“So What?” – Your Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
Indices, Indices… Everywhere!
Data-driven decision making is the mantra to beat. As we toured the new website of the estimable Institute for Economics and Peace, we reflected on the many metrics we now have to compare countries and promote an ideal: peace, business climate, corruption, happiness… the list goes on. It is a boon, to be sure. But it also makes us wonder: who actually uses these metrics? How are they used? How do they influence government behavior?
17 Goals! 169 Targets!
And speaking of indices: This week the UN in its collective wisdom officially approved the Sustainable Development Goals, successors to the Millennium Development Goals established in 2000. And whether you salute their potential to reduce child marriage or spoof their idealism (does SDG stand for “Senseless, Dreamy, Garbled”?), it’s well to ask: did anyone really ask the poor what they think?
Soar like a …PELICAN?
We are known, confessed fans of the Pelican listerv, where we lurk often in search of smart thinking from evaluators around the world. Join up and you’ll sometimes find tough questions about evaluation and evaluation clients amid the usual buzz of job announcements and Requests for Proposals. Here’s a great little piece from the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) that can remind evaluators (and their clients) of some things we all need to know about evaluation.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep
