"Our Valuing Voices ex-post research of 39 organizations’ evaluations of sustainability shows that most project results decrease (20-90%) as early as two years ex-post in addition to an Asian Development Bank study of post-completion sustainability found that “some early evidence suggests that a ... s many as 40% of all new activities are not sustained beyond the first few years after disbursement of external funding,” Most project exits are in the last quarter and sustainability handover assumptions are not validated expost. Learning from what was sustained helps us know how to exit for sustainability from the very onset of the project as compared to the typical project cycle. We encourage those tasked with funding, designing, implementing, monitoring & evaluating projects to use these longer checklists and view the full recording shared with participants. These checklists are aimed at donors/designers and implementers of foreign aid projects outcomes and impacts and can be adapted by local NGOs, national governments, private sector, academics, to create exit plans. Local participation in creating these and feedback on how well exit is going will help them sustain results." (Page 1) more

"A review of eight projects with end-of-project and post project evaluation reports suggest that post project evaluations can contribute to better understanding of the sustainability of project impacts and identify unexpected and emerging outcomes years after project close. The review highlights som ... e of the methodological issues that are unique to post project (as opposed to end of project) evaluation, and point to the advantages of planning for sustainability measurement from the outset of the project. In the majority of cases, the sampling approach adopted at the endline proved challenging to replicate post project because it was not designed to measure sustainability, or because of access to or demographic changes in the beneficiary population. Finding suitable projects for this review was difficult because so few post project evaluations are done, fewer are publically available, fewer still had comparable final evaluations and included local voices. Agencies that fund post project evaluations offer a range of reasons for doing so: to learn, to promote a success, to inform replication or scale, to provide justification for future funding, to promote accountabilities. What is less explicit is how findings are used within implementing and donor agencies, shared with partners, and influence future programming. As part of this report, Valuing Voices offers an evaluability checklist for doing a post project evaluation from the onset of the project, and a checklist for measuring sustainability through the entire project cycle." (Abstract) more