Between 10 and 15 percent of all aid to developing countries (equivalent to over US$6 billion) is channelled by or through non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Although emergency assistance counts for a significant (and in recent years rising) share of total NGO aid flows, the majority is currently provided for development projects and programmes. A recent Overseas Development Institute Briefing Paper examines how best to approach the issue of impact assessment. What evidence is there to suggest that NGOs are having a positive (or negative) impact on developing communities? Are there such things as objective yardsticks for assessing that impact? And how do donors and NGOs view impact assessment in principle?

There is growing interest in the assesment of NGO development intitiatives, not least in the main causes behind instances of failure. Indications are that the majority of NGO projects undergoing assessment succeed in achieving their immediate objectives, but often fall short of achieving the wider objectives of the donor agencies. Despite successful efforts to assess the impact of development projects, impact assessment remains problematic. Missing are:

• quantitative and qualitative data on projects, a problem compounded by the fact that some NGOs, especially the smaller ones, still do not place a high priority on gathering and assessing information regarding outcomes
• agreement on how to assess impact, reflecting the different emphasis that different stakeholders place on particular kinds of outcome, and the extent to which smaller NGOs are prepared to allocate scarce financial resources to this purpose.

It is not uncommon for NGOs to alter the nature, scale and purpose of their engagement midway through development activities. This may exacerbate the gaps in knowledge noted above. Thus, recent shifts away from funding projects for the poor towards work involving capacity building and support for processes of democratisation, means that impact assessment based on 'old' practices lose their relevance to current development activities.

Contemporary initiatives and debates among donors and NGOs regarding impact assessment reveal marked differences in approach, method and purpose. But they also point to some growing common ground between the two, particularly on the need to know more about impact and the need to learn from past experiences. The future is likely to witness further growth in donor interest in assessing the impact of NGO projects, but will also bring increasing recognition of the complexity of NGO development interventions. On the positive side, more is likely to become known about how and why particular clusters of NGO development projects succeed or fail. But it will also be far more important to ask, and difficult to answer, questions about the overall role NGOs ought to play in development.

Source(s):
1. Non-governmental Organisations and rural poverty alleviation, Oxford University Press and ODI, Riddell, R., Robinson, M. Et al (1996)
2. The impact of NGO development projects, ODI Briefing Paper May 1996 (2) Full document.

Funded by: Overseas Development Institute (ODI), UK

id21 Research Highlight: 1998-May-01

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