize interventions for village water committees.

This journey started in a rural village in the district of Karatu, Tanzania where a new water system had just been commissioned. The district water engineer was about to inaugurate the water scheme after a five-day training of the village water committee, giving them full ownership of their water scheme. During the opening ceremony, one question kept puzzling her: “Was the village water committee fully equipped to manage, operate and maintain their newly installed water scheme?”

Found a positive impact, published in a peer-reviewed journal. What more do we need?

Urmy Shukla's picture

Family utilizes protective malaria bed nets in their home, Nigeria In this blog, we advocate the importance of in-depth reporting on implementation processes, evaluation processes, and relevant contextual details of interventions and linked evaluations. This will facilitate research transparency, as well as assessments of both learning and the potential for generalizability beyond the original study setting (learning lessons from ‘there’ for ‘here,’ but not necessarily promoting the strict and exact duplication of a program from one setting to another, in line with an understanding of external validity that is appropriate for the social sciences in development).
We start with a hypothetical scenario of an intervention and associated evaluation, based on too-frequent experiences in the impact evaluation space. We hope that it doesn’t sound familiar to those of you who have been involved in evaluation or have tried to make sense of evaluation results -- but suspect that it will.
A research team, connected to a larger research and evaluation organization, ran a study on an intervention. For reasons of statistical and political significance, they have deemed it sufficiently successful and worthy of scaling up, at least in a very specific new setting. 
The intervention sought to overcome the following problem, for which there are supply-side and demand-side issues. People in malarious areas may procure a bednet (whether for free or for a positive price), but they do not always follow-through with maintenance (re-treatment or replacement).
For supply, the private sector only sporadically offers retreatment and replacement, and it is expensive, while the public sector does not always have supplies available. The intervention, therefore, concentrates provision of this service at a specific time and place through temporary service centers.
For demand, people with nets often don’t understand the need for retreatment and, even if they do, continuously put off doing so. The intervention, therefore, included a non-monetary incentive for which there is local demand (in this case, soap) to be picked up at the time of net retreatment.


Humanity Journal's picture




Policy to research to policy in difficult places

Humanity Journal's picture






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Hawthorne effects: Past and future

Heather Lanthorn's picture

Hawthorne history



Four principles for Theories of Change in global development

Craig Valters's picture

The stratospheric rise of the Theory of Change approach continues. In a new paper published on September 15, 2015, I argue that taking a Theory of Change approach demands a radical shift towards more and better learning in development thinking and practice.

Local farmers attend a workshop on ecology and social organization in Vila Da Canoas, in the Amazon region of Brazil near ManausHang on, do we know what a Theory of Change approach actually is?

At a workshop at ODI in April 2015, we sought to work out how different people were using the term, for what purpose, and with what effects. More detail on that can be found here and here. What’s emerged is that the term ‘Theory of Change’ is being used in at least three overlapping ways:

As a discourse, asking ‘what’s your Theory of Change?’ has become an increasingly fashionable way interrogate someone’s assumptions about change (and flummox newcomers to the terminology).

As a tool, it’s rapidly rivalling (and being used in conjunction with) the log frame. Here it’s often used as a way of making explicit the assumptions connecting (watch out, here comes aid jargon) activities, outputs and outcomes in reporting for donors.

Taking a Theory of Change approach will likely include use of a tool in some form, but is broader, reflecting a desire to embed a critical and adaptive approach in organisational practice. This is perhaps the most exciting, as it builds in what we know about how aid organisations can make effective contributions to social change in complex environments.

So where do we go from here?

The following principles (not rules) seek to ground Theory of Change approaches in this emerging knowledge – and are rooted in a concern with persistently damaging problems within the industry.

However, the aim is to not to be prescriptive: debate them, critique them, and develop your own!


Duncan Green's picture





