SoCha

SoCha team members specialize in advancing social science solutions to improving applied humanitarian and development interventions. The ME&L team has evaluation experience at the macro and micro level, ranging from national and regional, to community level, using a variety of approaches to measuring effectiveness across a range of geographies and diverse cultural contexts. Team members have developed monitoring systems, including qualitative and Meta evaluation models for impact and performance measurement, rapid field evaluations, design of data collection methods, surveys, and data quality assessments at project, country mission and donor levels. The SoCha team has regional expertise in developing areas, with experience in across Southern, Eastern and Western Africa; the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. Our four primary service areas are: Our four primary service areas are: M³SC and Cost Effectiveness Analysis SoCha's "Mixed Method Measurement of Social Change" (M³SC) is our flagship approach to determining program effectiveness, capturing implementation learning and improving design. M³SC is a variant of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) that has been adapted to international development and humanitarian assistance settings to determine how context, external factors and complex programs contribute to outcomes. We use M³SC to inform learning reviews, support mini-evaluations, and provide ongoing feedback loops to identify which intervention, or combination of interventions, are the most effective for achieving outcomes. M³SC is especially useful for complex programs that seek to understand how various combination of implementation activities work together to contribute to program outcomes in and across a variety of settings. When conducted in cooperation with impact evaluations, M³SC provides a more nuanced picture of how positive social change occurs by answering "how" questions through the rigorous application of comparative methods. SoCha has recently pioneered the application of M³SC to conduct a new kind of Cost Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) of complex programs with multiple components. Whereas traditional CEAs compare a variety of programs across countries to determine which is more cost effective, we compare variation within a single program to identify multiple pathways to achieving the same outcome. We then apply an activity-based costing model to these pathways to determine which are most cost effective. This new type of CEA is especially useful for pilot projects that seek to develop evidence-based proof of concepts before going to scale.