A big challenge for organisations working in international development in the 21st century is measuring the impact and capturing the evidence of the changes that our work is having on peoples’ lives.
This is required and expected of us by the public who support our work and the governments and institutions that entrust us with funding. Most importantly, it is a duty that we have to the communities whose lives we are seeking to change.
However, capturing evidence is a complex business. For organisations that work with agriculture being the driver of economic and social change, like Self Help Africa, this change can be slow, and uncertain.
There are so many variables at play when it comes to farming.
In Africa, small-scale farm producers need a whole host of different factors to fall into place to ensure that they can provide for their families.
Weather conditions, seed quality, and market prices must all be right. Furthermore, households who mainly use hand-tools to plant and harvest their crops, must too hope that they remain in the fullness of health to be able to carry out the manual work that is necessary to yield food from their land.
It is therefore with huge pride that I received a set of results and reports this month that show goals being met and targets achieved in one of the biggest and most ambitious development projects that my organisation has ever implemented.
For more than four years we have been working, with exclusive backing from the Government of Ireland, on a multi-million euro development project that set out to increase food production, reduce malnourishment, improve lives, and end extreme poverty for 80,000 people living in a remote pocket in the far north of Zambia.
Because of the scale and importance of this particular task, we carried out some of the most extensive and rigorous monitoring and data gathering that was possible – before, during and after - so that we might learn all that we could from this work.
We harnessed digital technology, applied new methods for capturing data, and retained local consultants and international academics to help us to see and analyse the impact that our efforts were having on local lives.
My colleagues spent days and weeks living with villagers who were working with us. They conducted year on year interviews with people - hearing, seeing, filming and photographing, so that we might capture, in their own words, the change that our work was having.
The results were startling.
Within just over three and a half years, we saw stunting, caused by chronic malnutrition, fall from 40% to 31% amongst children under the age of 18 months, with large numbers of young children moving from the ‘severely’ malnourished category to the less serious ‘moderately’ malnourished category in the same period.
Various factors contributed to these, and other positive improvements, including the availability of different food, increases in the rates of post-natal breastfeeding, and substantial improvements in the number of households reporting that they had more assets – including goats, chickens and other livestock and food crops.
89% of people who participated in qualitative surveys carried out by academics from the University of Bath said that they were more optimistic for their future wellbeing, 57% said that their overall wellbeing had already improved, while 54% of respondents said that the quantity of food they were producing and consuming at household level had increased.
The access of households to cash, in communities where barter is more commonplace, had increased from almost zero to 30% in two villages that were surveyed.
Rosemary Chate, a mother of seven from Malela village said that her family were now eating two meals every day, while all of her children were attending school. In the past, she could provide just one meal a day for most of the year, while she had only been able to afford to send two of her sons to school.
56-year-old widow Charity Kamwala described how she had been able to use a small loan provided by a project savings and loan programme to establish a small income generating business. She explained that she had used profits from the enterprise to replace her leaky thatched roof with new iron sheets.
Rosemary and Charity are just two of many people involved in the project who have had their lives totally transformed for the better. As international development professionals, it is stories like these that inspire and encourage us every day in our work.
We want to share this inspiration with everyone, and so created the Two Villages website (www.twovillages.org). I encourage you to visit and find out more on the many stories and experiences we captured in Northern Zambia in recent years.