Supporting USAID Impact Evaluation in Honduras
In 2016, the Pulte Institute for Global Development was awarded a $1.2 million contract out of the Monitoring and Evaluation Support for Collaborative Learning and Adapting activity, implemented by Dexis Consulting Group for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Honduras.
“One of the Keough School’s goals is to connect research to policy and practice in order to help answer critical questions for development practitioners in the field,” said Scott Appleby, Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. “This important engagement with USAID will lead to more informed strategy for development progress in Honduras and around the world.”
The Pulte Institute collaborated with Laura Miller-Graff, Associate Professor of Psychology and Peace Studies with the Kroc Institute, to develop a risk assessment tool called the Violence-Involved Persons Risk Assessment (VIP-RA); an aggregate of seven psychometric and social risk assessment tools previously validated in various American and European contexts. The team used the VIP-RA to track the progress and changes in youth during and after their involvement in a workforce development program. The tool was also used to inform a performance evaluation of the activity. An article co-authored by the researchers was published in the Journal of Crime and Justice in 2018.
In addition to the creation of the VIP-RA tool, the Pulte Institute collected and analyzed three waves of data from USAID target communities to track progress toward the USAID development objective of increasing citizen security. The team also provided technical assistance for the development and implementation of migration intention measures, including concepts related to resilience and community rootedness.
In the future, the team will be integrating the VIP-RA into additional programs for monitoring and evaluation in Honduras and beyond, and plans to do capacity strengthening work with Honduran research institutions.