Capacity Strengthening for Improved Implementation: Using Effect Size to Identify the Most Promising Approaches

Presented by: Evan Bloom, Co-Founder and Managing Partner for Innovation, Root Change; Claudia Liebler, Co-Founder and Managing Partner for Services, Root Change

The chances are that almost every capacity strengthening intervention has some positive effect. The question, though, is finding those approaches that bring the greatest results. A recent study by Root Change showed that almost 100 percent of capacity strengthening interventions can stake a claim in making a difference if any effect above zero is considered an achievement. But when did we set our performance bar at zero? Do we really believe that all we need to do is more of what we already have been doing? How do we best strengthen the capacity of local partners as well as our own organizations, and which investments yield the highest returns?

Groundbreaking research in the education sector offers some important lessons in how we might one day answer these difficult questions. Participants learned more about how we can use Effect-Size, an extremely useful method for comparing results over time, to measure the impact of our own capacity strengthening investments.