Recently on openGlobalRights, Emma Naughton and Kevin Kelpin argued that the evaluation of human rights progress requires a people-centred, light-touch approach that works with the grain of front-line staff’s work. This process, they suggest, must be flexible enough to account for the non-linear nature of human rights change and it must find ways of including rights-holders. As Naughton and Kelpin rightly note, evaluating human rights work is about people.
Their conclusions echo much of our own thinking over the last few years within Amnesty International. Such conversations must, inevitably, begin with questions around what kind of impact we want to have and what kind of organisation we want to be. How and what results you measure has an effect on what kind of organisation you become. It is relatively easy, for example, to measure website hits, social media shares, or signatures on a petition. But it may be actions that are harder or more expensive to measure comprehensively—such as the “hard yards” behind the scenes in lobbying decision-makers—that could be making the difference. Putting in place ways to measure and report on website hits, for instance, at the expense of other elements, would encourage teams to see our work through that lens. This could potentially change our sense of our own impact, the decisions we might take, and incentives that effect the future actions of staff.
We try to capture this nuanced, qualitative information on a central database, in which teams running our projects can enter updates on a monthly basis. This information then informs bi-annual project reviews in which project teams build on this data to reflect on how their projects are going, and make adjustments in strategy if required. However, we are currently preparing a new Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework for our Strategic Goals 2016-2019 through which we will build-on, expand, and deepen our ability to understand our impact.
