170 - Social Return on Investment (SROI) - An Evaluation Framework for Localization?

Abstract Information: The youth, peace and security (YPS) agenda is gaining momentum across policy, funding and practice communities. To match this growing interest, the YPS agenda requires a change in the mindset of how we think of impact and how we quantify that impact as it relates to youth-led and adult-supported interventions that impact the lives of people in youthful majority countries. Measuring the right impacts changes the narrative and puts power where it matters – in the hands of young people locally, something critical in understanding the role of young people in preventing violence and sustaining peace. The international community critically needs a way to assess the impacts of youth-led and youth-supporting peacebuilding interventions to better support and sustain these efforts. While evaluations of peacebuilding programming are conducted regularly, little is known about the overall impact and return on investment of such programs. Traditional economic evaluations often shed light on cost savings to the State but are hard to come by in the peacebuilding field. Furthermore, traditional approaches do not capture the value of interventions to all key stakeholders, including youth and communities, and what matters most to them. To fill this gap, a research team led by the Institute on Inequalities in Global Health at the University of Southern California in collaboration with Search for Common Ground and multiple partners, conducted a proof-of-concept study of the impact of peacebuilding interventions using social return on investment (SROI) methodology, a stakeholder-centered participatory approach to impact measurement and management, to evaluate youth-led and youth-supporting peacebuilding interventions in Kenya. This session will describe the approach used, results that were found, and implications for practice, including for localization in international aid and development.

Relevance Statement: This proposal presents findings from a proof of concept study on how social return on investment (SROI) analysis can be used to measure the impact of youth-led and youth-supporting peacebuilding interventions. While SROI is of growing interest in terms of evaluation methods, what is particularly novel about this proposal is its consideration of how SROI analysis can be used as a framework for localization (or decolonization) in international aid and development.