Impact
Water supplies repaired, classrooms built properly, and communities and public stakeholders trusting each other and collaborating to solve problems.
Over 6,000 problems solved - and behind each one, a story
The approaches we have pioneered represent an important way of ensuring projects and services meet the needs of citizens. What is more, we know it works – about US$1 billion worth of projects and services have been monitored by citizens to date, and out of 9,000 problems identified, over 6,000 have been fixed. Here are a few examples:
Kenya: Water without walking for miles
When water pumps broke, repair was often delayed and people had to walk miles for water. Uchi and Mwanakombo got this and other problems solved.
Nepal: Students with disabilities secure eye tests for all
Mithilesh is partially sighted and felt excluded at school. Now, as chair of the school’s Integrity Club, he’s made life better for his peers.
Afghanistan: Ensuring teachers turn up to work
Teachers often failed to show up at this school in Afghanistan. Now engagement by the Integrity Club has solved the problem. This programme ran from 2018 - 2021.
The impact of our work and partnerships exists on multiple levels and we invest resources in building evidence for it and understanding how and why it happens. We are also keen to learn more about where our impact is less than expected.
Here are a few more ways in which we see impact from our work:
- Young monitors in DR Congo persuaded their school to build better and gender segregated toilets, making it much easier for girls to attend in a place where girls did not go to school because of the lacking toilet facilities.
- Over a year after the widespread destruction of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, people were still waiting to go home. Monitors successfully sped up the reconstruction of homes so that people could get on with their lives following the disaster.
- Monitors in Afghanistan resolved delays in school construction meaning that access to education for children in remote areas has improved (this programme ran from 2017 - 2021).
With so many problems solved, one challenge we face is being able to investigate enough of them so that we can fully understand the impact. This is an area we continue to work on.
Marginalised people benefit from our approach
Citizens in a variety of challenging environments have managed to secure tangible, relatively rapid improvements to essential services, with significant benefits for marginalised people. When comparing citizen monitors who are more marginalised with those who are not (e.g. women vs. men), we have seen marginalised citizens gain (for example) similar levels of confidence to make complaints to local authorities.
- In this initiative in Nepal, we have seen young people with disabilities play a leading role in monitoring and advocating for improved accessibility in schools and even allocation of budget by local authorities to support accessibility in the local area.
Two areas we are keen to understand better are the sustainability and scalability of our approach. These challenges are particularly acute when we consider the importance of maintaining these benefits for everyone, especially the most marginalised.
Other organisations have adopted or adapted our approach
We are seeing CSOs adopt multiple elements of our approach, including current partners but also organisations we have not worked with before (who know about our methodology through partners).
- In Nepal, Integrity Clubs have been successful in improving how schools are run to the extent that other schools in the local area are either starting their own clubs without our support, or requesting our support to do this.
Through working with much larger organisations, like the Aga Khan Foundation and Restless Development, we have been able to apply our approach in new ways, and at a scale that Integrity Action could not manage alone.
Browse our blog and resources for examples of our impact and what we are learning including research, case studies, reports and evaluations.