The idea of EVAL-LAB is to bring academic rigor into impact measurement, without sacrificing the needs of operational timing, to enable associations or ministries to make decisions quickly.
"When we look at the scientific literature of projects that have been evaluated, the real conclusion is that having an impact is far from automatic and is actually quite complicated,” states Thomas Escande.
For example, a study conducted in 2020, which evaluated several hundred educational projects scientifically, revealed that in over 70% of cases, the impact was either very weak, nonexistent, or negative.
“The social economy sector, the associative world, is sometimes driven by intuitions, with a desire to do good that does not necessarily translate on the ground,” explains Thomas Escande.
"We consider impact as what I become with a program versus what I would have become without it, all else being equal. But we know we are subjected to a lot of pressures, social, cultural, and political forces that always bring us back a bit to our starting point.”
Indeed, there can be a difference between what is conceived as the project and how it is implemented on the ground, by volunteers or association members, with misalignments or tensions that are not necessarily perceived.
If there are significant absenteeism rates in a mentoring program, for example, we do not expect it to necessarily have an impact, because it is not being implemented at its maximum potential.
"We also work in developing countries. One of the most effective interventions is to provide bed nets for sleeping, to protect against diseases with very strong impacts. And we find that in some contexts, people will use them as fishing nets,” shares Thomas Escande.
So EVAL-LAB will identify problems, limitations for each organization, test different solutions, and then keep and adopt the proposals, types of implementation, or projects that have the most impact.
"What we try to do is to really delve deep into this reflection around impact, around how people react, how people react differently based on their specificities, bringing in that very rigorous aspect that we can find in the academic world,” concludes Thomas Escande.
