My contributions
Nowadays many donors, international organizations, government agencies and NGOs promote their use as a way to ensure that their day-to-day activities are aligned with their ultimate aims. I raised this topic with the Community and asked members about their experience with their use, and their views on the main value added of ToCs. Several members shared their experience and volunteered ideas for ensuring adequate use of ToCs, such as the following:
- ToCs add value when they are co-generated in a participatory manner with project managers, technical experts, implementers and beneficiaries.
- ToCs can be powerful communication tools to share the project’s
Prospective users of such information, however, have become less capable to take full account of this development, in part due to lack of time and capacities to absorb all the information. Decision-makers in particular demand and expect from researchers and evaluators to provide them with products to facilitate the uptake of such knowledge. Evaluation synthesis can fill this gap by building on findings from different sources to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of a program or policy.
A synthesis is the integration of existing knowledge and findings relevant to a topic, and has as its main objective to
Using synthesis and meta-analysis to make the most of evaluative evidence: what is your experience?
DiscussionWhen evaluating projects, we identify issues that affect their effectiveness and note that these often originate from flaws at design and/or implementation stages.
In early July, I raised this topic with the Community and asked which good practices members would recommend to governments, donors, international organizations and non-governmental organizations to improve project effectiveness.
Several members shared suggestions and ideas for ensuring high-quality projects, such as the following:
- Quality projects should clearly contribute to a bigger developmental impact of the country.
- Projects should have clear objectives, milestones and monitoring of deliverables.
- Commitment and ownership by the government is key; this goes
Carlos Tarazona
Senior Evaluation Officer FAODear John,
Thanks for starting this interesting discussion! The approach that you outline is very similar to how Outcome Mapping (OM) is used for planning and monitoring purposes. In the FAO Evaluation Office we have used Theory of Change (ToC) and OM for evaluation purposes only.
I believe you can find some examples on evolving ToC and the application of OM in the real world at the Better Evaluation website: https://www.betterevaluation.org/en/plan/approach/outcome_mapping
Best regards,
Carlos