Evaluation of interventions

This section aims to provide an introduction to the issue of evaluation; irrespective of your profession and where you work it is essential that you continuously evaluate whatever you do. In some aspects, evaluation is not optional and indeed may be a mandatory requirement. At the  end of the section, you should be able to:

• understand how to apply a simple evaluation framework to any project or intervention
• know how to identify develop indicators that allow you to demonstrate the results of the project
• be able to identify 'successes' and 'lessons learned' for future projects.

The Lancet editorial Evaluation: the top priority for global health states: "Evaluation must now become the top priority in global health. Currently, it is only an afterthought. A massive scale-up in global health investments during the past decade has not been matched by an equal commitment to evaluation. This complacency is damaging the entire global health movement. Without proper monitoring and accountability, countries and donors--and taxpayers--have no idea whether or how their investments are working."

Evaluation can be defined both as a means of assessing performance and to identify alternative ways to deliver: as example the new Canadian Federal Evaluation Policy developed by the Treasury Board of Canada defines evaluation as "the systematic collection and analysis of evidence on the outcomes of programs to make judgments about their relevance, performance and alternative ways to deliver them or to achieve the same results.”

As you explore the resources below, consider this case scenario:

Imagine that you're a member of a project team who have been commissioned by your Ministry of Health to develop a project to reduce the impact of one major disease on your population. The Ministry is very keen to see the impact of their investment, and so you've been tasked with planning the evaluation of the project, to demonstrate your impact and learn lessons for the next project cycle. Remember that even though the evaluation takes place at the end of the project, you have to think about it from the beginning so that you can collect baseline data, monitoring data throughout the programme, and final data at the end so that you can show an impact - if you only think about evaluation at the end, then you won't necessarily have the baseline data so you won't know if you've had an impact.