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Showing posts from August, 2008

Performance Measurement as a Critical Leverage Point for Improving International Development Impact

Individuals and organizations need good performance feedback in order to be effective and meet their objectives. In the private sector there is the luxury of sales, profit and other clear measures that indicate output and outcome performance. These measures are used to identify and reinforce successful business patterns, such as effective strategies or high performing individuals, and to disrupt and correct unsuccessful patterns. They are critical to learning, development and long-term success. To survive, private sector organizations have to meet the performance expectations for these measures that are set by their funders. This mechanism helps to ensure that high-performing organizations and individuals are able to succeed and expand their impact while low performing organizations and individuals are not.  Unfortunately, measuring output, and particularly outcome performance is very difficult and generally poorly done in the international development sector. Outputs are often c