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Silva Ferretti is a freelance consultant with extensive international experience in both development and humanitarian work. She has been working with diverse organizations, committees, networks and consortia (e.g. Agire, ActionAid, CDAC, DEC, ECB project, Handicap International, HAP, Plan International, Save the Children, SPHERE, Unicef, WorldVision amongst many others).
Her work is mainly focused on looking at the quality of programs and on improving their accountability and responsiveness to the needs, capacities and aspirations of the affected populations.
Her work has included impact evaluations / documentation of programs; set up of toolkits, methodologies, standards, frameworks and guidelines; coaching, training and facilitation; field research and assessments.
Within all her work Silva emphasizes participatory approaches and learning. She has a solid academic background, and also collaborated with academic and research institutions in short workshops on a broad range of topics (including: innovations in impact evaluation, Disaster Risk Management, participatory methodologies, protection, communication with affected populations).
She emphasizes innovation in her work, such as the use of visuals and videos in gathering and presenting information.
Silva Ferretti
Freelance consultantMy two cents.
When a "theory of change" (as illustrated in the manual) looks like this - with arrows going in the same direction, and with a linear outline (IF... THEN), it is just a logframe in disguise.
A proper "theory of change", fit for complex setups, will have arrows going in many diverse directions, interlinking ideas in ways that are hard to disentangle.
It is messier, harder to navigate, but... ehy! This is what reality most often looks like. (this is the "obesity map", in case you wonder)
There is a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE amongst the two.
You cannot really approach them in the same way and with the same thinking.
This should be the starting point of any analysis!
Once you understand if you are dealing with a linear or complex theory of change, then you need to remember
I feel that it is quite unfortunate that the "theory of change" idea - born to appreciate complexity, ended up just being a different way to picture logframe thinking.
At least we should be able to distinguish what is a logframe on steroids and what is appreciating complexity, and move on from there.