Participatory Impact Assessment

Abstract

The words like Impact, Monitoring and Evaluations have been in the development discourse for more than one decade now. As NGOs continue to play important role in development, such words attain greater meaning. There has been increasing concern about NGOs' performance in social development. The questions like how does one know what has happened in public good, how one can measure the process of change, is it easy to trace the pace of transformation etc. have confounded many NGOs. The evaluations of the projects and programmes when taken up demonstrate the achievements in particular fields, and such interventions are largely seen as 'donor driven'. Most NGOs feel forced to take up evaluations not because these were considered important for institutional learning but the next instalments and future course of funding largely depended on evaluations. Generally the words like monitoring, evaluations and impacts are used interchangeably, in reality and practice all three are related but have different meanings. Before untangling the threads of monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment, it is necessary to understand their relationships with social development.