{"id":10748,"date":"2026-09-23T14:05:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T14:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cordaid.org\/en\/?p=10748"},"modified":"2026-09-23T14:36:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T14:36:51","slug":"community-led-evaluation-in-fragile-settings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cordaid.org\/en\/news\/community-led-evaluation-in-fragile-settings\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen to Those Who Live It: Community-Led Evaluation in Fragile Settings"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For decades, development organisations working alongside governments and local communities have helped fill gaps in public services and respond to what communities actually need. But when it comes to designing projects and tracking their impact, communities themselves have rarely been at the centre of the process. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A participant in the Shared Futures project telling his story in front of the camera. Photograph: Cordaid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There’s a paradox: we say we’re here to serve the people, yet we judge our own success using frameworks created by outside experts, rigid checklists, and numbers on a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Messy, Real Human Change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Too often, this approach treats people as data, rather than partners. It squeezes messy, real human change into simple “yes\/no” boxes. And because most evaluations happen at the end of a project, the findings often arrive too late to actually help us adjust or improve our work while it’s still running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognising this, Cordaid and its Shared Futures consortium partners piloted a radical alternative: the Most Significant Change (MSC) approach combined with Participatory Videos (PV), with support from partner Kerk in Actie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results offer a clear lesson: when communities lead the action, evidence becomes more authentic, programmes become more adaptive, and power shifts from the office to the project locations and local communities we serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The approach is innovative, respectful and treats beneficiaries as empowered clients, not passive recipients. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Coastal Kenya, Under Pressure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Kenya\u2019s South Coast is home to culturally rich communities whose identities have been shaped by centuries of interaction between the African, Arab, and Swahili cultures. White sandy beaches give way to coral hills and the rugged hinterlands of Kwale County, dotted with coconut and palm groves, baobab trees, rich coastal biodiversity, and the sacred Kaya forests of the Mijikenda people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Livelihoods here run on tourism, fishing, small farms and trade. Yet land disputes, climate pressure and youth unemployment are straining the ties that hold communities together, feeding the interfaith and inter-communal tension that can tip into violence. It is exactly the kind of setting where a survey arriving late in a project changes nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, strong traditions of community dialogue, respect for elders and religious leaders, and collective action provide a foundation for locally led solutions through Cordaid\u2019s Shared Futures Project. This makes the South Coast an important setting for the MSC-PV approach, enabling communities to document their experiences, define what change means to them, and lead pathways towards peaceful coexistence and resilient futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Passing The Mic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, representatives from the Shared Futures Consortium led by Cordaid received training by InsightShare (UK) as local MSC-PV facilitators in Kwale County. The methodology is disarmingly simple. Instead of deploying external enumerators after training, the facilitators invite community members to create story circles and respond to a single, open-ended prompt (the MSC question), allowing each participant to share their own story of change: ‘What has been the most significant change in your life, your family, and your community over the past year?’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Monitoring, evaluation and communications officer for Cordaid Kenya, Fredrick Owino (third from the left), facilitates a Youth Story Circle in Mombasa County. Photograph: Cordaid<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After going around the circle, they develop their own selection criteria to highlight emerging issues and change, including resilience, improved mental wellbeing, economic empowerment, peace, interfaith coexistence, and sustainability. They vote collectively on which story best represents meaningful transformation. Participants are then engaged in a creative exercise to co-create visual narratives and skits that preserve their authentic voices and lived experience using River of Life and Storyboards. Participants are then given video cameras. They film their own stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is not a bureaucratic report. It is a co-created archive of lived experiences, embodied in powerful video stories that capture the nuance of change in ways that Likert scales never can. These stories are evidence of enriching, contextual, and actionable experiences. They reveal that the greatest enablers of change are not top-down interventions, but peer support, organised group structures, and restoring human dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch the video stories as part of the Most Significant Change approach within the Shared Futures programme:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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