Valuing long-term change over short-term outcomes in early childhood development
Tracking the pace of transformation is not a straightforward or speedy task when you are focused on delivering community-driven systems change and measuring long-term impacts on a community.
Even before a program can properly begin, there is a whole vital process of engaging the community in creating their vision for change, identifying their indicators of success, and participatorily establishing baselines – and that’s just for starters.
So why not just stick with the far simpler task of measuring short-term outcomes? In an initiative to address food insecurity and shortages, for example, it’s easy to track the number of meals distributed and straightforward to explain the impact a specific initiative had: a set number of meals were served, and for that day those people had sufficient nutrition. The real question is, what happens next? When the program serves its final meal, and when the final dollar is spent, how have the conditions that create food insecurity been changed? Where do the community members who have come to rely on these meals go the following day? Or next week? Or next year?
When Firelight committed itself to adopting community-driven systems change, we also committed ourselves to reimagining how we conceptualized, tracked, and valued long-term change created by the initiatives we support. Learning and evaluation are still paramount, but we have sought to adjust our mindset around what we consider change to be, what outcomes we and our CBO partners value, and how we can hold space to recognize and celebrate surprising or unanticipated results that emerge from the work we support.
Working together, we are beginning to see some exciting results from this mindset shift in our work supporting more than a dozen organizations across Zambia and Malawi to introduce and expand on indigenous early childhood development practices for children under the age of 6 years.
The project, which began in 2020 and is due to continue to 2026, prioritized surfacing the root causes of problems the community was facing, from poverty to inadequate food to inadequate access to Early Child Development Centers.
It aimed to work hand-in-hand with, and be guided by, all those who will be involved in the project from the outset for the simple reason that a collaborative, cooperative partnership is more likely to be successful than an individually-designed, top-down approach.
Breadth of stakeholder engagement plays a critical role in community-driven change because systems change means connecting all, and not just some, parts of a system. Indeed, these broad connections across a range of stakeholders – from parents and teachers to government officials and traditional leaders – helped deliver some of the unexpected longer-term shifts in the Malawi program. On one occasion, traditional leaders, who had gained a deep understanding of the project’s goals and resources, offered to allocate land to the ECD centers and even created by-laws asking each community member to contribute building materials. The new bonds formed between the CBOs and these traditional leaders were invaluable in this case because they operate independently of Firelight and are key to the sustainability of community-driven systems change.
In Zambia, the government itself has begun to adopt community-driven systems change. Having participated in the onboarding workshop, ministry personnel at the district level started adopting elements of the approach into their ongoing interactions with the community. This has included delegating the annual infrastructure maintenance budget to schools and ECD centers as well as a change in the government’s role from inspector or decision-maker to funder and facilitator.
Consultation with local government is another essential part of community-driven systems change. We invest time in building relationships with government officials in relevant ministries, sharing the goals of the initiative with them and requesting their input into the CBOs we approach as potential partners. As the project progresses, officials are invited to join meetings and onboarding sessions to share the government strategy and connect with the CBOs and communities involved. From that point on, government engagement is managed by the CBOs and communities.
Again, these relationships led to unexpected, longer-term benefits. A good example is the case of the CBO that was able to reduce malnutrition rates after local Ministry of Health officials introduced it to a care group model approach to working with people living with HIV and AIDS in the community. Through this approach, the CBO identified and trained community mobilizers on good health, nutrition, and related ECD issues. They were encouraged to train another wave of community members, and so on, to cascade the knowledge out into the community. This cyclical approach is inherently sustainable, particularly in the ECD context where the program is limited to children under 6. As one parent’s child ages out of the group, parents who are having new children are welcomed into the group.
These trainings have resulted in a significant reduction in malnutrition for community members living under the poverty line, who have begun home gardens and to focus on more nutritious ingredients. An increasing number of mothers are choosing to deliver in the community health facilities, reducing mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS and registering children at birth, in turn ensuring they have birth certificates that are necessary for future qualification for loans and other programs.
With community-driven systems change, CBOs are encouraged to look beyond a rigidly set plan and instead pursue natural evolutions and connections as they emerge. In this Zambian case, the knowledge sharing was not an explicit goal of the project, yet its ultimate impact on the overall success of the initiative is undeniable.
None of this detracts from the natural desire to know that a program or initiative is achieving its purpose, particularly given the pressure many organizations are under to ‘prove’ that their work is worthwhile and effective even on very short time frames. But when our grantmaking, learning, and evaluation practices prioritize the most obvious or immediate results, we artificially limit ourselves to a narrow range of options that do not always produce the change we ultimately seek.
Long-term work at the community and governmental level is deeply valuable, despite the fact that its impact may be harder to track than more traditional measures of short-term success. However, it is the key to powerful, sustainable change that lasts long after a single initiative or grant. In the case of early childhood development, we’re seeing again and again the amazing impact of community and government level support. As we continue to support this project, we’re keen to follow the lead of the wonderful community, CBOs, and governments who continue to demonstrate their investment and shared vision for change. These efforts might take longer to bear fruit, but it is worth the wait when it can meet the needs of the community and allow that community to truly thrive.