Preface
In recent years, the devastating consequences of long term and violent conflicts across the globe have generated tremendous interest in the psychosocial effects of complex emergencies on children, families and communities. At the same time, as relief organizations have developed projects to address these critical issues, there have been relatively few resources available to these implementing agencies on how to measure the effectiveness of their work.
What concepts, methods and tools might be used to evaluate psychosocial projects implemented during crisis situations? How do we know if individuals and communities are benefiting over the short and long-term from projects designed to facilitate emotional healing, social reconciliation, and community building?
The development of outcome and impact measures for psychosocial projects in crisis situations presents a continual challenge for field practitioners. The various factors influencing child development and psychosocial well-being are difficult to isolate, define, and quantify. In addition, change takes time to evidence itself, a luxury in any emergency response project. As a result, too often project practitioners must take a leap of faith that their projects are having a measurable and positive effect on the lives of children, families, and communities. Without indicators, however, practitioners are left in the position of asserting that projects are “helpful” in broad and often unverified ways. There clearly exists a need to develop models of impact, share lessons learned, promote cross- fertilization of strategies, and to build effective intervention practices based on sound measures of project outcomes and impact.
To pursue this broad objective, Save the Children Federation, Inc. (Save the Children USA), with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, initiated a collaborative process among a number of academic institutions, donor organizations, and field-oriented non-governmental organizations that are operational in the broad area of psychosocial programming. Persons from these organizations with extensive experience in psychosocial programming participated in initial discussions regarding the focus of this document. A core committee of fifteen members was organized based on these initial discussions. The core committee has been responsible for the overall conceptualization and articulation of content area of this manual. In an effort to broaden the programmatic, cultural and geographic expertise of the core committee, several colleagues with extensive experience in psychosocial programming were asked to provide feedback at various points throughout the development of previous drafts of this document.
The manual should be considered a “working document.” We anticipate that, through dissemination of this document, colleagues, field-based managers, and coordinators of psychosocial projects can continue to provide critical review and further input across a variety of disciplines, cultural settings, and regional perspectives.
Children in Crisis: Good Practices in Evaluating Psychosocial Programming[1.1MB].