In some cases these public funds were supplemented by private and philanthropic funding and, as already mentioned, investment by the latter was especially large in Fatima Mansions, it amounted to the equivalent of approximately €4,500 per household in that estate in 2006. ABIs in Moyross received funds from a philanthropic foundation established by the businessmen JP McManus and by the Dell computer company, although we were unable to capture the value of this investment. As mentioned above, in Deanrock and Cranmore the private and philanthropic sectors did not make a significant contribution to funding area based services.
4.5
Impact
As outlined earlier, information on inputs to area-based initiatives at estate level is patchy and difficult to fill in with any degree of completeness. It is scarcely surprising, then, that no rigorous assessment can be made of the impact of these initiatives. Writing in 2003, Haase and McKeown found that ‘little is known about the actual impact of the area-based Partnerships and even less about the comparative value of different approaches to tackling poverty and deprivation’ (Haase and McKeown 2003, p. iii). Their call for a more scientific approach to monitoring has since gone largely unheeded and the information needed for effective monitoring of programmes is still largely absent. The present study has established that the scale of initiatives deployed in each estate is in most cases collectively large enough to have substantial impact. This in itself is significant since it eliminates the possibility that the programmes were too small to make a real difference. However, it was beyond the scope of a point-in-time study such as ours to generate the trend data and control variables that would have been necessary to provide well-grounded impact assessment. Nevertheless, we can offer some broad comment on a range of issues connected with impact. We do this first by presenting statistical indicators that, taken together with national evaluations of the ABIs and local interviews with activists who implement initiatives in the estates, throw some light on the possible effects of these initiatives. In addition, we comment on three characteristics of these programmes which bear heavily on their effectiveness, namely, their targeting, design and governance.
Statistical indicators Indirect evidence on the possible impact of area-based programmes can be derived by examining change in statistical indicators of deprivation at electoral district (ED) level for the ten area-based programmes that adopted the ED as their spatial unit. For each of 77
