DP 5.- Evaluation and psycological variables that affect the PC

Step 4.- The Evaluation

Evaluation should be about the impact of our actions, but very often and due to transparency, as I said in the previous step, it is only about showing that you did what you said you were going to do. Very often it also becomes as a matter or money: you evaluate if the money was spent in the activities designed.

The evaluation of a project is nowadays a step that all organizations care about. The criticism about the efficiency of international development has been put into that stage of the cycle, and every organization is increasing their efforts for a good evaluation. I think this stage is going in the right path, but I think that the same amount of effort should be put in the other stages, because the only way to make sure that a project is well evaluated, is to develop the project properly.

Some psychological variables that should be considered when designing a project cycle:

1.- Self esteem: Self esteem is one of the most important variables of any human. I doesn´t have to correspond to the reality, it is made out of perceptions, and sometimes a person that is very capable and has low self esteem wont be able to develop a task only because of this perception. When we work with recipients, do we have esteem in consideration? It is not good for esteem when some outsider comes to your community to tell you that THEY are here to bring the solution to YOUR problems. And this happens every day in development. The participatory approach should be not only to work with real problems, but to make sure that the recipients feel empowered to change the reality.

2.-. Motivation: Are we sure that the recipient are motivated for the project we have? Even if they have identified the problem, do they have the drive to work in it? Projects should be able to find the motivation behind the recipients, but not many incorporate this kind of research in the identification. Finding the motivation of a person is always the key for action, and the development projects should give this variable the importance it has and include motivation surveys in their tools. Using the Maslow´s Pyramid of needs seems like a good beginning.

3.- The reinforcements: Long term reinforcements are not very usefull. If a community is working in a project that will bring them results after 4 years, the chances of abandoning the process before the goal is reached are really high. Short term reinforcement have to be included in the projects, and every effort should be rewarded. The behavioral theory of Successive Approximation Model has years and years of research about how human learn a behavior through rewarding behaviors that come closer to the conduct you are looking for. These kind of theories should be used in development projects, and they are used in many occasions, but not in a conscious level. Bringing human science to development seems to me like a good idea to improve the project cycle.

4.- The concept of Learned Helplessness: This psychological concept shows how a person can learn to feel helplessness. When a person feels that, no matter how hard they work, no matter what they do, the situation never changes, there is a natural process of conditioning that links these two circumstances, leading the person to learn that there is nothing that can be done to change a problem. Some developmental projects make helplessness individuals all around the world. Expectatives are not well managed, and a project that has been poorly planned and fails, can make a recipient think that the solution is impossible.

How to induce learned helplessness

As a conclusion for my DP Blog: There are many variables that should be considered in order to improve the project cycle. The developmental tools need to be more open, and social and human sciences have something to say. Every step of the process must include psychological biases, we have to feel more humble about the tools we have developed and ensure that the process itself is in a continuous path of improvement.

There are still many things to improve in our sector, even in a “common sense” tool like the Project Cycle. Because, after all, like the proverb says: “The common sense is the less common of all the senses”

Comments Off on DP 5.- Evaluation and psycological variables that affect the PC / 13 Jan 2013 por Paloma Andres Urrutia
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