Our Control of Development Variables Undermines Our Ability to Learn
There’s been a lot of feedback on the last two articles on ‘breathing space’ in development programming. One particular question focused on why the development system is so keen to avoid such ‘space’ and how we can rationalize not undertaking impact studies a few years after a project has been completed. The first thing that comes to mind is that we could argue that paying for a study is impossible since we can’t hold donor funding from the project for three or five years after completion. But that’s kind of a cop-out - if we budgeted differently organizationally, we wouldn’t need to worry about using donor project funds for impact studies. But I digress.