"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

"Internews Network, a U.S.-based organization that for more than two decades has trained journalists around the world, in 2002 received funding from the United States Agency for International Development to launch a project in Africa to help media improve their coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Cal ... led “Local Voices,” the project expanded to Ethiopia in 2005 and India in 2006. In 2004, Internews Europe started a similar project in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, “Turnaround Time,” with funds from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. That project evolved to do trainings in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. This report evaluates Local Voices and Turnaround Time and aims to help strengthen the continuing training programs [...] Both projects had a similar, overarching goal: To increase the quality and quantity of HIV/AIDS coverage, improving the environment for prevention, treatment and care. Although we have no way of assessing whether the projects had an impact on a societal level, over 1000 journalists went through carefully designed workshops, subsequently printing or broadcasting more than 5600 HIV/AIDS-related stories that Internews mentors often helped produce. Journalists clearly benefited from the trainings at each site, and many praised the program for fundamentally altering how they approach their jobs." (Executive summary) more