Talking Impact

It is essential that charities and other development organisations are always able to show their worth, both to the intended beneficiaries and to donors. Particularly in this current economic climate (to use a tired cliché), the tracking of donations and ‘value-for-money’ have become more visible in debates on development and aid effectiveness than ever before. An interesting piece on this can be read on the development site Devex here, which asks whether the focus on ‘accountability’ (to use a current buzzword) has pushed development agencies to try and demonstrate impact in a much shorter time-frame than can reasonably be expected when the goals are as nebulous, complicated and long-term as ‘poverty reduction’.

Why does this debate matter for small charities working on development issues, who have much more restricted aims (and budgets) than DFID? Both legally and ethically, small charities need to be able to demonstrate to their donors that their donations have been used (a) how we said they would be and (b) effectively. The clearest way to do the latter is to support any claims with numbers. This is what most immediately seems to show impact. To use Quest4Change as the example, if we claim that we “fight poverty and the destruction of the environment in Africa and South America”, do we need to be able to prove that this we are doing this effectively? The short answer is ‘yes’. To this end, we gather our data and report it to our charitable donors – read our 2010 Impact Report here.

The difficulty with measuring success and effectiveness, though, is recognising that not everything is quantifiable. You can count the number of children who go to school, but it is much more difficult to measure the difference education will make in their lives, and the life of their community. Indeed, if we were only to focus our efforts on projects which would produce immediately quantifiable outcomes, would it not be the case that we would restrict ourselves to never being ambitious, not looking past the first few years? In the words of Andrew Natsios, former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, “Those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.”

In this way, being a small charity can have its benefits: it would be absurd for us to make grandiose claims to be ending poverty. We have to admit that whilst our work may definitively improve the lives of the people we work with, it can only ever work towards ending some specific conditions of poverty. We play a small part in the grand scheme, which has as much to do with the complexities of power, money and politics as it does to global goodwill. Nevertheless, it is only with lots of us playing our ‘small parts’, and continuing to do so in a sustained manner, that the hope of one day reducing poverty to almost none may be reached.