Participatory Impact Assessment - Capacity4Dev

If a food security project were to establish a community nutrition garden, you may want to measure
the impact of the project garden on household food security using a simple scoring exercise. This
could be done by asking project participants to identify all the food sources that contribute to the
household food basket. Using visual aids to represent each of the different food sources, you would
then ask the participants to distribute the counters amongst the different variables to illustrate the
relative proportion of household food derived from each food source.
FIGURE4.2:EXAMPLE–SCORINGOFFOODSOURCES
Cereal
Crops
••••••••••
••••••••••
••••••••••
Project
Garden
••••••••••
Livestock
••••••••••
•••
Poultry
Fishing
WildFoods
Purchased
FoodAid
•••••••
••••••••••
••••••••••
••••••••••
•••••••
•••
3%
17%
10%
10%
7%
13%
30%
10%
CerealCrops
ProjectGarden
Livestock
Poultry
Fishing
WildFoods
Purchased
FoodAid
The results from this simple hypothetical example indicate that ten percent of household food comes
from the community garden (figure 4.2). Assuming that this particular food source (community
garden) was introduced by the project it represents a new food source and the ten percent contribution
to the food basket represents an impact on household food security that can be directly attributed to the
project.
Note - although using a hundred counters makes it easier to automatically assign a percentage score to
the results of scoring exercises, it is not essential that you use this many, and often it is quicker to use
fewer counters when carrying out repetitive scoring exercises. As a general rule, if you are comparing
many indicators, you will need more counters, if you are only comparing two variables, ten counters
may be sufficient.
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