Baselines are complicated matters, especially global ones where various partners are involved. Here are some key learnings we have gathered from setting up global baselines:
- Make sure your partners understand and agree to what you want to achieve together (preferably this is done by engaging partners in proposal development) – this is a prerequisite if you want to agree on the baseline
- Be open to changing originally set indicators – they are not (or should not be) written in stone! Setting up the baseline is an opportunity to test how well suited the indicators are.
- Indicators must be relevant, capture results and change (not activities), be realistic to monitor and should of course provide meaningful information upon which the project/programme can make adjustments … don’t measure things just because you can!
- Do not operate with more indicators than what you have resources to actually monitor, report upon and get a meaningful learning from.
- Engage partners to the degree possible in the baseline development, communicate the results of the baseline – and when following up on the baseline ensure learning from results is done WITH partners!
Author:
Anja Nordlund,
NCG’s senior Gender Equality and Equal Opportunity Expert
