Step-by-step guide to using Most Significant Change in Communities

OneVillage Partners (OVP) inspires and equips people to transform their lives and their
communities. Working in Sierra Leone, West Africa, we partner with local communities and assist them to 1) train, empower and mobilize leaders to design projects that address their community’s most pressing, self-identified needs, and 2) create new opportunities for women through economic empowerment and financial literacy training. OVP believes that by letting communities lead their own development, rather than telling them what they need, OVP fosters dignity for all and support equitable and sustainable development.

OVP’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) strategy applies a mixed methods approach to uncover program outcomes and inform learning. Beyond the cache of quantitative methods that OVP utilizes to monitor and evaluate project and program-level outcomes, OVP introduced Most Significant Change (MSC) as a methodology to build capacity, engage community members in learning about their completed projects, and capture the outcomes of OVP’s work. MSC is a participatory evaluation methodology that engages project participants in telling stories of ‘most significant change’ that they experienced throughout an intervention or program.

Click here to download the Step-by-Step Guide.