Webinar 1 | Planning for Sustainability: Towards a Role for Evaluations and Measurement in Planning Exit Strategies

March 4, 2021

SUMMARY

Planning for Sustainability: Towards a Role for Evaluations and Measurement in Planning Exit Strategies.

For this webinar we were interested in exploring three critical questions:

1. Most theories of change are focused on immediate and intermediate impacts. How do we incorporate ideas of sustainable impacts into our theories of change?
2. What is the role for measurement, learning, and evaluation approaches in planning exit strategies for interventions?
3. How does one measure system capacities and system readiness to implement and sustain interventions?

Given the global scope of this topic, one of the features of this workshop was to seek ideas that inform a real-world sustainability challenge. The Evaluation Centre invited Sambodhi, a leading evaluation organization based in Delhi, India, to reflect on the utility of the ideas generated in planning an evaluative approach that addresses challenges of sustainability in their ongoing evaluations in India in maternal health and nutrition solutions.

The exciting slate of speakers included:

Shikha Rana, Research Manager from Sambodhi Research, India

Kylie Hutchinson, Evaluation Consultant at Community Solutions in Vancouver

Jindra Cekan, Founder of Valuing Voices, Prague

April Nakaima, Research Officer at the Evaluation Centre for Complex Health Interventions at the University of Toronto

We also were pleased to have Kultar Singh from Sambodhi to provide his reflections as a discussant, and Ray Pawson, the developer of Realist Evaluation, join this workshop and the series as a discussant.

PRESENTATIONS

COMMENTS & SYNTHESIS

For each of the webinars, we synthesized the exchange of comments from the webinar chat and summarised the learnings from the presentations.

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  Post Webinar Reflections on Sustainability Evaluation
  by Amanda Pereira
  March 4, 2021
  What happens once a program comes to an end? How do program implementers help build a system’s capacity to sustain impacts? How do we measure sustained impacts and how do metrics change over time to respond to the evolving needs of communities? These were some of the questions that were raised by participants during TECCHI’s… Read more: Post Webinar Reflections on Sustainability Evaluation
• Summary of Presentations | Sustainability Evaluation Webinar
  by Rachael Gibson
  March 3, 2021
  March 4, 2021 Shikha Rana Example of Health System Evaluation of Uttar Pradesh Technical Support Unit Limitations of traditional health systems evaluation: Change/progress seen in terms of alleviating input constraints Linear frameworks Limited interconnectedness and interdependency across system blocks/pillars Doesn’t capture multi-dimensional and multi-level changes and impact Doesn’t fully incorporate constructs like: capacities, absorptive capacities,… Read more: Summary of Presentations | Sustainability Evaluation Webinar