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.