Evaluation for Smart Power for Rural Development
The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) funded programme (SPRD) aimed to promote sustainable business models delivering renewable electricity to the households and enterprises. By enhancing access to quality electricity, SPRD aimed to spur economic development among the poor consumers and underserved rural population. The initiative have focused in the areas where a new organization, Smart Power India (SPI) has been established by the RF. SPI partnered with energy service companies, telecom tower operators, investors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies to electrify 1,000 villages during the intervention period. Sambodhi was engaged with SPRD as its evaluation partner.
The evaluation focused on household level impact on improved quality of life of the consumers, micro-enterprise development and community-level. Sambodhi is engaged with SPRD as its evaluation partner. The planned evaluation framework is evolving in nature responding to the changes in underlying theories and assumptions, methods as well as the goals of SPRD. The proposed framework has two arms (Impact Evaluation & Implementation Monitoring) which are reinforced by well-defined learning structures that assure completion of a learning loop by design.
1. Impact Evaluation: The proposed evaluation questions focus on household-level impact on improved quality of life, micro-enterprise development, and community-level GDP and GDP+. The total value of all goods and services produced within the village during a given year will be assessed to calculate the GDP. In addition to measuring the GDP of the village, we will also collect information about some social factors and combine them to measure the GDP+ of the village. Additionally, the evaluation framework also focusses on measuring inclusive growth, gender equity and improved resilience to stress and shocks.
Implementation Monitoring: Implementation monitoring were conducted to analyse the effectiveness of program operations, implementation, and service delivery at the communitylevel. The implementation monitoring had two components: rapid reviews to track changes in short-term indicators and quality of community engagement to assess the implementation strength. The monitoring of the key output-outcome indicators will be an ongoing exercise and will help to provide support for implementation and fine tune the interventions. Also, spatial report cards will be developed and used as a summative measure of performance of a unit of implementation i.e. cluster.