Very little is known about the wider and longer-term contribution of civil society organisations (CSOs) to development and poverty reduction. Evaluators have shied away from making judgements for lack of data: rigour has trumped relevance. This article reports on the work of a panel set up by NORAD in response to growing pressure from the public to assess the wider impact of CSOs at the country level. It comes to the conclusion that CSOs have made a significant wider impact, but that this would be greater if donors were to encourage them more to think beyond the narrow focus on discrete projects and if they were to adopt a more strategic approach to their work.
This report is the result of an exploratory study undertaken by NORAD’s Civil Society Department. The following key findings emerged about the impact of CSOs at individual and community level:
- At the level of individuals and communities at the grassroots level, positive findings indicate that the projects reach poor people and are relevant to their needs; those directly affected by CSO projects targeted at improving the quality of their lives have positive results and significant results can be found and documented.
- However, the evidence also suggests that little strategic planning takes place to implement projects based on a systematic assessment of need. Similarly, the hypothesis regarding large transaction costs was confirmed, due to there often being several intermediaries and administrative layers between Norwegian CSOs and the ultimate beneficiaries.
- In all four case-study countries, there was evidence that CSOs have played an important role in assisting marginalised groups (such as people with disabilities and those from ethnic minorities), in part by implementing projects for members of these groups.
- Yet probably of far greater long-term importance was their awareness-raising and lobbying work, with examples found of CSOs successfully influencing legislation and policies to assist marginal and hard-to-reach groups – a clear example of both direct and wider impact. In addition, in countries that have been at war, the Panel found evidence of the important role that CSOs had played in providing basic services in areas from which the government had had to withdraw, or was prevented from entering.
- There is a continued lack of robust information at the project level from which to draw firm conclusions about project impact: assessments are mostly based on qualitative judgements and secondary information and they still focus on activities and reporting on outputs rather than outcomes. Some project benefits are under-reported, others are overinflated.
For evidence of wider and long term impact, the key findings were as follows:
- In all four countries, CSOs contribute significantly to long-term development in a range of different ways, some direct and some indirect. However, the wider development impact of CSOs and their overall contribution to poverty reduction would seem to occur as much by luck as by design.
- There is significant potential for far greater wider and longer-term development impact by CSOs: if more CSOs approached their work far more strategically, by focusing more centrally upon and asking more explicitly how they could make a greater long-term and sustainable difference, and by assessing more clearly what particular contribution that might make and how they might work more co-operatively with government and with others.
- A major way that CSOs influence development at the national level is through the combined contribution that different CSOs make to the national provision of education and health services. Over the past decade with the closer alignment of aid to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is likely that even more funds will have been channelled to CSOs involved in service-delivery in health, education and water and sanitation.
- CSOs make an important contribution to service delivery in all four countries – 25% of the service-delivery budget in Ethiopia, 40% of health services in Malawi, between 10 and 15% of educational services in Nepal and a discernible, though almost certainly far lower, contribution in Vietnam.
- However, in all four countries there is an almost complete absence of accurate and up-to-date data recording precisely what the contribution is and how it changes over time.
