People impacted by public policy / practice change

Indicator Phrasing

INDICATOR PHRASING

Number of people currently living in poverty who are positively impacted through the public policy or public practice change you contributed to

Indicator Phrasing

INDICATOR PHRASING: Number of people currently living in poverty who are positively impacted through the public policy or public practice change you contributed to

What is its purpose?

This indicator intends to give a realistic estimate of how many people currently living in poverty are, or will be, positively impacted by a particular public policy or public practice change that you have contributed to. It is one way of estimating the number of people experiencing positive effects spreading from your work.

How to Collect and Analyse the Required Data

It may not always be possible to quantify the number of people benefiting from a particular public policy or public practice change. For example, a global agreement to limit global warming potentially benefits the entire world population. In such cases, it is probably not meaningful to attempt to come up with an estimated number of people positively impacted.

However, for public policy or practice changes that target a more specific group of people, you may be able to come up with an estimate as follows:

Define which particular group the public policy or practice change was intended to benefit;
Work out, or estimate, the size of this group;
Where possible, provide some evidence to support your claim that these people have experienced a positive impact from the policy or practice change.

Some examples of how this indicator could be estimated include:

A project advocated for a government department responsible for disaster prevention to start using a digital early warning system that would ensure that people are alerted in time about a high risk of floods. The department has agreed to use the system. Since the system effectively covers a flood-prone area where 170,000 people live, this number was used as an estimate of how many people benefit from the change the advocacy efforts achieved.
A project’s advocacy campaign targeted three companies selling improved vegetable seeds, asking them to start offering the seeds in smaller packaging, so that even poorer farmers could buy them. Two companies accepted the proposal and started selling small sachets with seeds of selected vegetables. Based on the sales data provided by the two companies for the smaller sachets, the project estimated how many farmers have benefited from this change.

Disaggregate by

This indicator is not normally disaggregated. Where relevant and possible, you could disaggregate the data by gender, age group, and other criteria relevant to the focus of the advocacy efforts that contributed to the public policy or public practice change. You can add this information into the narrative accompanying the indicator update.

Important Comments

In addition to reporting on the number of people benefiting, also provide qualitative information on how they benefit.

This indicator gives only a rough estimate of how many people have benefited. Such estimates are often too optimistic. If you need to have more reliable evidence, you could conduct a survey among a representative sample of the people who were supposed to benefit and measure how many have gained the desired benefits. However, in most circumstances, this is not necessary for Tearfund’s purposes.

Any proper advocacy strategy should already include an initial assessment of how many people are impacted by a given issue, which can help you estimate the benefits brought by successful advocacy efforts to secure a particular policy or practice change.

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