Over recent decades, there has been an increased focus on development agencies’ results, with an increased demand for quantitative measurement in general and impact evaluation in particular. Funding agencies have started to request more objective, independent evaluations to prove that their resources really improve people’s lives, health, education, and wealth. All development agencies today try to measure the performance and achievements of their interventions.
This TOP discusses evaluations, focusing on the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. It covers the causal chain and evidence-based evaluations, ‘black boxes’ and realistic evaluations and complex adaptive systems, complexity evaluations and change assessment. The TOP explains the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and includes some examples of participatory tools to assess change in complex WASH interventions. The TOP ends with useful books, websites and contacts.
Free download from http://www.irc.nl/page/49104.
