Given Hapunda

59 everyone may know Benchmarks Use international or national standards as basis for comparison with post evaluation Easily accessible and inexpensive They do not take into account cultural and national variation Cross-sectional Documentation Use documented information about a region or people as basis for comparison Inexpensive and easily accessible Data may be difficult to find and may not be accurate Cross-sectional Rolling baseline profiles Create a profile of observed changes Shows trend of change which is easy to understand Expensive and require advanced methodological skills Un/interrupted time series Conducting Baseline Surveys You need to be clear what the objectives of the baseline study are so that you collect information that is relevant to the baseline and the intervention. A baseline is the bedrock upon which post-evaluation will be done. Therefore, care must be taken to make sure the measures used are not only valid but reliable. It is advised to use a mixed method approach during baseline to improve validation of results. Because you use the baseline as the basis for comparison, the measures used will also be the ones used in post- evaluations. Changing measures will render non-comparability and renders the baseline useless; because you will be comparing “apples and oranges”. Give experts to develop and assess the baseline tools for their validity and reliability. Ideally, combining both qualitative and quantitative measures will yield good results. Collect What You Need not Want Collect only information that you will use, that is information that will answer your objectives and cross-cutting issues. In evaluation surveys, the data collected should answer, in addition to the objectives, impact, relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, utility and governance of the intervention. Cross- cutting issues such as poverty and gender among other relevant information specific to a project that should be collected. The principle is only to collect information you will use. This will focus your data collection and maintain the budget allocated to the baseline survey.