How can development agencies implement feedback systems so as to hear systematically from the intended beneficiaries of their work? How can such systems improve aid accountability, and thus effectiveness? This article focuses on agricultural development, arguing that in most agricultural development projects, quantified summaries of smallholder farmers’ views can be collected. Such data can provide real-time performance indicators that incentivise staff to focus on beneficiaries’ priorities. The feedback process can be empowering in itself, and acting on the feedback can significantly improve project impact and sustainability. While measuring performance against plans encourages supply-led and agency-centred development, using feedback systems can encourage demand-led and people-centred development.
A ‘feedback system’ is a systematic approach to collecting the views of beneficiaries and other key stakeholders about the quality and impact of work undertaken by a development agency, generating quantitative data. Despite increasing recognition of the need to reform established accountability mechanisms, feedback systems have not been widely used: current institutional incentives mean that the costs for managers and organisations outweigh the benefits. For example, funding tends to be increasingly short term and restricted to pre-determined activities agreed with donors, limiting opportunities for responding to feedback.
However, proven techniques for the implementation of feedback systems are available and are being improved through new technologies. Two examples of feedback systems used in development settings are citizen report cards and community scorecards:
- Citizen report cards generate satisfaction ratings about public services from a random sample of users, using market research survey techniques. Results suggest that report cards can increase the pressure for reform and support the efforts of internal reformers, but are unlikely to force reform on unwilling or constrained public leadership.
- Community scorecards bring together the service provider and service users to strengthen understanding, reinforce shared responsibility and identify improvements. Evaluations of their use in the health sector have noted impressive and cost-effective results.
Carefully used, perception-based indicators are empowering and strengthen dialogue between local people and service providers about what works in the local context and why. They can measure outcomes (like income changes, nutritional intake and empowerment); outputs (like technology adoption, access to services and capacities); and operational effectiveness (like the quantity and quality of services received, and the quality of participation). Other findings include the following:
- The data can be disaggregated by gender, with the potential to link agencies’ funding to poor women’s assessments of their work.
- Feedback systems appear to be useful for advocacy and capacity-building interventions as well as for direct service delivery.
- However, the approach may not be appropriate in all cases or for all parts of all projects.
- Feedback data are subjective, and need to be interpreted in context, but their subjectivity can provide insight into who is gaining and losing from a project.
- There are three key challenges in implementing feedback systems: 1) ethical issues (such as whether the views solicited are representative and the risk of women and other marginalised groups being excluded); 2) practical issues (such as complicated survey methods and the time and skills needed to adapt approaches to context); and, crucially, 3) management and organisational incentives that reward supply-led rather than demand-led development.
In order to reshape incentives towards demand-led development, the management structures and practices of implementing agencies and donors require significant change. For example:
- Donors and senior managers could consistently make quantified reports of user satisfaction a requirement
- Implementing agencies could publish reports of user satisfaction as standard practice
- Civil society actors could collect and publish feedback data independently of donors and implementing agencies
- Cheaper and simpler feedback tools could be developed.
For further information and more practical examples, see the author’s website and blog, ngoperformance.org.
