Evaluation Mechanisms

As a self-sustainability strategy, several development initiatives and projects design and implement evaluation mechanisms to review their results and adapt and improve their processes.

Evaluation mechanisms are spaces, instruments or dynamics that can be deployed at different moments in the course of a project to better understand what is happening at any given time, what obstacles have come up and whether objectives are being met. Some initiatives also evaluate how well they are doing in terms of self-sustainability, i.e. how relevant they are to the lives of the different people they impact, how comprehensive their proposed solutions are, how equitable they are in terms of decision-making and representation of different interests, how efficiently their resources are managed and how much dependence there is on external support. In other words, different projects use evaluations to identify obstacles and opportunities to adapt and –if necessary– course-correct their social programs, collaborations, management of funds, etc.

To these ends, many initiatives seek feedback, i.e. the evaluation of their users, beneficiaries, collaborators, or other people. Depending on the case, projects encourage this feedback by organizing meetings with beneficiaries, collaborators, donors or among the different working groups within the initiative. Others, such as projects that offer services, create rating systems on their Internet platforms to receive feedback from users. Still others open spaces up or create instruments to regularly evaluate the project itself and any new ideas, such as pilot projects, rotating administrations, periodic meetings, work teams that supervise the functioning of the initiative, audits, systems such as the PMES, annual reports in which the different areas of the project are held accountable, etc.