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Why Beneficiary Assessment (BA) and its Principles
Beneficiary Assessment is about getting people's own perspectives on development results in a fair way and to use the findings to adapt and steer our (Swiss funded, donor) contribution to development processes. It should help us get a better idea of how a project has contributed to its original goals, but it goes beyond this as it gives the range of development actors (donors, implementers, local stakeholders) greater
insight into community perspectives on a project's effectiveness and provides a basis for meaningful response to people's self-expressed needs.
For the SDC, the BA is embedded in our results-based management thinking and is one source of information to get insight at the outcome level. It allows verifying the impact hypothesis and checking if the poverty reduction effect implicitly included in a systemic approach is taking place or not.
A BA also serves to bring concerned communities closer to a project: not only are members of communities themselves involved in conducting BA field research, but the community members whose opinions are sought also develop a better idea of what a project is trying to achieve and who is involved in trying to make it happen.
BA Principles
BA
is driven by a core set of principles which are designed to ensure that
it reaches the goals of revealing local perspectives on development
interventions and providing clear indications of how development actors
can make meaningful adjustments to their work. These principles are:
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Participation and ownership – A crucial
aspect of the BA approach is that it creates space for participation by
the involved stakeholders, in the design, implementation and
interpretation of results. This goes hand-in-hand with a stronger sense
of ownership in the process and results.
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Inclusion – A BA is aimed at gathering a
full range of perspectives of those affected by a project, so it must
be designed in an inclusive way, especially for poor and marginalised
groups, whose voices are often excluded from mainstream development
initiatives.
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Representativeness – The process needs
to ensure that sampling methods result in coverage of local populations
that gives an accurate picture of the project landscape and the people
within it.
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Differentiation – Another important
element of the BA approach is the clear surfacing of different
perspectives (through sex disaggregation, disaggregation based on social
group).
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Self critical quality of analysis – No
assessment is unbiased, including a BA. However, conscious effort to
explore the implications of the perspectives of various participants
(both those being assessed and those doing the assessment), as well as
critical reflection on the methodological approach itself, can
strengthen BA results.
- Responsiveness – A
distinguishing and essential principle of a BA is the orientation to
using the results to inform future action. If implementer and donors are
not prepared to (possibly substantially) adjust what they are doing in
response to a BA, the exercise should not be conducted at all.
