Discuss

Baseline studies are crucial in understanding the impact of a project or program. Without knowing what the base situation was prior to the intervention, how will we know if the project had any effect?

Furthermore, properly constructed baselines can tell us other critical information: did the project have the effect we believed it would have? If not, was this due to project implementation (we targeted the wrong people, for example), project design processes (no or poor conflict analysis, for example) or the underlying theory of change (training village chiefs in mediation to reduce inter-ethnic tensions doesn’t actually do so because village chiefs only work on conflicts they have preference in, for example)?

Hot Resource! Developing a Baseline Study Infographic by PREVAL.org

According to Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers in Designing for Results, “baselines are the most often forgotten component within design, monitoring and evaluation, yet they are key to proving that change has truly taken place.”1

Hot Resource! Designing for Results: Integrating Monitoring and Evaluation into Conflict Transformation Activities, Chapter 5: Baselines by Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers

So, what is a baseline? According to the OECD, a baseline is “an analysis describing the situation prior to a development intervention, against which progress can be assessed or comparisons made.”2 It will usually come before project implementation, but after your proposed design has been funded.

Baseline v. Conflict Analysis

It is important to distinguish between a baseline and a conflict or context analysis: while similar, they are not the same and they serve different purposes. We conduct a baseline in order to establish the status of the area of intended changes for comparison purposes. Conflict analysis, on the other hand, is about understanding key factors and actors in order to inform intervention strategy.3

While conflict analysis is key for informing effective design, a baseline is key for informing progress towards intended goals and objectives. In other words, a conflict analysis comes before a baseline.

Defining the Baseline Scope

Your baseline study should be informed by your project design: what are the goals, objectives, outcomes, impacts, and indicators? Usually, your baseline will need to take initial measurements on key outcome and impact indicators, as well as other, related areas that provide greater depth and triangulation to your indicators. While high-level changes can begin to be assessed with a baseline, the focus is usually on lower and mid-level results such as outcomes.

Hot Resource! Developing a High-Quality Baseline by Salimah Samji and Mona Sur

There are, generally, three potential focuses of a baseline: primary change, secondary change, and assumptions.4

The first, primary change, will always be included in the baseline; this is, after all, the central purpose of the baseline and to not include it would just be silly. Is anyone aware of a reason to NOT include primary change in the baseline?

The second potential purpose is secondary change: to what extent has the intervention affected indirect beneficiaries? These might be secondary target audiences, or simply unintended effects on unintentional audiences. Take, for example, an experience from Search for Common Ground in Macedonia.  A media intervention sought to increase children’s awareness and knowledge of the ethnic ‘other’. While children were the primary target audience, the secondary and in-direct audience was parents, who were frequently engaged in discussion by their children on the show’s themes. Provided that this is recognized in the design phase, a baseline study might seek to assess the attitudes and knowledge of parents on the ethnic ‘other’, as well as how frequently such issues are discussed with their children.

Baselines can also provide information and establish measurements on the assumptions that underpin programming. What information do managers need to determine if their assumptions in the design still hold true? For example, a project seeking to reduce youth on youth violence by training key youth in nonviolence assumes that the key issue in youth on youth violence is a lack of capacity to constructively resolve conflicts nonviolently. A baseline might, then, seek to establish whether this is indeed the case or whether there are external factors or motivations for such violence. It might be found, for example, that youth are being manipulated into violence for political gains—in which case, further activities might be required to achieve the desired reduction in youth on youth violence.

Of course, a high quality baseline requires high quality design: are your goals, objectives and indicators SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)? Is the intervention relevant (i.e., based on a thorough and high-quality conflict analysis)?

Hot Resource! Handbook on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating for Development Results, Box 14, page 63 by UNDP

Baselines are absolutely crucial in understanding the impact of our work. Not only do they provide an initial measurement of the areas of change desired to be affected, they provide key data for making adjustments to your intervention prior to its start—hopefully making your intervention more effective and relevant!

• 1. Cheyanne Church and Mark Rogers, Designing for Results: Integrating Monitoring and Evaluation in Conflict Transformation Activities, Chapter 5: Baseline, p. 62, 2006.
• 2. OECD, Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results-based Management, p. 18, http://dmeforpeace.org/learn/glossaries-key-terms-evaluation-and-results-based-management-15-languages.
• 3. Church and Rogers, Designing for Results, p. 63.
• 4. Church and Rogers, Designing for Results, p. 66.