Outcome Mapping: Focusing monitoring and evaluation of development programmes on changes in partners. 6 pages. By Sarah Earl, Fred Carden and Terry Smutylo, IDRC Evaluation unit, July 2000. "In its conceptual and practical work over the past few years, the Evaluation Unit has encountered fundamental challenges in assessing and reporting on development impacts. While development organizations are under pressure to demonstrate that their programs result in significant and lasting changes in the well-being of large numbers of their intended beneficiaries, such "impacts" are often the product of a confluence of events for which no single agency or group of agencies can realistically claim full credit. As a result, assessing development impacts, especially from the perspective of an extemal agency, is problematic yet many organizations continue to struggle to measure results far beyond the reach of their programs. In response to this problem, IDRC has been working with Dr. Barry Kibel, of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, to adapt his Outcome Engineering approach to the development research context. Methodological collaboration with the West African Rural Foundation, and testing with the Nagaland Enviromnental Protection and Economic Deveiopment Project have greatly informed this adaptation process. A methodology called "Outcome Mapping" is evolving, which characterizes and assesses the contributions development programs make to the achievement of outcomes. Outcome Mapping can be adapted for use at the project, program, or organization level as a monitoring system or to evaluate on-going or completed activities. It takes a leaming-based and use-driven view of evaittation guided by principles of participation and iterative leaming. As development is essentially about people relating to each other and their environment, the focus of Outcome Mapping is on peopie and organizations. The originality of the methodology is its shift away from assessing the products of a program (e.g., policy relevance, poverty alleviation, reduced conflict) to a focus on the changes in the behaviours, relationships, actions and/or activities of the people and organizations with whom a development program works." There is also a larger document titled "Outcome Mapping: Planning and Documenting International Development Results as Changes in Behavior. A Facilitation Manual, by the same authors, produced in May 2001, available from the same web site. The contact email address for the IDRC Evaluation Unit is evaluation@idrc.ca (posted 10/10/2001)