Programmes are often designed without a full realization and articulation of their desired outcomes. In developing performance indicators to measure the success of a programme, it is far easier to focus on short-term performance measurement, which often seeks to answer questions around efficiency: “What did we do?” and slightly better, “Did we do it well?” and “What needs improvement?” To tell the full story about a programme success, we need to measure its effectiveness as well, and assess intended versus actual outcomes over a longer period of time. In this workshop, you will learn about performance measurement best practices and how to use strong performance indicators to show how the programme can actually make things better for the end-users. To do so, we need to borrow from the world of evaluation, to dig deeper into the data. The objective of an evaluation is to determine whether and to what degree a programme succeeded in making a better end-state, perhaps by measuring the impact of a programme on various kinds of clients or beneficiaries. Then an evaluation goes further to look for other, unanticipated impacts. “Effectiveness” is often the holy grail of evaluation. While you will learn about ways to measure efficiency and effectiveness in this workshop, there will also be an emphasis on a third E: equity. The equity lens is a way to explore social issues, such as those related to GBA Plus, environmental sustainability, and other issues of concern.

Pre-reading, research and group work are part of the workshop. Lively discussion will likely fall out of the readings and other tasks that you might need to undertake off-line, outside of the training sessions. You are encouraged to bring a performance measurement question or issue to discuss in a group setting.

At the end of the course, you will have the skills, methods and templates to measure the success of a policy or programme. Topics covered include:

• Overview of the world of programme design, performance measurement, and evaluation
• Best practices of performance measurement and evaluation
• A Structure for Change: Using a model based on Theory of Change and outcomes-chains to develop a soup to nuts framework for programme design through to evaluation
• Creating a logic model, with emphasis on the difference between outputs and outcomes, for both shorter and longer terms
• Identifying strong performance indicators
• Getting the data – quickly on quantitative and more thoroughly on qualitative analysis
• Design and delivery of interviews and surveys