At TSIC, we are embarking on a journey to develop a new methodology that will help organisations small and large evaluate their impact on system change. We will invite a wide range of organisations, funders and evaluators to contribute and make system change evaluation possible. 

At first, it might not seem like the right time to start thinking about methodological questions – we are in the middle of a global pandemic, after all. But as the outbreak is exacerbating the gaps and flaws of systems all around the world, the need to achieve change at system level is more obvious than ever. Interest for system change evaluation is certainly there. TSIC has been conducting social impact assessment since 2008, and alongside, we have incubated and scaled social change interventions which force us to think about systems change. But for a long time, we haven’t been able to merge the two together – but we feel this is a really important time to make methodological innovations in this area.

Last week at the Skoll Word Forum’s Virtual Edition, TSIC hosted a webinar title “Co-creating a system change evaluation methodology”, which attracted close to 300 attendants. This webinar was the first stage of the methodology development. Our aim was to get feedback on our general approach, based on the 5R framework from USAID, and find system changers, funders and evaluators who would like to engage in the co-creation process. If you are curious to discover our approach, you can find the presentation here. 

We learned a lot from our participants. They confirmed that the 5R framework, which is normally not used for evaluation, could serve a good basis to understand change within system. In the Q&A and comments they left us, they reminded us of the importance of culture in systems and the role of incentives and power dynamics for system change. 

Next steps 

We are looking to conduct the research and co-creation phase in April. Co-creation will take the form of workshops during which evaluators and system changers work together to build research designs fit for measuring system change for specific interventions. In May, we will focus on digesting learnings from the workshops and turn them into a practical methodology. 
If you are a system changer, system change funder, an evaluator or just really curious and you want to participate in the co-creation process, please contact us! You will find us here: [email protected]