March 11, 2021
SUMMARY
Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards Goals
This webinar explored how the evaluation frameworks that we use to assess progress needs to be informed by understandings of historical outcome trajectories and how progress and performance needs to accommodate the realities of multiple dimensions of contexts. The relevance of these ideas to measuring progress on the SDGs and the challenges of incorporating multidimensional contexts in measuring improvement over time were explored. We also anticipated learning opportunities in this workshop to understand what works through comparisons of outcome trajectories across different contexts.
Questions addressed in this workshop included:
- How do we promote an understanding of historical context and multiple disadvantages in an understanding of change processes, both at the national and community levels?
- What incentives need to be in place to make a difference on the difficult-to-move problems?
The exciting slate of speakers included:
Michael Woolcock, Lead Social Scientist, World Bank and Harvard University
Sandra Albert, Director, Indian Institute of Public Health in Shillong, India
Boru Douthwaite, Independent Evaluator and Founder, Selkie Consulting in Ireland
Shubham Gupta, Research Manager at Sambodhi, India.
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.
- Insights from webinar two “Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards Goals”
TECCHI’s webinar, “Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards Goals”, gave rise to a lot of discussion on the topic of timelines and trajectories for understanding programs and their impacts. Below is a table of some insightful comments from different webinar participants as they engaged with the ideas being presented. “ex-post we find things that ‘fail’… Read more: Insights from webinar two “Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards Goals” - Summary of Presentations | Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards GoalsMichael Woolcock Understanding Trajectories Change is rarely linear and can take a long time Example – Pace of Change for 5 different social events/processes over last 250 years: In case of interracial marriage, we see that change took forever (nearly 200 years). But even in examples like same-sex marriage that seem to have had a… Read more: Summary of Presentations | Contexts, Trajectories, and Assessing Progress Towards Goals
