Contribution

From EvaluationWiki

In the evaluation context, this usually comes up when a client or stakeholder wants to know what contribution to the outcomes resulted from a particular component of the input or support provided by a certain factor or donor. This question is often unanswerable, but the interest in it justifies making an effort to answer it, and there are times when one can do this from the documentations; that is, one may be able to say, for example, that a suggestion made by the expert on sustainability was the factor that ensured the long-term success of a particular food security program. If you know in advance what questions of this kind will be asked, you can set up 'tracers' in the design that will mark the causal path of some contributions and perhaps identify elements in the outcomes that resulted from them; for example, you can arrange that teachers teaching the same discourse analysis skills use different terminologies and see which of these shows up most often in the best student essays on the final exam.