Continuing to Learn about Sustainability, Now more than ever
Since 2024, foreign aid has taken multiple shocks (post-Covid): wars, climate shocks, and a widespread retreat from foreign assistance, especially among OECD countries: “Official development assistance (ODA) by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and associates amounted to USD 174.3 billion in 2025, a 23.1% decrease over 2024. It is the largest annual contraction on record and a second consecutive year of decline, bringing ODA to where it stood at the start of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Notably, many of these cuts were bilateral donations, notably from the USA, Germany, France, Japan, and the UK. Least developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa. A striking statistic cited by the US Council on Foreign Relations was that by 2025, Americans collectively spent more on their Halloween candy ($3.9B) than their government did on life-saving humanitarian aid ($3.4B).” However, they excluded in-donor refugee costs, humanitarian aid and debt relief, and while USAID was dismantled in early 2025, a bit of health funding has been restored. Still, 72% of the UN’s funding needs are unmet, unparalleled, which includes 25 million fewer people received aid in 2025, such as those with rising needs in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, Haiti, Yemen, and Ukraine’s wars not to mention rising natural catastrophes from floods and fires raging currently in 2026’s El Niño.
In mid-2026, OXFAM reported that “aid’s crucial role in combating diseases like HIV-AIDS and malaria, the Institute of Global Health of Barcelona estimated that global aid cuts of such magnitude would kill hundreds of thousands of people in 2025 alone. If this trend continues, aid cuts could kill over 9 million people by 2030” while Rockefeller Foundation cites Lancet projections that “aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date.” (Oxfam pointedly notes that “top 0.1 percent richest people worldwide hide $2.84 trillion in tax havens. Even a small tax on that wealth would yield much more than the amount of aid cuts,” but political will is needed for that, in a world led by elites, thus unlikely.)
So this is bad, as according to a 2026 poll that found that 46% of African youth believed the “closure of USAID would have a damaging impact on their countries, with healthcare services and disease prevention seen as the areas most affected.” Yet a quarter of African youth, believed USAID cuts were positive,as they want their governments “to take agency and responsibility for their own reality” and stop being influenced by foreign powers. Further, “A lot of people find aid very demeaning…“they didn’t feel that the aid was being used for the right things and there is a sense of ‘We can do this for ourselves’.”
This gives us several learning opportunities, in addition to re-examining why the messages about the need for and effectiveness of aid were not heard.
1) We would ground-truth the modelling and confirm the projected negative effects as well as document the unintended positive effects of these aid cuts in terms of how communities coped This is because most sustained results documented by our SEIE (Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation) and other ex-post evaluation show that national uptake and continuation is key to results lasting as we documented in five cases in Part 1:What Happens After the Project Ends? driven by Country-national Ownership in Part 2.
2) We would also continue to evaluate the sustainability of results, as Japan’s JICA, which performs ex-post evaluations in addition to “terminal evaluations” and “post-project monitoring” several times post-closure for rich design learning. They have done 3,000 such evaluations and are a continued leader in this field, most recently highlighted in this recent annual report on lessons for Technical Cooperation, ODA Loans and Grant Aid, which showed they did 66 ex-post evaluations for Technical Cooperation, 24 for ODA Loans, and 26 for Grant Aid. Of the projects that do remain, the need is even more vital to show sustainability results to combat more aid cuts on the supposed lack of effective – and defensible- results.
3) What can be done immediately for all projects that are currently underway is to embed learning about projected sustainability by planning for it. This involves by using checklists from at least the mid-point onward that create the conditions for sustainability, as well as consider needed commitments to sustainability and revise implementation pre-closure. Authors from Central Asia and Asia share insights about the need for continued knowledge from such evaluations, below.
The blog posts above noting the need to embed resilience and institutional pathways during the crisis itself, as well as excellent pages from Muhammad Maksudul Hannan from Bangladesh noting the need to retain knowledge locally and how we should be measuring behavior change rather than trainings done, show how, overall, to do good monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). This continues to be true for the remaining 77% of aid programming that continues to assist ‘development’, as well as the many corporates launching projects in LDCs such as for community-level carbon credits which are equally in need of MEL.
A recent Better Evaluation post on whether evaluating sustainability in humanitarian contexts matters amid shrinking budgets and hyper-prioritization; “whether today’s investments yield benefits that endure and whether responses help build systems and capacities that can last.” Examples from Central Asia and Afghanistan show the need to localize evaluation to the context, but that it is still sorely needed, pre-exit and post to “provide evidence on humanitarian interventions’ lasting contributions.”
4) For those restructuring foreign aid (USA especially): The ex-post sustainability learning shows that when donors design and implementation by putting ownership in local communities from the start in true partnership, take sufficient time to implement (up to 10 years, not 1 or 2), put in feedback loops and act on their input by revising implementation to support capacities to maintain assets and pass on knowledge to non-participants, have sufficient resources generated to pay for ongoing costs and expand livelihoods in emerging ways to be resilient to new shocks (and opportunities!) in their ecological contexts, sustainability and greater resilience will follow.
Let me know your thoughts during this turbulent time…
The draconian cuts to USAID in February 2025 ($40 billion in currently allocated aid assistance, $63 billion in 2024, $71 billion in 2023, Pew) to 120 countries around the globe) are said to address waste and fraud and re-align priorities. Elon Musk of ‘DOGE‘ (government efficiency group tasked by US President Trump, without an approved remit or security clearances) called the Agency “a criminal organization. Time for it to die” (CBS) without citing proof. While aid is currently frozen under Secretary Rubio, the agency will likely be diminished to only humanitarian aid, leaving development programming shuttered. 10,000 USAID staff, thousands of US-funded contractors, and hundreds of thousands of INGO and NGO national staff and participants and ‘beneficiaries’ and partner organizations worldwide are abruptly without funding, inputs (medicines, seeds, research, scholarships, collaborations, etc) or information about timelines or recourse. While judges rule, suffering has already commenced, value chains have been broken, with aid rotting in warehouses, causing losses to donors (un-paid US farmers or contracted firms) and recipients.
FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC LOSSES
From an ex-post sustainability view, what is difficult is that such sudden closures mean that not only this year’s already approved funding has been frozen, but all projects and programs that were implemented over a typical 1-5 years could not close properly and that received new funding this cycle. This means projects that began from 2019-2025 have not had time to finish implementing much less prepare for exit, nor learn or share lessons about what worked, what did not, and what the world can learn from such implementation. For instance, in an agriculture project, farmers are trained in year 1 of a 5 year project, inputs are given in year 2, with further inputs, farming practices and trainings and linkages with Ministry of agriculture are fine-tuned (e.g. in response to climatic shocks or changes in economic systems) in years 3 and 4, pre-closure in year 5. Some projects such as those in climate funds install the infrastructure by the end of the project, so any earlier closure is even more catastrophically unfinished. So too are capacity development and ongoing health and education and humanitarian help. While many of this current allocation cycle are likely to be new, many can be continuations of older projects. Premature exit dooms most projects that haven’t finished implementing fully or that needed extended funding to complete. As we shared in our nine checklists (see Capacities book chapter) drawing on best practices from sustained exit and ex-post research, sustainability pre-closure takes time. This time is to foster sustained handover to other partners,or finding alternate resources, including making sure capacities will continue to be passed on. Without time to do this plus evaluations and administrative close-out, far more than ‘just’ current billions allocated by Congress for current funding for programming is at stake; investments over the last 5+ years are also at stake. Thus, abrupt closeout means losing Years of funded implementation benefits and lessons.
From 2018-2022 (the most recent, similar timeframe of data from the OECD), a total of 841 trillion in official Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) has been disbursed, with the US government’s share of ODA over those years was 51 billion, of which only US “Core support to NGOs, other private bodies, PPPs & research institutes” constituted ‘only‘ 935 million. It is, therefore, unsurprising the effect that withdrawing such amounts of foreign aid plays in the poorest recipient countries (CGD):
“Eight low-income countries and eight lower-middle-income countries face losing over a fifth of the total foreign assistance they receive (South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia). For these 8 countries: The economies of these eight low-income countries are so small that aid makes up an average of 11 percent of their total income (based on available GNI data for seven countries). With USAID providing 30 percent of that support, the freeze could create a shortfall equivalent to over 3 percent of GNI—a potentially major economic shock for countries that are home to 410 million people.”
The economies of these eight low-income countries are so small that aid makes up an average of 11 percent of their total income (based on available GNI data for seven countries). With USAID providing 30 percent of that support, the freeze could create a shortfall equivalent to over 3 percent of GNI—a potentially major economic shock for countries that are home to 410 million people.
A further eight [countries] rely on USAID for a fifth of their support: Haiti, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Honduras, Angola, Jordan, and Eswatini.
If USAID’s freeze went on for a year it would leave twenty-three economies facing at least a 1 percent economic shock (sixteen LICs and seven LMICs). Eight of these would face [a 3-9] percent blow: South Sudan (9 percent), Somalia (9 percent), Afghanistan (7 percent), Liberia (4 percent), Syria (5 percent), the Central African Republic (4 percent), Yemen (4 percent), and Micronesia (3 percent).”
These ‘hits’ to the economic system of these countries will cause even more widespread suffering than ‘just’ those directly affected such as HIV+ babies, input-deprived farmers, students, and many more. Further other donors are also cutting budgets, e.g. the Netherlands and now Denmark, following the UK several years ago.
LEARNING LOSSES
Also, information, the vast troves of 60+ years of development experience housed in the USAID DEClearninghouse has disappeared as well. This included over 3 million mentions of evaluation, including over 50 ex-post studies and evaluations, and hundreds of millions of pages of research and programming, projects, and studies across economic development, health, refugees, climate, education, orphans and vulnerable children, democracy, etc. We can now only access a very partial set of archived documents until 2021. Many of us researchers who used USAID’s documents are having to go back to the archives and recover what we can – while it still exists. The loss of learning for researchers is exacerbated by losses of complementary global health data cand climate data (e.g. avian flu, ebola and NOAA climate models no longer funded to share data, etc). How can aid be effective without learning from the past for the future. Given we are approaching climate tipping points, we cannot afford to lose resources, data or focus. Further, we are losing all the institutional and technical knowledge of the staff and contractors being let go.
NEXT?
Other than Reinstatement, it is time for their own governments, wealthy country nationals, other countries, multilaterals, philanthropic foundations, and private donors, large and small, need to step back in (as during the first Trump administration to fill shortfalls). Droves of private ‘impact’ investors would be welcomed with open arms to finally engage in these countries to fill the gap. We can see that conserving democracy and helping the poorest is no longer the governments’ problem around the world. It is in our hands to save it. We can also make sustainable development better: fostering accountability from us to our development partners.
But this time it needs to be in greater collaboration with country national and civic leaders to invest sustainably in sectors and industries they believe have the greatest unmet needs, combined with the greatest prospects of locally-driven development and sustainability. This includes addressing power inbalances, long-term resources, partnerships, andcapacities and fostering ownership from the onset and prevent future governments globally from shutting down their assistance without referendums.
How will we be new this New Year? It may seem funny as an ex-post sustainability evaluator to write about the future rather than the past :). But ex-post learning is learning from past successes or failures for future improvements. Such learning is part of “longtermism”where “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. It’s about taking the sheer scale of the future seriously, and how high the stakes might be in shaping it” (which for many of us means learning from the past to do better in the future). “It means thinking about the challenges we might face in our lifetimes that could impact civilisation’s whole trajectory, and taking action to benefit not just the present generation, but all generations to come…. Many social movements have fought for greater recognition for disempowered members of society. Advocates of longtermism want to extend this recognition to future people, too.”
Taking the longer view also means taking a global view and continuing to address the disparities that our economic system generates, and seems to be generating more destructively. As Oxfam’s excellent Inequality annual reporttells us, “since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes. During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer.” At the same time, the UN cites a World Bank estimate that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change”. Given the EU is 450 million and US is 330 million, imagine 20-30% of our populations falling into poverty due to changes we can make – but did not – in addressing inequality and a sustainable, liveable planet. I don’t know what your long-term vision for y/our world is, but I’m quite sure adding to global poverty is not on the list.
What can we do anew?
Where life is stable: Focus on our collective communities and our planet and helping others: the NYTimes on making new year’s resolutions for collective happiness. I would add, we need to make choices from a planetary perspective – I got a plug-in electric hybrid Toyota CHR this year so I would pollute less and am a vegetarian (aspiring vegan) to decrease my tiny share of the 30% of emissions due to our food systems. Am reading the book The Logic of Sufficiency and preparing to read Less is More will help us consume less, as we need less. Remember, as we in the Global North consume less, the Global South is likely to suffer less, as they have caused so little of today’s climate crisis.Generation Climate Europe states: “In 2019, the top 10% of global emitters (771 million individuals) were responsible for about 48% of global CO2 emissions, while the bottom 50% (3.8 billion individuals) were responsible for almost 12% of all emissions.” This is a staggering statistic we all need to act to reverse.
Take a longer view, doing ex-post evaluations, for sectors such as agriculture, even for disasters: 3ie admitted that only 4% of all impact evaluations include long-term learning about food systems interventions evaluating long-term outcomes (including climate change) and a collection of sustainability learning byIDEV’s Sustainability Matters asks us to take a holistic approach, covering the full spectrum of environmental, social and economic sustainability. Both sources tell us we need to do more evaluation and learning over the longer-term as climate shocks increase. Disaster Science also discusses the need for a longer-term view – this means putting out fires but thinking longer-term (see longtermism above :)) about how we can make our interventions more sustained. We can ‘bake-in’ or ‘hardwire” sustainability as we shared here in a VV blog about health projects. Also this includes evaluating climate adaptation ex-post as the Adaptation Fund has shared (and I spoke at the European Evaluation Society Conference) positive and negative lessons from our ex-post learning from past design/ implementation for future sustainability. Proud that the Fund has created the Adaptation Fund’s toolkit, and in 2025, look for more ex-post learning from the Climate Investment Funds and other clients!
EES Conference presentation – Rimini in 2024 (photo by the Vladislav Arnaoudov)
Use our money to do more measurable good: pushing the private sector for more equitable investments given public funds to do good are so stretched: Dr G. Marcellenotes that we need transformative sustainable finance (which is environmental, social, and governance (ESG)) to address inequalities and address climate change harm being done. As an evaluator, we need to measure real impactas the Adaptation and Resilience Investors’ Cooperative does or the Global Impact Investor Network (GIIN) which has set up benchmarks in Agriculture, Forestry, Energy, and Finance. And we so need mandatory, transparent and comprehensive reportingwhich fosters trust, not greenwashing or wishful thinking. Also considerwhat banks you are funding, some profit from more fossil fuels.
Appreciate and learn from what works and do more of it, patiently, especially at the community level! This BBC article celebrates 5 successes against biodiveristy loss. This Barbados conference“Sustainable Energy for Equity, Security and Prosperity” I will attend in 2025 (!) may also cover the exciting new debt for climate resilience dealwhich is the world’s first! IDEVreminds us conservation is most powreful at the community level, but we must learn from monitoring data, locally. IFAD reminds us sustained development takes time and resources and patience.
As a global development industry, we have almost no evidence of how (un)sustained the outcomes or impacts of 99% of our projects because we have never returned to evaluate them. But from early indications based on the ex-posts, we have evaluated 2-20 years after donor departure it is, learning from what was and was not sustained is vital before replication and assuming sustainability. Most results taper off quite quickly, showing 20-80% decreases as early as two years post-closure and donor exit. A few cases of good news also appear, but more trajectories falter and fail than rise or remain. Sustainability, then, is not a yes-no answer, but a how much, yet too few ask… hence if they were, resilient, they are less so, or even not at all, now.
At Valuing Voices we focus on the sustainability of projects after external support ends. Still, those projects are also dependent on the viability of the environment in which they are based. As Andy Rowe, an evaluator on the GEF’s Adaptation Fund board, noted at IDEAS’ Conference in Prague late 2019 [1], a need for sustainability-ready evaluation to help us know how viable the resources are on which so many of our projects rest [2]. He states, “the evaluation we have today treats human and natural systems as unconnected and rarely considers the natural system”. He goes on to differentiate between biotic natural capital (air, water, plants, and trees) and abiotic natural capital sources (fossil fuels, minerals, and metals, wind, and solar).
How much are projects designed assuming those resources are and will remain plentiful? How often do we evaluate how much our projects drain or rely on these environmental elements? Many projects are required to do environmental compliance and safeguarding against damage at project onset [3]. Others, such as agriculture and natural resource management or water/ sanitation, often focus on improving the environment on which those activities rely, e.g., improving soil or terrain (e.g., terraces, zais), planting seedlings, and improving access to potable water for humans and animals. Still, many projects ‘assume’ inputs like rainfall, tree cover, solar power, or do not consider the sustainability of natural resources for the communities in which they intervene. Examples are both those that rely on natural systems as well as those supposedly beyond them, e.g., enterprise development, education, safety nets, etc. Yet many enterprises, schools, safety nets do rely on a. viable environment in which their participants trade, learn, and live, and all are subject to the growing climate change disruptions.
Why is this urgent? The OECD/DAC reminds us that “Natural assets represent, on average 26% of the wealth of developing countries compared to 2% in OECD economies” [4]. Unless we protect them and address the demand for natural resources, demand will far outstrip supply. “By 2030, an additional 1 billion people are expected to live in severely water-stressed areas, and global terrestrial biodiversity is expected to decline an additional 10%, leading to a loss of essential ecosystem services. By 2050, growing levels of dangerous air emissions from transport and industry will increase the global number of premature deaths linked to airborne particulate matter to 3.6 million people a year, more than doubling today’s levels. Failure to act could also lead to a 50% increase in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and global mean temperature increases of 3-6°C by the end of the century, in turn contributing to more severe and sometimes more frequent natural disasters… [so] reconciling development with environmental protection and sustainable resource management is broadly agreed as a central concern for the post-2015 development agenda.”
When we return to projects that are a mix of behavior change and environment, we find a wide range of results:
Some projects, such as JICA Vietnam’s water supply and irrigation infrastructure reached 80% of the final results two years later [5]. And while the pilot projects were worse off (as low as 28% of irrigated hectares), longer-standing projects sustained as much as 72% of final results. While such agricultural development assumes continued water supply and access, does it evaluate it? No.
Some can define what ex-post lessons are more narrowly as functioning mechanisms: New ex-posts of water/ sanitation showed better – but still mixed results, such as USAID Senegal’s [6]. “While a majority (63 percent) of the water points remained functional, the performance varied significantly based on the technology used. Of the different technologies, the Erobon rope pumps performed poorly (27 percent functional), while the India Mark (74 percent functional) and mechanized pumps (70 percent functional) performed the best.”
Some projects that include environmental considerations illustrate our point by only focusing on behavior change as this sanitation/ hygiene ex-post from Madagascar did, where results fell off precipitously three years ex-post but without considering water supply or quality much [7].
[7]
There can be useful learning when one combines an evaluation of both types of sustainability (ex-post and environmental). A JICA irrigation project in Cambodia shows that when irrigation canals were mostly sustained over the five-years ex-post, they could serve increasing needs for land coverage and rice production [7]. The area of irrigated fields at the national level in 2010 reached the target, and the irrigated field area has since continued to increase in most areas. Even the largest drop [in area irrigated] post-closure was only 11%. They reported that the unit yield of rice at the end-line survey in 2012 at 11 sites was 3.24t/ha (average) versus 3.11t/ha of unit yield of rice at the ex-post evaluation in 2017, which [almost] maintains the 2012 level. The ex-post showed that “continuous irrigation development in the said site can be considered as the main reason for the increase in land area. Securing an adequate amount of water is an important factor in continuously improving rice productivity.” The research also found that 81% of agricultural incomes as a result of the irrigation had increased, 11% stayed the same, and 8% had decreased. Again, this looks to be among the most resilient projects that, based on ex-post research, included environment which was also found to be as resilient as the livelihoods it was fostering.
Sometimes more bad than good news is important when tracking environment and ex-post sustainability: Food for the Hungry, ADRA, and CARE Kenya found that unreliable water supply reduced the motivation to pay for water, threatening the resources to maintain the system [8]. What improved prospects of sustainability understand why communities could not sustain water and sanitation results based on willingness-to-pay models, as well as water being unavailable. Further, a lesson the organizations ideally learned was that “gradual exit, with the opportunity for project participants to operate independently prior to project closure, made it more likely that activities would be continued without project support.” So the question remains, what was learned by these organizations to avoid similar bad results and improve good, resilient results in similar circumstances?
[6]
Neither sustainability nor environmental quality can be assumed to continue nor to have positive results. Both are extensively under-evaluated, and given climate change disruptions, and this must change. Rowe concludes: “Climate change is a major threat to the long-term sustainability both attacking the natural systems (e.g. lower rainfall or higher floods, worse soil quality, increasing pests attacking crops, disappearing fish stocks, microplastics in our air and water, increasing sea levels from melting glaciers, worsening public health etc.) and destabilizining our Earth’s regenerative capacity. Fortunately, technical barriers do not prevent us from starting to infuse sustainability into evaluation; the barriers are social and associated with the worldview and vision of evaluation.”
[5] Haraguchi, T. (2017). Socialist Republic of Viet Nam: FY 2017 Ex-Post Evaluation of Japanese ODA Loan Project “Small-Scale Pro Poor Infrastructure Development Project (III)”. Retrieved from https://www2.jica.go.jp/en/evaluation/pdf/2017_VNXVII-5_4.pdf
[6] Coates, J., Kegode, E., Galante, T., & Blau, A. (2016, February). Sustaining Development: Results from a Study of Sustainability and Exit Strategies among Development Food Assistance Projects: Kenya Country Study. USAID. Retrieved from https://www.globalwaters.org/resources/assets/ex-post-evaluation-senegal-pepam
[8] Kobayashi, N. (2017). Kingdom of Cambodia: FY2017 Ex-Post Evaluation of Technical Cooperation Project: “Technical Service Center for Irrigation System Project – Phase 2 / The Improvement of Agricultural River Basin Management and Development Project (TSC3)”. Retrieved from https://www2.jica.go.jp/en/evaluation/pdf/2017_0900388_4.pdf
Did we make enough time and measurement to foster sustainability, as we phased-down and phased-over an array of activities, alongside those remaining (white paper forthcoming)? Did we abruptly phase-out leaving partners and participants at a loss? Sharing power over all these decisions will influence what lasts.
There is an amazing breadth of local, ongoing resources, skills & capacities, linkages, motivation (thanks to Tufts FHI360’s work for USAID’s Food For Peace) that we can explore and learn from. There are local innovations and an array of unplanned collaborations (e.g., funding for health staff (Niger), training in small enterprise from the national government (Bangladesh), or private sector markets (Ethiopia) that can be accessed when partnerships are transparent and created one or more years pre-exit to collaborate on post-exit.
Ideally, we design and implement for exit from the onset. When we jointly set the timeframe and jointly assess risks to sustainability and adaptively manage exit, rather than exit based on pre-set timeframes, all sides win, with partners and participants able to foster sustainability. As USAID/ GIIN wrote about Responsible Exits for Impact Investors (2018), “the foundations for a responsible exit are laid even before an investment is made. To increase the likelihood of continued impact after exit, investors often select investees based on whether impact is embedded in their business model or inextricably linked to financial success. They also seek to understand the likely growth trajectory of the business, which has implications for which exit paths and options will become available.” They also note that a “growth strategy’ is needed throughout and at (investment) exit is “a company’s continued access to the right resources, networks, and knowledge” for sustained impact.
The need for a thoughtful approach to sustainability is shown by Hiller, Guthrie, and Jones in “Overcoming Ex-Post Development Stagnation“ (2016). The authors cite “limited evidence of program efficacies coupled with government and agency preference for planning, approval, and implementation processes rather than sustainment of outputs, outcomes, and impacts means that ex-post performance, scaling, and sustainability is not well understood or well pursued…. [There is a] lack of willingness to commit time and resources to rigorous evaluation of post-project effectiveness“. This affects a vast number of projects. For instance, they found 63,000 projects in 2003 alone, and “relative to the number of development projects undertaken, ex-post project [evaluations] are not commonly carried out, meaning that rates of success are often unknown and the complexity of causalities and ex-post dynamics of interactions and processes are not well understood.“ This limits our learning from what has (not) worked and what to do more (or less) of, including those that could not be sustained with only local resources.
We make sustainability assumptions are participants long for them, as Valuing Voices also found. Hiller et al. state that “whilst project documentation commonly conveys an expectation that some process of spread will occur ex-post, it rarely does, despite strong ex-post case-study evidence of stakeholder requests for further development opportunities.” This cautionary feedback could mean some project activities could be so resource-intensive that they could not feasibly be sustained or spread without long-term support, and retaining results may be limited to less costly activities. Valuing Voices found that other activities could be remunerative enough (financially, in health or education outcomes, for instance), as to be locally demanded and continued to be pursued. We have found in our Valuing Voices research and the Tufts research that activities where incentives did not continue, tended to die ex-post, while those which continued to bring benefits, such as cash crops and credit, water supply, and health, were prioritized ex-post, even in the absence of external funding continuing.
Hiller et al. outline that there are multiple ways in which scaling-up environmental sustainability over time, over area and, interestingly, scaling-within projects. The Ex-post Development Stagnation authors are clear that “creating conditions to support longer-term sustainability beyond project completion represents a recurring challenge, and it is not uncommon for activities and institutions to become inactive ex-post or for stakeholders to revert to previously unsustainable practices.” They note that some watershed studies have even found that participants actively destroy project measures in some cases. Certainly, the inability of locals to sustain often expensive activities without a project or larger organization’s support is common. “If it is assumed that development needs remain outstanding, then there may be merit in ensuring that development projects do not just remain “isolated, one-time interventions, like unconnected dots on a white page” or “islands of salvation.” The authors concur, “based on project subsidiarity and participatory principles, scaling-within management should be devolved to the local level (local authorities and local communities) to allow communities and individuals to filter out irrelevant practices and encourage adaptation and evolution of activities which are of greatest perceived livelihood benefit”.
As Valuing Voices research on exit has shown, it is a process, not an event(forthcoming, with thanks to I. Davies). The Hiller article notes that sustainability is best enhanced by capacity-building during implementation and with time for handover where “organizations adopt modes of functioning that allow local communities and organizations to build conceptual, operational, and institutional capacities. While scaling-down does not mean that governments disengage from processes such as community-driven development — it does, however, require it to be more flexible and responsive to locally generated demand to ensure the terrain is fertile for community organizations to emerge, learn, and grow.“
Let’s work together to extend the sustainability of impacts. Would love to hear your thoughts…
Assuming Sustainability and Impact is Dangerous to Development
(+ OECD/ DAC evaluation criteria)
We all do it; well, I used to do it too. I used to assume that if I helped my field staff and partners target and design funded projects well enough, and try to ensure a high quality of implementation and M&E, then it would result in sustainable programming. I assumed we would have moved our participants and partners toward projected long-term, top-of-logical-framework’s aspirational impact such as “vibrant agriculture leading to no hunger”, “locally sustained maternal child health and nutrition”, “self-sustained ecosystems”.
INTRAC nicely differentiates between what is typically measured (“outputs can only ever be the deliverables of a project or programme…that are largely within the control of an agency”) and what is not: “impact as the lasting or significant changes in people’s lives brought about by an intervention or interventions” [1]. They continue: “as few organisations are really judged on their impact, the OECD DAC impact definition (“positive and negative, primary and secondary long-term effects produced by a development intervention, directly or indirectly, intended or unintended“) allows for long-term changes in institutional capacity or policy change to be classed as impact” [1]. Do we do this? Virtually never. 99% of the time we only evaluate what happened while the project and its results is under the control of the aid implementer. Yet the five OECD/DAC evaluation criteria asks us to evaluate relevance, effectiveness, efficiency (fair enough, this is important to know if a project was good) and also impact and sustainability. So in addition to the prescription to evaluate ‘long-term effects’ (impact), evaluators are to measure “whether the benefits of an activity are likely to continue after donor funding has been withdrawn… [including being] environmentally as well as financially sustainable” [2].
How do we know we are getting to sustained outcomes and impacts? We ask people on the receiving end ideally after projects end. It is dangerous to assume sustainability and impact, and assume positive development trajectories (Sridharan) unless we consistently do “ex-post” project evaluations such as these from our research or catalytic organizations that have done at least one ex-post. At very minimum we should evaluate projected sustainability at end of project with those tasked to sustain it before the same project is repeated. Unfortunately we rarely do so and the assumed sustainability is so often not borne out, as I presented at the European Evaluation Society conference Sustainability panel two weeks ago along with AusAid’s DFAT, the World Bank, University College London and UNFEM.
Will we ever know if we have gotten to sustained impacts? Not unless the OECD/DAC criteria are drastically updated and organizations evaluate most projects ex-post (not just good ones :)), learn from the results and fund and implement for country-led sustainability with the country nationals. We must, as Sanjeev Sridharan tells us in a forthcoming paper embed sustainability into our Theories of Change from the onset (“Till time (and poor planning) do us part: Programs as dynamic systems — Incorporating planning of sustainability into theories of change” (Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, 2018).*
There are remarkable assumptions routinely made. Many projects put sustainability into the proposal, yet most close out projects in the last 6 months. Rarely do projects take the time to properly phase down or phase over (unlike CRS Niger); many exit ceremonially ‘handing over’ projects to country-nationals, disposing project assets, and leaving only a final report behind. Alternatively, this USAID Uganda CDCS Country Transition Plan which looks over 20 years in the future by when it assumes to have accomplished sustained impact for exit [3]. Maybe they will measure progress towards that goal and orient programs toward handover, as in the new USAID “Journey to Self-Reliance” – we hope! Truly, we can plan to exit, but only when data bears out our sustained impact, not when the money or political will runs out.
As OXFAM’s blog today on the evaluation criteria says, “Sustainability is often treated as an assessment of whether an output is likely to be sustained after the end of the project. No one, well, hardly anyone, ever measures sustainability in terms of understanding whether we are meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need” and “too often in development we evaluate a project or programme and claim impact in a very narrow sense rather than the broader ecology beyond project or programme parameters” [4]. In fact, most ‘impact evaluations’ actually test effectiveness rather than long-term impact. Too rarely do we test impact assumptions by returning 2-10 years later and gather proof of what impacted locals’ lives sustainably, much less – importantly – what emerged from their own efforts once we left (SEIEs)! Oh, our hubris.
if you’re interested in the European Evaluation Society’s DAC criteria update discussion, see flagship discussion and Zenda Offir’s blog which stresses the need for better design that include ownership, inclusivity, empowerment [5][6]. These new evaluation criteria need to be updated, including Florence Etta’s and AGDEN‘s additional criteria participation, non-discrimination and accountability!
We can no longer afford to spend resources without listening to our true clients – those tasked with sustaining the impacts after we pack up – our partners and participants. We can no longer fund what cannot be proven to be sustained that is impactful. We talk about effectiveness and country ownership (which is paramount for sustainability and long-term impact), with an OECD report (2018) found “increases [in[ aid effectiveness by reducing transaction costs and improving recipient countries ownership” [7]. Yet donor governments who ‘tie’ aid to their own country national’s contracts benefit a staggering amount from ‘aid’ given. “Australia and the United Kingdom both reported … 93 percent and 90 percent of the value of their contracts respectively went to their own firms” [7]. It is not so different in the USA where aid is becoming bureaucratically centralized in the hands of a few for-profit contractors and centralized hundreds of millions in a handful of contracts. We must Do Development Differently. We can’t be the prime beneficiaries of our own aid; accountability must be to our participants; is it their countries, not our projects, and we cannot keep dangerously assuming sustained impact. Please let us know what you think…
[3] USAID. (2016, December 6). USAID Uganda Country Development Cooperation Strategy 2016-2021. Retrieved October, 2018, from https://www.usaid.gov/uganda/cdcs
[6] Ofir, Z. (2018, October 13). Updating the DAC Criteria, Part 11 (FINAL). From Evaluation Criteria to Design Principles. Retrieved from https://zendaofir.com/dac-criteria-part-11/
Jindra Cekan, Ph.D. has used participatory methods for 30 years to connect with participants, ranging from villagers in Africa, Central/ Latin America and the Balkans to policy makers and Ministers around the world for her international clients. Their voices have informed the new Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, other M&E, stakeholder analysis, strategic planning, knowledge management and organizational learning.
If you don’t find what you are looking for via the search, categories, or posts above, you can go to the Blog page, scroll to the bottom, and click “previous posts” to go through all of the posts (newest–>oldest).
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
