In the first of two blog posts for The Stone Family Foundation, Dispensers for Safe Water Director Arjun Pant reflects on key lessons learned as the program rapidly scaled its operations.
Evidence Action Beta is looking for ambitious researchers whose work or insights could benefit millions of people living in poverty, and who want to participate in seeing their research turned into viable, scaled up programs.
Have you done work that has similar potential? Read on!
At Evidence Action, we do not typically measure final impacts when we implement a program at scale. By “impacts” we mean the metric of ultimate interest - the real reason we are doing what we are doing. We don’t measure whether households with Dispensers have less diarrhea or child mortality. We don’t measure whether children that get dewormed attend school more or have better cognitive scores. We measure whether people use chlorine and whether worm infection levels fall.
Measuring “means” rather than “ends” could be a controversial stance in an NGO community where M&E teams pride themselves in always measuring ‘impact.’
We think we are doing the right thing. Here’s why.