Conclusions

Summary of Findings

Across all stories, visions of the future were multifaceted and reflected many changes across areas individual households, businesses, and communities.  In addition to the key role of finances, the following areas were key to prosperity:

• Personal and Family Well-being: Improved nutrition, health, education, and social inclusion.

• Assets: Housing, land, transportation, livestock, and productive assets for personal use and business endeavors.

• Community Infrastructure: WASH infrastructure, transportation, access to electricity, health care, schools, and other community-based amenities.

• Business and Entrepreneurship: Access to finance, inputs, fair markets, technology, employment opportunities and skills training.

• Climate Resilience: Sustainable agricultural practices, natural resource management, and disaster preparedness.

• Gender Equity & Social Inclusion: Overcoming social norms, increasing decision-making power, and ensuring equal access to resources and opportunities.

In addition to stories, engaging with the MSC Selection Processes elicited the following key insights from the stories:

• Community Perspective and Impact: Selection Committees placed a strong emphasis on stories that demonstrated a positive impact on the broader community, emphasizing the importance of initiatives that benefitted the collective well-being.

• Relatability and Contextual Relevance: Stories that resonated with the lived experiences of community members were prioritized, ensuring that the selection process captured aspirations specific to local contexts and realities.

• Realistic and Achievable Goals: Selection Committees valued stories that showcased realistic and achievable goals, taking into account the local resources, skills, and constraints.

• Social Norms and Barriers: Selection processes highlighted stories which addressed social norms and barriers, particularly those related to gender equality and social inclusion.

• Sustainability and Inclusivity: Sustainable and inclusive initiatives that promoted long-term change that extended beyond interventions and benefited multiple stakeholders were highly regarded during the selection process.

Insights and Reflections from the Process

Investing in a participatory approach to measurement has been a huge undertaking at iDE over the past two years. The MSC method and its application on a large scale has taught us many lessons on how to approach this and other new methods in the future. Some of the key lessons about implementing MSC learned in the process by our global MERL and GESI teams are listed below:

• Participatory skill building: Training on the MSC method which is a qualitative participatory approach required significant investment both from HQ and Country teams. This meant significant time and funding to support the training and piloting of this method to enable teams to feel confident in implementing it. This is especially important as many of the MERL team members did not have extensive experience in qualitative methods.

• Time commitment for community engagement: Qualitative and particularly qualitative participatory methods such as MSC are time consuming as they require careful and intentional engagement with community members that goes significantly beyond data collection. This is especially true for the engagement of Selection Committees. Many staff members had to spend time familiarizing Selection Committee members with the MSC approach and their role in the process, which took up time meant for story selection.

• Open storytelling: The open format of the MSC prompts allowed for respondents to discuss other aspects of their lives beyond the targeted project activity, revealing a much richer description of the futures they envisioned and the links between their livelihood activities and their goals. In some cases, this meant respondents talking about their sanitation needs in an agricultural focused project and vice-versa, or the mentions of children’s educational needs as part of their prosperity definition. 

Implications for iDE

iDE’s first Pillar is to Start with People. As our organization reflects back on its first 40 years, we are working to find new and improved ways to ensure we avoid assumptions about what people want or what the final solution should look like - including beyond the project level. The findings presented here allow iDE to improve its approaches by understanding the aspirations of those we work with, while also challenging our assumptions as an organization. iDE can leverage that understanding to tailor not only our interventions to meet local contexts, but to tailor our global strategy to prioritize globally-relevant themes and tailor our country strategies to prioritize support for common goals and overcoming common barriers.

Sector, Country, and Project-Level Strategy

The goal of this study was to better understand how the individuals and the communities where iDE works define success on the local, country, and global level. By asking about their visions and goals for the future, we aimed to find out if iDE is still offering products and services that a broad representation of iDE-impacted households desire, helping reduce risks and achieving success that is sustainable and scalable. Where the findings reveal potential gaps in our offerings, we can move to our second Pillar, Design to Context, to inform new proposals and the direction of our country and sector portfolios. Our solutions must be tailored to meet local social, cultural, political, and environmental contexts, and knowing what our clients want can help us do that.

Organizational Strategy

As iDE gears up to set our next big goal on the heels of our 20 Million More success, these findings offer another vital opportunity to pause and reflect on our overall organizational goals and the way we track their progress. 

Aligned with Paul Polak’s original vision, iDE has traditionally defined and measured its impact through changes in client household income. The theory was that iDE interventions would increase income for families, which families would then spend to ‘thrive on their own terms,’ a concept that became part of iDE in 2019 with the development of our internal management framework (9). 

But over the years, we’ve heard a more nuanced view directly from clients on how they judge success. Increased income can certainly provide opportunities to thrive, as demonstrated in the findings above, but income changes alone can not tell us if they achieved success on their own terms: sending their children to school, improving their or a loved one’s health, improving the way women are viewed in relation to men, and so on. As we dug into the idea of ‘thriving on their own terms’ when designing this study, we found:

• “Thrive” was broadly defined by iDE staff as prospering, and  

• “On their own terms” was meant to highlight the value of voice and choice  - essentially the agency - of iDE customers (10). Rather than an outcome on its own, the concept was meant to signal the way iDE approaches our work: from the outset, a truly market-based approach makes the customer the decision-maker. Someone choosing to buy into a particular solution, using their own resources, is sending a powerful message about value, desirability, priority, agency, sustainable adoption, etc. 

In his book Out of Poverty, Paul Polak states, “Poor people are poor because they do not have money”(11).  Our findings support this sentiment, as storytellers most commonly cited finances as the primary barrier to prosperity. Yet poverty, like prosperity, is multifaceted. Therefore, our strategy for how we define and look to assess prosperity is evolving. This study allowed us to explore poverty’s multiple dimensions by capturing how iDE clients defined a prosperous life - on their own terms. The findings revealed that respondents see financial security as one critical aspect of prosperity, but they viewed success in a much more holistic and multidimensional way. Many wanted to improve their nutrition, health and hygiene, empowerment and social inclusion, household assets, and education, and ensure that their communities are also resilient and thriving.

Additionally, the interconnectedness between the agriculture, WASH, and other sectors in stories gives iDE an opportunity to rethink our strategy and improve the links between our programs. As income is becoming a harder and harder metric to track globally with political concerns, changes in the landscape of third party evidence available, the capture of external economic volatility in the data such as commodity prices, and so on, respondents’ views presented here have given iDE the opportunity to think about conceptualizing our same desired impact - to end poverty - in a way that captures if households are actually able to meet their diverse needs with that additional income. 

Using the major themes presented in this report combined with iDE’s strengths, we will use the findings to inform the creation of a theory of change that can drive our new organizational goal, along with a set of multidimensional poverty indicators that better capture the impacts of iDE’s market-based approaches on the household we work with. 

___________________________________________________

The findings presented here underscore the significance of allowing communities to define and determine their priorities and approaches based on their unique needs, perspectives, and aspirations. Start with People and Design to Context means recognizing and honoring that individuals, families, and communities have the agency to make decisions around their own agenda and vision. These findings have challenged our previous ideas around focusing on income impacts alone. Yet investing in respondents’ broader visions allows iDE to pursue more meaningful and sustainable success on the household level. Respondents also made clear that they frequently leverage their knowledge and resources to support one another within their communities and networks. Demonstrating that we take client definitions of success seriously and we are willing to adjust our approach accordingly could gain the trust of our clients and pay off in dividends for all additional iDE stakeholders. 

9.  Input from KC Koch and Stu Taylor. July-August 2023.

10 Input from Stu Taylor. August 2023.

11.  Polak, P. (2009). Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (BK Currents edition). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.