What Difference
            Does it Make?

• Evaluations
• Peace Builders in Action

What Difference Does It Make?

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We are committed to measuring and increasing the influence our interventions have in the communities where we work.

Situations of conflict are rarely simple or linear; multiple actors, causes, and possible solutions all play a role.

Identifying the difference that our work makes is therefore a difficult endeavour. The task is made more complex by a lack of reliable tools to measure effectiveness of peacebuilding activities and by physical and social environments that are outside the reach of standard research methodologies. Despite these limitations, we established the Institutional Learning and Research Division in 2003 to measure and enhance our effectiveness, so as to enable us to maximise our impact.

Our approach to improving effectiveness is a commitment to excellence in monitoring, evaluation, and continuous learning. This translates into a number of initiatives, including the country-programme evaluations that are conducted at two-year intervals. The findings of these evaluations inform our work and result in continuing improvements.

While the Institutional Learning and Research Team is newly established, several comprehensive country-programme evaluations had been previously conducted. At the country-programme level, these evaluations generally have verified the added value of our work and, within the limitations of the methodology, its impact. As expressed, for example, in the European Union's evaluation of our Sierra Leone programme, "The project already has had a major impact on the general population, who express great respect for it." The external group that evaluated our Burundi programme in 1999 concluded, "This evaluation team is confident to state that Search For Common Ground made its mark on the Burundian culture."

Ongoing self-assessment and informal feedback also provide indications of the results of our work. Our impact appears to be manifest in four important spheres:

Supporting and advancing peace processes
In the Middle East anecdotal evidence and continuous follow-up with participants indicate that our activities have helped forge key relationships between influential decision makers in the peace process. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) our information-dissemination activities are reported to be one of the critical sources of public awareness of the peace process, helping to reduce suspicion and rumours that can lead to violence.

Reducing violence
In Burundi and in Sierra Leone surveys indicate that our radio programming is a trusted and credible source of information about events in the country, including peacemaking efforts. Such information reduces preemptive violence resulting from fear and misinformation.

Shifting attitudes and building foundations for peace
In Sierra Leone our community outreach programme is strengthening many people's participation in the democratic process - a key to the maintenance of a fragile peace. External evaluations in Burundi found that the radio programmes produced by Studio Ijambo have changed the way people feel about and relate to other ethnic groups in their society. Similarly, evaluations of the interethnic kindergartens we founded in Macedonia have shown them to have significant positive influence on children's views of other ethnic groups, particularly during periods of increased tension.

Equipping communities to prevent and resolve conflicts
Informal tracking and feedback show that many of the vast numbers of people we have trained - 10,000 internally displaced persons in Angola, for instance - go on to implement their new skills, through either establishing new organisations or personally employing the techniques learned. In Macedonia our evaluations show that the Nashe Maalo television series provides children with valuable skills for preventing or resolving conflict with their peers in diverse ethnic groups. We are committed to sharing fully the results of our evaluation and research in ways that will strengthen the field of conflict resolution.

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