Participatory Impact Assessment - Capacity4Dev

What is Participatory Impact Assessment?
Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) is an extension of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and
involves the adaptation of participatory tools combined with more conventional statistical
approaches specifically to measure the impact of humanitarian assistance and development
projects on people’s lives. The approach consists of a flexible methodology that can be adapted to
local conditions. The approach acknowledges local people, or project clients as experts by
emphasizing the involvement of project participants and community members in assessing project
impact – and by recognizing that ‘local people are capable of identifying and measuring their own
indicators of change’ (Catley, 1999).
All the definitions of impact in either the development or humanitarian assistance field involve the
concept of change, which can be positive or negative.
Consistent with this, a project level PIA tries to answer the following three key questions (Watson,
2008):
1. Whatchangeshavetherebeeninthecommunitysincethestartoftheproject?
2. Whichofthesechangesareattributabletotheproject?
3. Whatdifferencehavethesechangesmadetopeople’slives?
In contrast to many traditional project M&E approaches, PIA aims to measure the real impact of a
project on the lives of the project participants. Most evaluations tend to focus on measuring aspects
of project implementation, such as the delivery of inputs and services, the construction of project
infrastructure, the number of trainings carried out or the number of people trained. PIA tries to go a
step further by investigating if and to what extent these project activities actually benefited the
intended recipients, and if these benefits can be attributed to the project activities.
The use of participatory methods in PIA allows impact to be measured against qualitative
indicators, such as changes in dignity, status, and well being, or changes in the level of community
participation throughout the implementation of a given project. The use of participatory ranking
and scoring methods enables these types of qualitative indicators, often based on opinions or
perceptions to be presented numerically. Comparative scoring and ranking methods can be used in
PIA to assess project attribution, by comparing both the project and non-project factors that
contributed to any assessed change. This is particularly useful where the use of a control group is
unethical or impractical, which is often the case in the context of humanitarian assistance projects.
Comparative scoring methods used in PIA can also be used to develop a retrospective baseline
against which to measure impact. Again the lack of baseline data is a common feature of
humanitarian assistance projects, particularly those being implemented in an emergency setting.
The PIA approach emphasizes the standardization and repetition of participatory methods, helping
to improve the reliability of the information, but ideally leaving enough scope for the open-ended
and flexible inquiry typical of PRA. In this respect PIA tries to find a balance between systematic
methods and the richness of qualitative inquiry.
In summary, a systematic, well designed PIA can assist communities and NGOs to measure impact
using their own indicators and their own methods. It can also overcome the weaknesses inherent in
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