Needs are growing in the developing world and blended finance[1], including Impact Investing[2], with the “intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return” could help amid pressures on philanthropy. Investments look to fill the $4 trillion annual funding gap to fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, as current donations to aid programs can only meet so much need. Such investment is rising. In 2018, investors interviewed by GIIN, an industry thinktank, managed over $228 billion in impact investing assets and more are aimed at SDGs. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “a call for…

There are six bright Hallelujahs on the sustained impact journey this Holiday. I’ve paired each of them by a wish, so appropriate this Holiday Season.

1. Netherlands Greatness! The government of theNetherlands has recently started talking with their implementing agencies about how to track and prove sustainability six years after exit, as one Dutch colleague told me at the European Evaluation Society Conference this Oct.

WOW.

As we know, demanding evaluation of sustainability after project closureis rarer than vegan turkey on Thanksgiving, and the Dutch Ministry of ForeignAffairs is tacking the issues of a) how will they pay for it…

We all do it; well, I used to do it too. I used to assume that if I helped my field staff and partners target and design funded projects well enough, and try to ensure a high quality of implementation and M&E, then it would result in sustainable programming. I assumed we would have moved our participants and partners toward projected long-term, top-of-logical-framework’s aspirational impactsuch as “vibrant agriculture leading to no hunger”, “locally sustained maternal child health and nutrition”, “self-sustained ecosystems”.

INTRAC nicely differentiates between what is typically measured (“outputs can only ever be the deliverables of a project or…

Six years. That’s how long ago I have been researching proof of sustained impact(s) through its ex-post project evaluation. Until now Valuing Voices has focused on aid donors. We are expanding to the private sector.

In my PhD I was sure it was a lack of researched and shared proof of successful prevention of famine that led to inaction. In Valuing Voices’ research on ex-post project evaluation, I again felt “if only they knew, they would act”. I pulled together a variety of researchers and consultants who (sometimes pro-bono) researched the shockingly rare field evaluations of what was sustained after…

It is that we think it’s really all about us (individuals, wealthy donors and INGO implementers) not all of us (you, me, and project participants, their partners and governments). It’s also about us for a short time.

All too often, the measurable results we in global development aid and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funded projects that last 1–5 years track and report data for two reasons:

1) Donors have Compliance for grantees to meet (money spent, not lost, and results met by fixed deadlines of 1–5 years — look at some of the European Commission Contracting rules) and

2) Fund…

Investing in Youth for Project Effectiveness and Sustainability

One out of every six people on earth is between the ages of 15–24, says the UN. That is 1.2 billion youth. As one young leader says, “if the world’s problems are to be solved, it’s not going to happen without us.” Yet in 2015, the International Labor Organization said 73.3 million youth between 15 and 24 were unemployed. Not only do and an estimated 169 million young workers lived on less than $2 a day, 75 percent of youth workers are only informally employed. In Africa alone, the UN estimates 200…

Jindra Cekan, PhD, Carolien de Bruin and Peter Kimeu

For 50 years we have tried our best to ‘develop’ ‘less developed countries’ (LDCs). Increasingly, a realization has kicked in that doing ‘development’ for partners and participants through top-down funding, implementation, monitoring and evaluation is inherently certain to fail to break the cycle of inequality. Increasingly, a conviction has emerged that those who control the resources needed to break this cycle; ‘we’ need to be led by ‘them’. …

Local Accountability and Transparency… During and Post Project?

Local development partners? Check. Long-term transparent and accountable investments through them as “local solutions” partners? Not so much. While President Obama and former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Raj Shah promised up to 30% of all contracts would go to ‘local solutions’ that “promote sustainable development through high-impact partnerships and local solutions”, nowhere near that percentage became true then, much less now. While there seem to be good examples such as Haiti, Afghanistan is a poorer example. …