Our impact and outcomes

chapter two

Impact and outcomes of our work

Through the programmes that we work on with our partners and with our lobby and advocacy activities, we contribute towards the impact and the different outcomes in our new theory of change. In this chapter we present data and case studies that illustrate the progress we made against our theory of change in 2021.

Girls follow a training on the production of reusable pads - Bandarban, Bangladesh

Reporting against our new Theory of Change

In this Impact Report, we report against our new Theory of Change. Similar to previous years, we do this through data and case studies from programmes. During the previous years, we laid the ground work for our new strategy within the programmes that we implement together with our partners. As a result, most of our programmes respond to key elements of our new strategy. This made it possible to select case studies and data that corresponds to our new Theory of Change for this Impact Report.

With our new Theory of Change, we have also developed a new indicator framework. We have taken the opportunity to improve on the alignment of our indicators with the SDG framework. Going forward, we will align indicator frameworks of new programmes with the Simavi indicators. For this annual report however, we had to work with the data that is collected in our current programmes and activities. This means that when there wasn’t an exact match, we have linked Simavi programme indicators to the relevant SDG goals and targets, instead of using the specific SDG indicator.

Like each year, we have impact and outcome data from a selection of our programmes, as evaluations are not administered on a yearly basis. This, combined with the new indicator framework and the participatory set-up of the writing process of this year’s Impact Report made it more difficult to find data that matched the case studies that were collected. We therefore combine case studies and data from different programmes to showcase progress against the impact, the long-term and the mid-term outcomes of our Theory of Change in this chapter. We left the short-term out of this report as those are mostly captured by the higher level results of the mid-term outcomes.

Measuring impact and outcomes

As part of the development of the Theory of Change and our new indicator framework, we also reviewed our approach to impact and outcome measurement. Our new impact statement focuses on women and girls enjoying their human rights to water and sanitation. We purposely included the word enjoy in this statement, as we are striving for a sustainable change in the lives of women and girls that goes beyond just having access to water and sanitation facilities. We want women and girls to enjoy the benefits of this, and be healthier, more confident, in control, safer, and feel supported and connected. Which aligns with the five dimensions of well-being that we used to measure impact against our previous Theory of Change.

In the process of putting together our new indicator framework, we aimed to align this as much as possible with indicators from the SDG framework. With that, we looked at SDG indicators that were in line with our five dimensions of well-being. In addition to indicators from SDG6 (clean water and sanitation), we therefore also included indicators from SDG3 (health and well-being) and SDG5 (gender equality) to monitor our impact. On the different outcome levels, we also included indicators from other SDGs as well as indicators from other sources.

Our approaches to evaluating the impact and outcomes will be largely the same. We do intend to make more use of external sources of data to inform our programmes and progress, limit the amount of data that we collect and make monitoring and evaluation process more inclusive. This is in line with our increased focus on Shifting the Power.