What does more equitable impact look like?

Five important takeaways for practitioners seeking to enhance impact, and better serve the communities with which they work.

When I started the In Search of More Equitable Impact blog, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that we may all have different visions of what equitable impact is in a MSD programme. But a recent conversation with Karri Goeldner Byrne, a consultant with more than 25 years of experience in Fragile and Conflict Affected Situations (FCAS), forced me to revisit this foundational question.

Here are the five key areas we discussed.

1. Centre the community’s vision of impact and equity in your logic model

Being able to bring in a community’s concept of impact and equity can be challenging, Karri explains. It requires a nuanced understanding of how the community - particularly groups like women, youth and people with a disability - defines issues such as wealth and satisfaction. Karri finds that programmes often overlook community definitions of equity and impact and so fail to satisfy the communities they serve.

For example, in a lot of places Karri works, livestock is more than something you eat. It is also a form of savings, even status within a community - and closely linked to cultural practices which, in turn, may influence conflict dynamics. In Uganda’s Karamoja region, a fragile and conflict-affected area that has received intense donor support for years, communities define wealth in terms of number of cattle, not by the cash they have or how they dress and educate their children. According to Karri, it took a long time for development organisations to realise and accept the community’s definition of wealth. As a result, the impact is mixed, despite more than a decade of donor support and many millions of dollars of aid.

Research by Tuft’s University^1,2 showed that integrating communities’ concepts of wealth into a programme logic and design leads to more complexity-aware and impactful programming.

2. Embrace the complexity

Organisations that are not afraid to take on complexity are more able to measure impact across multiple dimensions, according to Karri.

In her experience, this multifaceted approach to measuring impact in FCAS can be better aligned with, and better capture, what communities themselves would define as important impacts. She notes that how a community defines impact doesn’t always align with how donors define and prioritise it, or how development organisations want to deliver it:

“If a community has said, ‘This is what’s important to us about our livestock’, you should be measuring that.”

In Madagascar, during a recent assignment, Karri observed that the consulted communities expressed different views on how they wanted to receive assistance. Some said they were happy receiving aid in the form of vouchers, while others wanted cash. It was interesting to observe that their underlying reasons were the same - convenience and choice. However, what was convenient for some members, who were closer to stores, was less so for others who were more remote.

Karri says that development organisations often want a clear-cut answer from this type of survey, but this doesn’t always reflect reality. She critiques both the lack of agile systems that help distinguish preferences among households or communities, and the attitudes of development organisations that do not want to hear about the complexities that are inherent in FCAS.

3. Adapt your M&E accordingly

Karri insists on the importance of adapting a programme’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to capture data that speaks to how the community defines success.

She’s noticed organisations, particularly those from a humanitarian background, trying to shift towards centring community definitions of success in their work, but has found that they struggle when it comes to M&E:

“Achieving more equitable impact is about asking better questions and using mixed methods to gather more meaningful data.”

She finds that these types of development organisations tend to be more adept at collecting quantitative data. But, when it comes to bringing in more nuanced findings through qualitative data, she notices that they can be both sceptical of the validity of data, and pressed for time to deeply engage with it. Karri finds that this impacts the work of current programmes as well as future programming:

“If you don’t fix your M&E to measure the right things, then the next programme doesn’t have the data it needs to be designed differently.”

4. Decide how the data will inform decision-making

An important step towards measuring ‘the right things’ is thinking ahead about how the information will be used, and by whom. Karri believes that meaningful impact is linked to the decisions you make with information:

“One of the questions I always start [an evaluation] process with is, ‘What decisions are going to be made with this piece of work and who is making those decisions?’”

5. Ask the next logical question

Karri explains that the second step is asking the follow-up question.

For example, if a programme has evidence of a positive impact on household income, the next logical questions might be to ask if the children were educated as a result of that income, or did the family eat better, etc.

“We have to look at impact, not as a set of indicators, but to inform what’s next.”

Karri admits that she is as interested in the small changes as in the big ones - that sometimes MSD programmes ignore changes unless they are at scale, and this is a mistake.

Even if the change occurred with just a small number of households, this change can be life-changing for those families. Small changes can also yield big insights that may help a programme eventually reach a larger scale and achieve greater impact.

Karri Goeldner Byrne is a Market Systems Development expert with more than 25 years of experience advising leading international development organisations and implementing programmes in fragile and conflict affected situations.

_{¹Changes in and perceptions of wealth, equality, and food security in Karamoja, Uganda. By Anastasia Marshak , Elizabeth Stites , Mackenzie Seaman , Barbara Athieno. Tufts University, September 2022
²Experiences of young women in four districts of Karamoja, Uganda: 2018–2022. Teddy Atim, Anastasia Marshak, Barbara Athieno, and Elizabeth Stites. Tufts University, September 2022}