Stories that opened the mystery box in development evaluations- the cases from evaluation in Africa.

Abstract Information: The presentation will use stories that were generated during the evaluation of different development intervention in Africa. It will demonstrate how the stories helped to uncover the main development challenges in achieving sustainable goals. The presentation will also show how to collect and generate credible stories in development evaluation.

Relevance Statement: Evaluators use different methodologies in answering relevant research/evaluation question. Evaluation often involves complicated design and equations in finding the right judgment about the intervention under evaluation. Ultimately, the evaluation reaches a conclusion on whether the intervention works or does not work. Policy or decision makers often demand for not only what works or not but also why it doesn’t work; for whom it works; under what circumstances. Here is where the role of story is highly important in demystifying or uncovering the box to better understand those questions. The story digs into the main factors that are determinant for success or failure development evaluation. Without using stories, the evaluators leave their conclusion without adequate explanatory factor.
This presentation demonstrates how stories helped to explain the finding of the evaluation in different context and set-ups. It will show the stories of households in Ethiopia that demonstrate the strengthen and weakness of development interventions in water supply and sanitation. The intervention theory of change shows that provision of water supply and sanitation services reduce health risk through improving hygiene and pure drinkable water. The presentation will share how we tested this hypothesis through stories.
The presentation will also present the stories from farmers in Malawi which explaining the lack of usage of market infrastructure built using donor finance. The theory of change for this intervention assumes that building market infrastructure such as market shedding and store improves farmers access to market and sale of farm produce. The presentation will share how we tested this hypothesis through stories.

The stories were generated through focus group discussions and one-one interviews with beneficiaries of development projects.