Background

Now that iDE has achieved its 20 Million More goal in 2023, we are currently defining our next big organizational strategy - a bold, audacious goal that will drive the organization for the next decade. Following Paul Polak’s guiding principle that you shouldn’t design anything until you had talked to at least 100 potential users (1), iDE set out to talk to the people and households we work with that are impacted by our organizational goals, and in particular women, who are often underrepresented in both scale and impact across the development sector.

Funded by iDE’s internal Paul Polak Innovation Fund, our teams across Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, Mozambique, Nepal, Vietnam, and Zambia set out to collect client narratives. By adapting the Most Significant Change (MSC) participatory methodology, this process captured insights into our clients’ visions of prosperity for the future by asking about the most significant changes they wished to see for their families, businesses, and communities. This report presents synthesized findings from this study to provide insight into the perspective of the households we work with as we design our new strategic goal. It encompasses generalized outcomes across all data, as well as findings from specific iDE sectors and countries.

Starting with this sort of empathy-led listening has powered iDE over the past forty years to avoid assumptions and create sustainable and scalable solutions to poverty, now institutionalized in our present-day approach. Leveraging frameworks like our iDE Pillars beginning with Start with People and Design to Context, and tools such as our Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) Policy whose principal of “Nothing for Us Without Us” mandates that project success be defined by the clients and communities we work with, iDE is now also incorporating participatory approaches into our measurement to help us derive more meaningful results from our third Pillar, Results Rule. To that end, the goal of this study is to understand how to consistently make iDE’s offerings impactful and desirable to the individuals and the communities where we work, by gaining insights into how they define success.

1. “A Tribute to Paul Polak: Market-Based Development Pioneer (1933 - 2019)” accessible at https://www.ideglobal.org/story/tribute-to-paul-polak

Page updated

Report abuse