Rationale

The way that CG Centers design, implement and assess research outcomes has changed dramatically in recent decades. These changes have significant implications for impact assessment. Impact-assessment practitioners must now document a much broader range of project impacts, especially in the areas of poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability. In addition, the number of stakeholders in impact assessment has grown dramatically and now includes Center management, researchers, donors, partner institutions, beneficiaries, and civil organizations-different stakeholders require different types of information, in different formats. Internal rates of return and cost-benefit analyses may have been sufficient for the accountability functions of impact assessment, but they do not satisfy those interested in knowing how, and why, a project affects people's lives.

In June 2003, participants at a stakeholder meeting organized by the CGIAR Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (held at CIAT Headquarters in Cali, Colombia) recommended that a workshop should be organized in 2005 "to build capacity in impact assessment and also to foster mutual learning among the impact-assessment practitioners within the CGIAR, by allowing participants to present on their experiences and empirical results, as well as to bring outside experts to present on topics of mutual interest."

Objective

The workshop will address difficult-to-approach issues in impact assessment, such as: measurement of empowerment; project impact on women that goes beyond head-counting; use of information from stakeholder assessment in project evaluation; selection of a manageable set of local and global poverty indicators; cost structure of participatory research; and, a framework for measuring institutional learning. These topics are relevant for impact assessment of participatory research projects, as well as for use as participatory evaluation methods in project impact assessment in general.

Output and Dissemination

Edited proceedings of the workshop will be published, including all of the papers presented. If there is sufficient interest from the participants, we will explore opportunities to publish some of the papers in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Topics covered

Tentative topics include the following.

· Measuring empowerment: Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make effective choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. Central to this process are actions that build both individual and collective skills. How do we measure the change in skills? What other indicators of empowerment are there?
· Beyond head-counting: What are meaningful ways of assessing project impact on women-other than disaggregating participants by gender?
· Using information from stakeholder assessment: Because participatory approaches are very much action-oriented, stakeholders themselves are responsible for collecting and analyzing the information, and for generating recommendations for change. How can the outside evaluator facilitate and support this process, and use the information to assess project impact?
· Local and global poverty indicators: What constitutes a meaningful and manageable set of indicators for measuring project impact on poverty? What useful methods are available for collecting poor people's views regarding their own analysis of poverty and the survival strategies that they use?
· Costs of participatory research: Research budgets are often fixed and the choice of research method (participatory or non-participatory) changes the allocation of budget, but not necessarily the magnitude of the overall budget-unless participatory research is conducted as an additional, add-on activity. How can we compare the cost structures of participatory and non-participatory research? Examples of measuring the research costs borne by participants.
· From assessment to learning: It is important that those involved in research and development projects learn from the experience and adapt their priorities and practices in order to continuously improve their contribution to the ongoing process of innovation. What framework should be used for assessing the extent to which research and development organizations have been able to learn and change because of their experiences? Some examples of successful sustainable linkage between project's monitoring and evaluation (M&E) process and impact assessment.

Participants

The number of workshop participants is limited to 30. About half of the presenter-participants will be selected from the CGIAR and their collaborating institutions, and half of the participants will be invited as resource persons from various institutions.