Strategische Beratung

Anyone who works in the field of International Cooperation faces questions about the benefit and impact of the work. It is no longer enough to show that aid efforts for disadvantaged people are carried out in a targeted and timely manner. The question of effectiveness is continually asked by institutional donors as well as the general public. The public and private donors quite rightly want to know if their money can help improve the living conditions of a large number of disadvantaged people. As humanitarian organizations, we cannot avoid answering these questions. We need to be able to communicate credibly to our donors what kind of impact our projects have and to what changes do we contribute through our work.

The sector of Humanitarian Aid is undergoing reforms which are designed to take account of greater impact orientation: institutional donors are harmonizing their procedures and are increasingly working together within the framework of the “Good Humanitarian Donorship“ initiative. NGOs are increasingly required to deal with UN organizations and other implementation organizations in the operational areas, and also to harmonize our aid efforts with the existing system and coordinate with others.

Humanitarian Action is geared to create positive impact respectively to avoid negative effects. Therefore, humanitarian action (projects) is designed to produce outcomes and impacts. This is called impact orientation. Furthermore, all impacts and effects - no matter whether they are positive/negative, intended/unintended- are observed, documented and interpreted. This is called impact monitoring and can be understood primarily as technical terminus. The information gained by the impact monitoring is used to steer the projects and programmes.

It is important to differentiate between impact monitoring and process monitoring: the process monitoring measures whether the intended results have been achieved and aims at an improvement of the performance of the actors. Impact monitoring observes whether the intended outcome and impacts have been achieved and whether the project has contributed towards an improvement of the situation as intended and hence has created certain benefits for the target group.

Impact orientation shifts our view of humanitarian action: it is not the technical neat performance which counts but the extent of the achievement of the project objectives which is a pre-condition for further improvements of the situation.