Impact Assessment

The Hunger Project (THP) is committed to providing its stakeholders with timely, objective and accurate data on the impact of its strategies. Our Impact Assessment program is designed:

1. To support the women and men working to end their own hunger and poverty to identify gaps, set priorities and track progress;

2. To enable THP staff and partner organizations to continuously improve our programs;

3. To enlist new sources of funding and be accountable to current investors; and

4. To engage in advocacy work with policymakers and other thought leaders to help persuade them that our bottom-up, gender-focused approach is deserving of wider adoption in the development field.

Our Impact Assessment program is consistent with our program methodology: to empower people living in conditions of hunger and poverty to be the primary agents of their own development. Strengthening the skills needed for them to participate in actively monitoring their progress is an integral component of our programs.

The Impact Assessment program includes an in-house online global monitoring system, which is currently under development and will integrate program and financial information to track inputs, outputs, near-term outcomes and long-term impact for each activity within an analytic framework based on our Theory of Change (see more below on our Theory of Change).

View some of our overall programmatic results.

Theory of Change

A Theory of Change shows how the components of a complex social program come together to achieve desired outcomes.

Our Theory of Change is based on three pillars:

Pillar 1: Mobilizing grassroots people for self-reliant development;

Pillar 2: Empowering women as key change agents; and

Pillar 3: Forging effective partnerships with local government.

In combination, these three pillars create a successful, sustainable process of integrated, people-centered development, by which clusters of villages locally achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

View a full diagram of our Theory of Change.

Independent Impact Assessments

Independent impact assessments of our work that are completed or in the pipeline include:

• A major independent, external and pro bono study of our work in Uganda, "Change to believe in: THP Uganda's impact" (January 2009). Read the executive summary of this report.
• A long-term longitudinal study of the impact of our scale-up program in Ghana commissioned by the Robertson Foundation and undertaken by a team of academics from Yale University, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Ghana. As of the end of 2008, baseline household surveys in both THP-mobilized areas and randomly selected comparison areas were completed. Learn more.
• We are discussing the proposal of having independent research done in India and Mexico in 2009.