Evaluation & Impact Assessment

Background

In a world where relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impacts and sustainability have become paramount for stakeholders in the development sector, how do you turn obstacles into opportunities? At ASK T&L we focus on high-quality evaluations & impact assessments for long-term impacts to build robust strategies and actionable agendas.

Our technical expertise in Evaluation & Impact Assessment helps clients strengthen and sustain varied projects. Evaluations cut across regions, communities, stakeholders and issues, to go beyond the usual. Centric to these, are the twin goals of value creation and impact. Evaluations & Impact Assessments also entail critical aspects of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability. With consistent high standards of evaluations & impact assessments, our penultimate goal is to bring sustainable social change.

Evaluation is a core competency of ASK T & L and the aim is to draw learning, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses, and to help and support organizations to develop, change, modify and strengthen their strategies, approaches, methodologies, nature of interventions, staffing & mechanisms. Over the years professional and quality evaluations have gained emergent prominence in the development sector by both, the donor agencies and project implementing organizations.

ASK T & L believes in fostering an environment of enhanced ownership among stakeholders and the community, and carries this mandate to its evaluations & impact assessments, undertaken over an array of social issues. Over the years ASK T & L has developed an expertise in this area, and an in-depth understanding of varied subject matter domains and is continuously facilitating an informed, participatory, comprehensive, and sustainable process of tapping results for social change.

What We Do: Services of ASK T & L

Use-focused Evaluations

Use Focused Evaluations are considered a major component of any kind of development program today. The factors that drives use focused evaluations include enabling organizations to grow from reflecting on and analyzing their interventions and functioning, facilitating efficiency & accountability in the development sector, and building knowledge for wider application. ASK T & L conducts Mid-Term and End-Term Evaluations of a designated programme/ project. An important focus of all ASK T & L evaluations is to ensure that the findings and recommendations are utilized to the maximum extent possible for increasing the relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impacts & sustainability of the project or program being evaluated and improve the quality of implementation. It also helps in strengthening the Project Management System, including Planning-Monitoring-Evaluation & Learning (PMEL) systems of the organization. Using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies (Structured and semi-structured interviews, key informant interviews, review of records & documents, different PRA methods, Observations & physical verifications and Most Significant Change method etc), this process of evaluation also helps organizations in identifying gap in the capacities of the organization and thereby the need to further build their capacity.“Use focused” evaluations encourage and facilitate the stakeholders to make decisions and plans of actions rather than ending with a set of recommendations only. Since the process is more engaging from the beginning, the inclination of the organizations is towards clear decision making at the end of the evaluation. ASK believes in and practices “Realistic” Evaluations wherein we look into not only the Outcome Patterns but the Context and Mechanism, elaborating on what worked, for whom and under what circumstances.

Impact Assessments

ASK T & L undertakes impact assessments to analyze and present findings on the “impacts” on the lives of the target groups / communities due to the implementation of a development programme, over a period of time. Impact assessments concentrate on direct impacts on beneficiary communities and subsequent socio-economic changes that the beneficiaries have been able to percolate through multiple levels of the society at large. Findings of impact assessments are useful in highlighting best practices and right approaches of development work that have a direct bearing on development of long term plans and programmes. ASK also helps to draw learning from the impact assessments regarding the underlying factors / reasons because of which the impacts could be achieved or not achieved and thus facilitates the actors in development sector to replicate the best practices or to modify strategies, as required.

Organisation Assessment

ASK undertakes a comprehensive assessment of all aspects of an organization to help them to take critical decisions for the future organizational growth and development. Organizational assessment comprises an in-depth analysis of an organization’s internal governance, management systems, programmes, policies, and overall capacities, to provide recommendations for better organizational strategies and synergy, for increasing the overall organizational relevance and effectiveness. In this exercise, we assist in determining the overall health of an organization and not just a particular project or program that it may be implementing. The end result leads to the development of a more systematic, relevant, effective, efficient & sustainable organization.

Pre-funding Appraisal

Pre-Funding Appraisal is carried out on the request of donor organizations and/or corporate for NGOs that they deem suitable for implementation of programmes, projects, and CSR initiatives. The appraisal is carried out to secure that the NGO concerned has updated policies, procedures, management systems and capacities for programme execution, as well as to identify areas where further capacity building may be required, and to strengthen NGO performance, if required, through a process of Organization Development. An in-depth & overall assessment is carried out to identify the current status / capacity & future needs.

Monitoring

A monitoring exercise includes the periodic assessment of the level of implementation of defined activities and attainment of corresponding outputs / results for an ongoing project or programme. It critically looks into the processes for implementation - looks into minute activities and accomplishments to generate a detailed assessment of progress made. Monitoring results are effective in ensuring that projects steer on track and help highlight internal issues and external challenges that may affect project performance, for developing remedial measures and timely implementing the same.

Our Approach

Participatory

We adopt a Participatory Approach to ensure perspectives and outcomes are unbiased, independent and effective

Empathetic yet Objective

Our experience affirms the fact that objectivity combined with an empathetic outlook towards an Implementing Organisation, helps tackle diverse issues and challenges

Facilitative

We view evaluations as a solution-finding, enabling process that creates a sense of ownership among stakeholders, instead of a fault-finding exercise

Community-centric

To maximise impact, our interventions are designed on contextual realities and needs of the community

“It is always a wonderful experience to work with ASK T&L team. They have a good understanding of the context and the sector as a whole. Time management is the key in conducting evaluations and reviews. I must appreciate the team for delivering quality reports on time.”

Ms. Itishree Sahoo, Manager-PQ&MEL, OXFAM India New Delhi, India

“ASK India facilitated a "Theory of Change" workshop for "Transformation through Empowerment & Organization (TEO)" program of WACT. We spent a lot of time in reflection, critically looking at different processes and system and planning for the next 5 years. The workshop was very useful. The facilitation process used by ASK helped us to develop a realistic and relevant project plan of the TEO project for the next five years.ASK staff responded promptly to our request for their service. The workshop resource person Mr. Manus also visited our network office in Kathmandu and organized a brief orientation program on Theory of Change upon our request. We received quality report in time and out feedback were well addressed.”

Ajay Anand Sharma Director Welfare Association for Children Tikapur (WACT) Nepal

“SCRIA experienced very smooth process since the first day of establishing contact till the submission of the final report, with the evaluation team of ASK T&L under the leadership of Mr. Manas Bhattacharya, for carrying out independent evaluation of the Program funded by MISEREOR – KZE , Germany. SCRIA also acknowledged the competency of ASK T&L in carrying out independent evaluation through the participatory processes and especially involving the outreach people.SCRIA further like to put on record that the evaluation team strictly adhered the time line set for completing the evaluation processes and at the same time maintaining all agreed standards.”

Mr. Sunder Lal Executive Director SCRIA

“TEAR Australia and our partner WACT in Nepal commissioned ASK T&L to help develop a theory of change for WACT's self-help group project and to assist in coming up with an improved monitoring system for the project.We found Manas from ASK T&L responsive and great to deal with. The result is a good monitoring system that we think WACT will be able to build on and use to both improve their project and show its value.”

Mr. Paul Hansen International Program Officer TEAR Australia Australia

“TEAR has been happy with the services provided by ASK T&L. We have had consistently positive feedback from our partners about evaluation process , which has been highly participatory, as well as about the respectful way in which ASK have related with both staff and communities. Evaluation reports have been timely, analytical and with targeted, practical recommendations that partners have used to shape future work. ASK T&L does well in taking a strengths based approach that affirms while also clearly laying out areas that need improvement.”

Ms. K Rae South Asia Regional Team Leader TEAR Australia Australia

Our Clients

Recent Assignments

title	state	country	year
Evaluation of a project “Trapped in cotton: Reduce and prevent at-risk children from labour in cotton farms of Madhya Pradesh state, India”	Madhya Pradesh	India	2018
Evaluation of a Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) project for people with disability	Jharkhand	India	2018
Evaluation of “Resilience Communities to Trafficking” project	Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand	India	2018
Evaluation of the “Family Centric Development Initiative”	Uttar Pradesh	India	2018
Participatory Evaluation for Two Integrated Community Development Projects (ICDP)		Bangladesh	2017
Evaluation of Dabur India’s CSR Project Sundesh to Construct Toilets in Rural Households	Uttar Pradesh	India	2017
SB Rural Integrated Project		Bangladesh	2016
Comprehensive Community Development Project		Bangladesh	2016
Community Based Child Care Project	Odisha	India	2016
Strengthening Community Based Organizations for Pro-Poor Democracy Governance (SCOPE) Project		Bangladesh	2016
Improving Food Security Governance in South & South East Asia through strengthened participation of organizations of marginalized farmers	Delhi	India	2016
Right to Food Project in India and Nepal	Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan	India	2016
Strengthening Grassroots Governance in Rural Kutch District Project	Gujarat	India	2016
Building Resilience and Increased Economic Leadership of Small Holders Specifically Women Farmers in India	Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand	India	2016
Sarai Tareen: Consolidation Phase	Uttar Pradesh	India	2016
Strengthening Education and Livelihood for Weaving Community (Barabanki)- Consolidation Phase	Uttar Pradesh	India	2016
Strengthening Community Action for Better Health and Nutrition (SCAN) Project	Odisha	India	2016
Green Federalism Project to Enhance Urban Environmental Governance through Participatory Budgeting in Pune	Maharashtra	India	2016
	West Bengal	India	2017
Diocesan Education Project for Disadvantaged Children	Punjab	India	2017
Right to Universal, Inclusive and Quality Education Project	Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand	India	2017
SB Rural Integrated (Development) Projects (TRIP) & Urban Women’s & Children’s Project (UWCP)		Bangladesh	2017
Transformation through Empowerment and Organization Project		Nepal	2017