Participatory Impact Assessment - Capacity4Dev

One way of collecting community indicators of impact is simply to ask project participants what
changes in their lives they expect to occur as a direct result of the project. Alternatively, in cases
where the project has already been implemented you can ask what changes have already occurred.
This should be done separately for each project activity that you plan to asses. If the project has a
technical focus, for example natural resource management, the provision of agricultural inputs or
livestock, ask the participants how they benefit from the ownership or use of the resources in
question. Alternatively if the project focuses on training or skill transfers, ask how the training or
improved skills will benefit them. These benefits are impact indicators.
FIGURE:3.1LIVESTOCKBENEFITSINDICATORS
Example: Benefits derived from Livestock, Dinka Rek Communities
Community Animal Health Project, Tonj County Southern Sudan 1999
Method: standardized
proportional piling with 10
community groups
Some of these benefits
can be used as impact
monitoring indicators;
For example an
increase in milk
production,
consumption, or an
increase in the number
of marriages may be
good indicators of
improved livestock
health that might be
attributed to the project
3%
10%
9%
3%
2% 1%
7%
25%
34%
6%
milk
meat
marriage
butter
compensation
manure
ploughing
sales/income
hides/skins
ceremonies
Source: Catley, 1999
One challenge that you may come across when collecting community indicators is that participants
will assume you automatically know what livelihoods benefits will be derived from project
activities or inputs. For example participants in a re-stocking intervention may tell you that they
now have more goats as a result of the project. An increase in livestock would be a good
community indicator of impact, however this alone doesn’t tell you how the goats will benefit that
person or their household. When collecting these kinds of indicators it is important to follow up
with additional questions. It may be that the actual benefit derived from the goats is an increase in
milk production which ‘we feed to our children’. From this you can deduce that increased milk
production, or increased household milk consumption are better indicators of impact than simply
an increase in the number of livestock assets 1 . These indicators can easily be represented
1 If the impact assessment takes place before the desired project impact is expected, you may have no choice but to use
proxy indicators such as an increase in the number of livestock. Although not ideal, at least if these have been
identified by project participants, they can to some extent be validated as community indicators.
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