Investing in Peace
Capturing the full value of building peace assets
A scenario: Rehabilitation and reintegration (R&R) for former child soldiers
The following is a fictional scenario, inspired by real-world programs.
At age 9, Jean-Luc was not thinking about politics, minerals, or the borders on a map. He was thinking about survival. That’s when an armed group in North Kivu, Eastern Congo, abducted him and he became a child soldier in one of the world’s most persistent conflicts.
By 12, Jean-Luc had seen and done things no child should experience. In many stories like his, that would be the end: a lost boy in a forgotten war, destined to cycle between violence, poverty, and suffering - if he survived at all.
But at 15, a rehabilitation and reintegration program offered Jean-Luc a second chance. Through trauma counselling, education, conflict resolution training, and vocational skills, he learned to rebuild not just his life, but his sense of self. Today, Jean-Luc is a solar panel engineer, bringing electricity to schools across North Kivu.
How do we measure value in stories like Jean-Luc’s? To some, funding rehabilitation and reintegration (R&R) programs for former child soldiers looks like a bad investment: expensive, risky, and hard to justify in financial terms. Some may even see it as unfair: why invest in people who have committed violence? But for Jean-Luc, the investment gave him a second chance at life, a chance for redemption.
Jean-Luc’s transformation illustrates the multiplicative value of R&R programs that prioritise human dignity over short-term financial calculations. At the individual level, these initiatives restore agency to people like Jean-Luc by addressing trauma through counselling and equipping survivors with marketable skills like solar engineering. For Jean-Luc’s community, the program converts a security risk into an asset: he is now a contributing member of the community. His solar installations power classrooms and clinics, directly addressing infrastructure gaps in a region where 92% of the population is without access to grid electricity.
At the societal level, interventions like this disrupt cycles of violence by demonstrating alternatives to militia recruitment - a critical step in Eastern DRC, where armed groups abducted or recruited over 400 children in the first two months of 2025 alone. Programs fostering economic self-sufficiency also reduce relapse rates; such programs provide the skills and opportunities to prevent re-recruitment or relapse into armed groups or violence, especially when combined with psychosocial support and broader community reintegration efforts.
Critics, focusing on financial costs and risks, may overlook the compounding returns of these programs. Jean-Luc’s solar projects now employ six other former combatants, creating a micro-economy that benefits 17,000 residents annually. Moreover, the “redemption dividend” extends beyond economic impacts. Jean-Luc’s visible success builds community trust in reintegration processes, making families more likely to report recruitment attempts. When former child soldiers become ambassadors of non-violent change, they reshape local perceptions of justice and possibility. In a region where mineral wealth has fuelled decades of child exploitation, Jean-Luc’s story redefines value: not in dollars per kilowatt-hour, but in generations of children who can now study under electric lights rather than endanger themselves and others in armed conflict.
Imagine doing a social cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to understand the value of this scenario
There's increasing evidence of how expensive conflict is. The Institute for Economics and Peace estimated the global cost of conflict at $19.1 trillion in 2023. Conflict prevention reduces these costs, with new estimates that a dollar of prevention can return up to $103 in reduced social and economic costs related to conflict. This relationship between resources invested and value created is called a Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) and is one of the key indicators that comes from a social cost-benefit analysis (CBA) or Social Return on Investment (SROI).1
CBA is a powerful economic method of evaluation that involves identifying, quantifying, attributing, and placing monetary values on resources invested in an intervention (costs) and the consequences of the intervention (benefits), adjusting them for timing (a process called discounting) and summarising the aggregate societal value in an indicator such BCR (essentially, benefits divided by costs) or Net Present Value (NPV; benefits minus costs).
If we did a CBA, we could include costs such as direct program expenses, administrative and logistical overheads. To illustrate, the average cost of rehabilitating and reintegrating one person is about $2,000 in South Sudan and may be comparable in DRC. We may be able to quantify, attribute, and place monetary valuations on some benefits, such as:
Peace dividends: reduced militia recruitment reduces conflict recurrence risks, saving security costs and economic losses associated with homicide - for example, a 2013 study estimated that the annual global-level economic impact of homicides of children in conflict-affected countries was $49.7 billion.
Economic returns: income generation and its flow-on effects to the local micro-economy.
Long-term returns on education: each additional year of schooling increases future earnings.
Environmental externalities: although Jean-Luc’s employment as a solar engineer is one illustrative scenario out of many ways former child combatants may learn marketable skills and contribute to their communities, it does illustrate environmental impacts that can stem from programs like this. For example, as solar projects replace diesel generators, particulate pollution and carbon dioxide emissions are reduced.
This analysis may find that the monetised benefits exceed costs, justifying investment in peace building. We won’t know until we’ve done the analysis. Either way, there are limitations to indicators like benefit-cost ratios. For example, benefits that we may not be able to monetise include:
Social cohesion: Jean-Luc’s and others’ visible redemption strengthens community trust in reintegrating processes, making families more likely to report recruitment attempts. This social capital, though highly valued, is hard to monetise.
Redemption dividends: Former combatants like Jean-Luc become ambassadors for non-violence, persuading others to surrender to UN forces.
Public health benefits: lower lifetime prevalence of PTSD and other mental health disorders, improving quality of life and lifetime earning potential.
Inter-generational trauma mitigation: programs breaking cycles of violence reduce future mental health burdens on survivors’ children.
Other inter-generational impacts: for example, children in solar-powered schools gain extra study hours daily, indirectly boosting regional literacy rates.
Human dignity: the restoration of agency and self-worth defies monetary valuation but is central to sustainable peace.
There are other limitations to CBA too, as summarised in this guide. For example,
Aggregation of values: By converting diverse outcomes (such as reduced violence, increased school attendance, and economic productivity) into a single monetary metric, CBA risks masking the unique importance of each and may overlook whose interests are prioritised, potentially sidelining voices of those most affected by conflict. Inattention to these dynamics may inadvertently lead to future violence.
Process value: CBA’s focus on end results such as aggregate reductions in violence and economic gains can neglect the value of fair, participatory processes in rehabilitation - like destigmatisation, community dialogue, or inclusive decision-making - that are vital for legitimacy and sustainable peace but may not show up as direct benefits in the analysis.
Trade-offs between breadth and precision: While some monetary valuations, such as market-derived prices, offer a reasonable level of accuracy, when we expand the scope to include non-market values (e.g., via surveys, proxies, or literature) the increased comprehensiveness comes at the cost of reduced reliability and certainty.
While CBA (and SROI) don’t entirely overlook broader, intangible values, their treatment of these factors is often limited. Typically, such methods supplement quantitative findings with qualitative descriptions, acknowledging intangible factors not included in the spreadsheet analysis. However, they rarely go further to systematically assess the significance or value of these factors. As a result, the benefits that are hardest to quantify - often among the most important ones - may remain underexplored or undervalued.
To address these gaps, evaluation should not rely solely on CBA for this program. Instead, it should integrate insights from economic analysis with a wider range of considerations, judging value on the basis of multiple strands of evidence. This doesn’t mean substituting subjective opinion for rigour. Rather, it means making warranted judgements - conclusions reached through agreed-upon criteria, supported by evidence, and articulated through transparent reasoning. In the next section we introduce a framework designed to achieve exactly this.
Taking a broader perspective
The Value for Investment (VfI) approach was developed to provide clear answers to value-for-money questions in complex programs and policies where economic methods and metrics alone are not enough. VfI is an evaluation system designed to determine how well resources are used, whether sufficient value is created to justify the resource use, and how more value could be created from the resources invested. It isn’t a replacement for existing methods and tools; instead, it provides a structured wrap-around framework to select, align, and combine those methods and tools.
VfI frames policies and programs as investments in value propositions (e.g., the promise to do something that has value to people, such as addressing a social problem or opportunity). The approach hinges on defining an agreed framework to make sense of evidence on a transparent basis.
The approach is guided by four key principles:
Inter-disciplinarity: combining economic and evaluative thinking to gain complementary insights from both disciplines.
Mixed methods: purposefully combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to reach a fuller understanding of the program and its value.
Evaluative reasoning: interpreting evidence through the lens of explicit criteria and standards to judge performance and value on a transparent basis.
Participatory: engaging stakeholders in co-designing the evaluation and making sense of the evidence to support evaluation ethicality, validity, credibility and use.
A VfI evaluation follows a sequence of eight steps, making it intuitive to learn and practical to use. The design steps involve:
Understanding the program and articulating its value proposition
Selecting key aspects of the value proposition to focus on (criteria)
Defining what the evidence would look like if the selected aspects were ‘good’ (standards)
Determining what kinds of evidence are needed to address the criteria and standards, and what mix of methods will deliver that evidence.
Step 1: Understand the program - including its value proposition
In any evaluation it’s a good idea to start by ensuring the evaluators, commissioners, and others involved have a shared understanding of the intervention to be evaluated, the context in which it is situated, who the stakeholders are and what is at stake for them, who will use the evaluation and how they will use it, and other important considerations. It is also at this stage that a theory of change may be developed (or reviewed, if one already exists).
The VfI approach also involves articulating the value proposition of the investment. When a decision-maker allocates resources to a program, they are investing in “a proposition about the value of a course of action”. An important preliminary step in a VfI evaluation is to describe the value proposition, because, if we can define the program’s value proposition, we will be better placed to evaluate it.
In business, a value proposition is a declaration of intent that communicates the benefits of a product or service to customers. It is beneficial for social investments to articulate clear value propositions too - though there’s extra complexity because the people who receive the services and the people paying for them are typically different groups, so questions of “value to/from whom?” and “who decides?” are critically important.
A value proposition complements a theory of change to more explicitly consider value. Theories of change tend to focus mostly on the middle two boxes of the following diagram - how organisational actions produce outputs leading to outcomes and impacts. The value proposition takes a wider-angle view that includes the resources invested, the value that people place on the resources, actions and impacts, and the mechanisms that convert resources into value at each step.
An intuitive way to begin developing a value proposition is to work through the following series of questions with stakeholders:
To whom is the investment valuable, and how is it valuable to them?
How does the investment address inequities, or fairly allocate resources, actions, impacts and value?
What outcomes and impacts would substantiate the difference the investment makes?
What ways of working would help to maximise the value produced by the investment?
What resources are invested by whom, and what does good stewardship of resources look like?
To illustrate, the following sections outline the value proposition of our fictitious R&R program.
To whom is the investment valuable, and how is it valuable to them?
The investment in R&R for former child soldiers is valuable to individuals, communities, nation states, and the international community. At each of these levels, a recurring theme is the notion of building assets around peace. Investment differs from spending or consumption because it’s about building assets - whether financial, economic, social, cultural, or environmental - which are sustained and provide ongoing returns.
Individual level: Value to former child soldiers. The primary value is to the children and youth who were recruited or abducted into armed groups. For these individuals, R&R programs provided trauma counselling, education, vocational training, and psychosocial support, helping them to recover from severe trauma, rebuild their identities, and acquire marketable skills for decent employment. This support is essential for their wellbeing, future prospects, and ability to reintegrate into society as contributing members.
To Jean-Luc, the investment transformed his life from one of violence and suffering to one of dignity, purpose, and ability to meet his basic needs. This investment is growing the asset of human capital - his wellbeing and his ability to contribute productively to his community. By installing solar panels, Jean-Luc earns an income and can take care of his basic needs. He pays taxes and provides a community service (electricity to schools).
Community level: Value to families and communities. Families benefit when their children are safely returned and supported in their transition back to civilian life. Communities gain when former child soldiers become productive, peaceful citizens rather than sources of insecurity or stigma. Successful reintegration can also help restore trust and social cohesion, as former combatants demonstrate positive change and contribute to local development.
Every person who is successfully reintegrated into the community reduces the risk of renewed violence, builds trust, and helps the community heal. Providing electrification boosts local economic development. The investment is growing assets of community resilience and economic infrastructure. Schools with electricity can access ICT infrastructure that is critical for educating students for the modern economy. With this education, students are better prepared for the modern workforce and contribute to their communities in other ways.
State level: Value to broader society and national development. This program disrupts cycles of violence by offering alternatives to militia recruitment and reducing the risk of re-recruitment or relapse into conflict. It also addresses broader development goals by improving education, public health, and economic stability in post-conflict regions. National governments benefit from increased security, reduced conflict, and progress toward peacebuilding and sustainable development.
Reintegrated former combatants lower the costs for security forces (military action against militias, prisons, etc) and, when people like Jean-Luc build skilled labor, they are able to contribute to higher GDP. At this level, the investment is growing the asset of stability. This is needed to encourage future investments and promote economic growth and workforce expansion. To fully realise these benefits, the program needs to be readily scalable and cost-effective at scale.
International community level: Value to implementing organisations, donors, and neighbouring countries. NGOs, UN agencies, and donor governments value this program as it aligns with humanitarian, peacebuilding and development objectives, advancing global agendas for child protection and conflict prevention. It reduces the need and future costs of peacekeeping missions, humanitarian assistance, and counterterrorism operations.
For neighbouring countries, it reduces conflict contagion, displacement, and migration flows that pressure neighbours’ scarce resources. It improves conditions for investment, trade, and environmental stewardship in Eastern Congo, which is one of the most resource-rich places on the planet – and essential for global supply chains. Multiple assets are built at this level, which provide conditions for regional stability and security, an improved investment climate, environmental and economic stewardship.
How does the investment address inequities, or fairly allocate resources, actions, impacts and value?
Jean-Luc didn’t grow up thinking “I want to be a child soldier by the time I’m 9.” His story is one that illustrates structural injustices: born into conflict, poverty, and instability. He and the thousands like him bear the costs of violence they didn’t start and suffer under systems that fail to protect them.
Critics of rehabilitation and reintegration often argue that investing money in these former combatants isn’t fair, because many people also live under this system and don’t perpetrate violence. But if we think of equity as responding to different levels of harm and vulnerability, rather than about treating everyone equally, then we can see that people like Jean-Luc are at a heightened risk of exclusion and re-recruitment and therefore need access to a higher level of intervention. In this way, the targeted investments toward people like Jean-Luc prevent future violence traps (poverty, ongoing conflict, instability) from compounding.
Investing in Jean-Luc’s rehabilitation and reintegration also creates many shared values. Importantly, the value of these investments extends beyond the individual. As Jean-Luc’s story shows, effective reintegration creates ripple effects. Intervening increases the likelihood that his ripple effect will be one of healing, transformation, and restoration of dignity for him, his community, and beyond. The investment prevents cycles of violence, reduces risk of re-recruitment, and generates shared community benefits such as increased trust, safety, and economic opportunity. Conversely, failure to intervene increases the likelihood that the ripple effect will be one of violence and ongoing suffering–another generation lost to egregious violence with no end in sight.
To fully address the complex needs of former child soldiers like Jean-Luc, effective rehabilitation and reintegration must also prioritise inclusivity and meaningful community engagement. This means ensuring that reintegrated individuals have equitable access to psychosocial support and that services are delivered in ways that foster acceptance within the community. Family and community participation in designing these programs - especially through culturally responsive approaches - can help dismantle exclusionary practices and historical power imbalances.
By embedding formal mechanisms for marginalised groups to share in decision-making, and by redistributing agency through participatory monitoring and evaluation systems, communities can help prevent the recurrence of harm and empower those most affected. Economic rebalancing, such as conflict-sensitive procurement and the transfer of assets to community trusts, alongside guarantees of living wages, are crucial for breaking cycles of exploitation. Additionally, supporting cultural equity through local languages and traditional conflict resolution, and promoting generational equity by investing in trauma-informed education and community-managed resources, ensures that the benefits of reintegration are both deep and lasting.
These holistic strategies create the foundation for equitable and sustainable peace and opportunity, not just for individuals like Jean-Luc, but for entire communities and future generations.
What outcomes and impacts would substantiate the difference the investment makes?
The value proposition differentiates value (the merit, worth, and significance that people and groups place on something) from impact (real changes in people, places and things, caused by actions fuelled by the investment). This is an important distinction, underscoring the need to define the value proposition in addition to a theory of change. However, it doesn’t exclude impact from consideration. To the contrary, impact is important in value-for-money assessment because “it would be difficult to justify that resources were used well in the absence of positive impacts”.
Examples of outcomes/impacts to pay attention to in this instance, that will help us to gauge whether the program is likely to create long-term value in the ways described above, include:
At the individual level:
Employment rates post-rehabilitation
Community acceptance (e.g., the community doesn’t stigmatize and ostracize people like Jean-Luc)
Psychosocial wellbeing (reduced PTSD or other psychological symptoms; substance use recovery, reduced suicidal ideation, improved social skills, etc)
Prevention of recidivism
At the community level:
Infrastructure (e.g., more schools electrified by solar power)
Increased local economic activity (more employment, stimulating the local markets, contributing to reduced poverty rates)
Improved perceptions of safety
Increased social cohesion
At the state/system level:
Reduced prison populations
Decreased humanitarian aid dependency
Decreased conflict
Increased foreign direct investment (FDI).
What ways of working would help to maximise the value produced by the investment?
There’s a lot to unpack here. To give a few examples:
Adopt the “nothing about us, without us” principle. Programs designed by and with local communities are most likely to be relevant, accepted by the community, and sustained after donor funding ends. In Jean-Luc’s case, this would mean developing the rehabilitation and reintegration program with, by, and through former combatants, local leaders, families, survivors, and community organisations to ensure the R&R programs are culturally appropriate and address community needs.
Focus on R&R as long-term prevention. Even though R&R happens after a conflict, it’s far more helpful to think of such interventions as future prevention rather than a response to current violence. This shift in framing helps us see R&R as a long-term investment in breaking communities out of violence traps, and in this way, the programming is proactive rather than reactive.
Take an integrated, systemic, and multi-level approach. Conflict happens inside an ecosystem, and peacebuilding needs to do the same. Combining interventions across a host of sectors - psychosocial support, livelihoods, education, community reconciliation - amplifies impact. Similarly, as we see above, Jean-Luc’s ripple effect touches different levels (individual, community, state, global) and so designing programs for people like Jean-Luc needs to take this into consideration. Our observation has been that often, we program at the individual level without awareness or intention toward this broader multi-level effect, and as a result, our interventions are not as impactful as they could be.
Employ strong monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) and adaptive management. Any peacebuilding practitioner or MEL specialist knows that traditional MEL does not get you far. Applying traditional MEL is how we end up counting meaningless things, like how many people attend a training. In these kinds of R&R programs, real-time learning and approaches like developmental evaluation are far more meaningful and valuable to effective programming. The programs need to be free to adapt without bureaucratic red tape, which means funders need to treat these programs as the complex innovations they are, where the goals may not be known at the beginning - and less like producing a widget that can be tracked against quarterly metrics and reporting.
What resources are invested, and by whom? What does good stewardship of resources look like?
Financial resources in this kind of program would include direct funding to support the full continuum of R&R for former child soldiers - e.g., for trauma counselling, psychosocial support, education, vocational training, family tracing and reunification, community reconciliation, and livelihood programs - as well as financial resources to support the administration and coordination of the program.
Good stewardship of financial resources is not about keeping costs as low as possible. Good stewardship is about using resources wisely, fairly, and in a way that will maximise the value of the investment across multiple levels of society.
Traditionally, the financial resources invested in these programs have been project-based, donor-funded primarily from the UN and/or foreign assistance from countries like the US under USAID. This isn’t ideal for a host of reasons. Most recently, we saw how the politics in the US drastically changed spending on these kinds of programs by abolishing USAID entirely. While the international development sector has made important contributions, achieving truly sustainable development - especially in Africa - remains an ongoing challenge, with mixed results to date. We need to reconceptualise where the financial resources for these kinds of programs will come from in the future.
But value for money is never just about the money. Other important resources that are essential to the success of the program include human resources (specialised staff with a broad range of skills) and community resources (such as the involvement of local leaders, families, survivors, and community organisations to ensure cultural relevance, local ownership, and legitimacy).
Human resources have often come from a blend of international and local practitioners: NGOs, social workers, psychologists, clergy, trainers, community leaders, elders, former combatants, etc. The group of people who “touch” the programming may not all be compensated, and their compensation may not reflect their full value to the program. However, their participation is crucial to provide expertise, counselling, training, local knowledge, and negotiation with the community.
In summary
By working through the series of questions above, we have created a long-form value proposition - a shared, agreed construct that we can use as the foundation for our evaluation, to investigate the extent to which the investment meets this value proposition.
Now that we have worked through the detail, we can also summarise the value proposition in a sentence or two, which is useful for communication purposes.
Value proposition:
Investing in the rehabilitation and reintegration of former child soldiers builds lasting assets - human, social, economic, and political - that transform individual lives, heal communities, stabilise nations, and strengthen global security. It’s a strategic, equitable investment in breaking cycles of violence and creating sustainable peace and prosperity.
This value proposition is illustrative. In a real-world evaluation, we would define the value proposition in collaboration with stakeholders. Moreover, the value proposition is only the first step in the evaluation design process. The next steps involve identifying aspects of the value proposition to focus on (criteria) and describing what they would look like if they were ‘good’ (standards).
Step 2: Criteria
When we articulated the value proposition of the investment, we described it in rich detail. This is an essential part of reaching a shared, agreed-upon understanding of what we are evaluating and recognising its complexity. To make the evaluation systematic and manageable, the next step is to examine the value proposition and consider which critical factors make the greatest difference to whether the investment creates a lot of value or a little. These factors are good candidates for inclusion as criteria.
In practical terms, criteria are selected aspects of performance that matter enough to be focal points in an evaluation. In logical terms, they are essential components of a framework to support transparency in reaching and reporting evaluative judgements. Note that criteria are different from indicators: Criteria describe the aspects of performance that matter rather than how they will be measured or otherwise evidenced (that comes later, in step 4).
If you’re familiar with the 5Es of VfM (economy, efficiency, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and equity), you may have already noticed that the value proposition questions align with this framework. There’s no definitive set of VfM criteria. Criteria need to be determined contextually. However, the 5Es are quite a good set of prompts for scoping and organising contextual definitions of good resource use and value creation, because they systematically consider different levels of the value chain. See Julian’s free guide to the 5Es for more.
Examples of criteria that we would consider for a VfM assessment of this program include:
Economy: good stewardship of financial, human, and community resources
Local involvement in program design and governance (e.g., program leadership by local organisations, community participation in design and monitoring)
Management of human capital to support program sustainability and community wellbeing (e.g., cultural alignment, mix of skills recruited and retained, ensuring a safe and supportive environment)
Strategic and ethical management of funds to ensure sustainable peacebuilding impact while ensuring accountability and local ownership (e.g., secure multi-year funding commitments aligned with community-identified priorities, ethical procurement, rigorous financial oversight with transparent reporting, needs-based resource distribution and alignment with conflict sensitivity principles).
Efficiency: ways of working that maximise value from the investment
Local ownership and legitimacy (e.g., inclusive co-creation with former combatants, survivors, families and local leaders; transparent and inclusive decision-making structures; leadership pipelines that transfer technical and financial control to local actors within defined timelines)
Long-term prevention focus (e.g., future-oriented design, interventions addressing intergenerational healing, structural reinvestment of funds to community-managed endowments for education and job creation beyond donor timelines)
Multi-sectoral programming that mirrors conflict complexity across levels (e.g., nested interventions linking individual counselling with community reconciliation; economic support paired with social healing; cross-system leverage to institutionalise trauma-informed practices across education and health ministries)
Adaptive learning systems (e.g., real-time feedback loops enabling evidence-driven evolution; developmental evaluation to support ongoing development of the program)
Effectiveness: achieving positive outcomes in conflict prevention and community resilience
Holistic reintegration ensuring dignity, security and social belonging (e.g., employment pathways aligned with local market needs and personal aspiration, active dismantling of stigma through reconciliation processes, trauma recovery and building psychosocial resilience)
Preventing future conflict (e.g., disrupting and reducing relapse and recruitment/abduction, fewer conflict events)
Fostering community resilience (e.g., functional non-violent conflict mechanisms, improved social cohesion)
Shared prosperity and trust through community-level action (e.g., public spaces reclaimed; resolving historical grievances; co-creating shared futures)
Structural reforms institutionalising community-led peace dividends (e.g., reinvestment of military budgets for participatory disarmament and local governance; transitioning from humanitarian relief to community-managed development funds).
Equity: addressing inequities, fairly distributing program resources and benefits
Inclusivity in service delivery (e.g., acceptance of reintegrated individuals, equitable access to psychosocial support)
Community engagement (e.g., family participation in culturally-responsive design)
Systematic dismantling of exclusionary practices and power imbalances (e.g., formal mechanisms with marginalised groups to address historical injustices; power-sharing mandates in decision-making arrangements)
Redistributing agency in peacebuilding processes (e.g., participatory MEL systems co-designed with excluded communities; veto-right systems to block harmful policies through community oversight panels)
Economic rebalancing, transforming extractive systems into equitable platforms (e.g., conflict-sensitive procurement, transfer of donor-funded infrastructure to community trusts with anti-corruption standards; living wage guarantees)
Cultural equity (e.g., conducting dialogues in local languages with trauma-informed translators; embedding traditional conflict resolution practices)
Generational equity (e.g., breaking cycles of inherited disadvantage through trauma-informed education, transfer of program assets to community-managed entities).
Cost-effectiveness: meeting the program’s value proposition to an extent that justifies the investment
Economic and social value relative to investment (e.g., as indicated through cost-benefit or break-even analysis)
Stakeholder value (extent to which the program creates value as anticipated at the individual, community, state, and international levels)
Scalability and sustainability (e.g., stakeholder support for scaling; future-facing cost analysis and CBA indicate affordability and sustainability at scale).
Step 3: Standards
Whereas criteria represent the aspects of performance and value that we will focus on, standards are levels of performance, describing critical differences between (for example) excellent, good, adequate, and poor value.
To illustrate, here is a generic set of standards that we often use to calibrate program-specific standards. These standards come from Oxford Policy Management’s guide to assessing value for money.
For example, when developing standards for each of the criteria above, we would consider what the evidence would look like if the investment was meeting all reasonable expectations. This would guide our definitions of ‘good’ value. We would also identify what the evidence would show if the investment wasn’t meeting all expectations but was fulfilling minimum requirements and showing acceptable progress. This would guide our definitions of ‘adequate’ value.
Step 4: Determine evidence needs
After defining criteria and standards, we are ready to identify relevant sources of evidence. This sequence ensures the evidence is meaningful, measures the right changes, and is appropriately nuanced. At this stage, we determine what evidence is needed and will be credible to support sound evaluative judgements, and what mix of methods to use, including context-appropriate approaches to causal inference.
Examining the criteria and standards usually reveals that the evidence we need will come from multiple sources. Credible evidence for VfM should go beyond what is easily counted and include what truly matters. This usually involves drawing on numeric, qualitative, economic, and financial data.
For our R&R program, examples of relevant evidence include:
Qualitative evidence: Community perceptions of legitimacy and trust in the program; participant and family narratives on how support met their needs; case studies illustrating integration of economic, social and psychosocial support; stakeholder feedback on accessibility and barriers to entry; community perceptions of safety and security improvements; stories of individuals who avoided re-recruitment due to program support; community narratives on handling conflict and shocks; descriptions of collective action and mutual support; staff and stakeholder reflections on learning processes and responsiveness; stories of broader community change inspired by reintegrated individuals.
Quantitative evidence: Numbers of former child soldiers successfully reintegrated; pre- and post-intervention measures of mental health, such as scores on PTSD and depression scales; attendance and completion rates for counselling or skills training programs; reduction in re-recruitment rates or relapse into armed groups; community participation rates in program design and monitoring; ratio of people served to those identified as needing support; improved scores on social cohesion barometers.
Economic evidence: Earnings of former child soldiers; employment rates or participation in vocational activities; access to microfinance, business start-ups or self-employment rates; changes in household economic status or reductions in poverty rates; community-level economic indicators such as increased local business activity or reduced reliance on humanitarian aid; cost-benefit analysis of monetisable benefits and costs.
These examples illustrate the synergistic value of including multiple sources and types of evidence in an evaluation. For example, mixed methods can strengthen evaluation through: triangulation (comparing different streams of evidence to reveal where different sources agree or disagree); gaining a broader and deeper view of the program by drawing on the relative strengths of different sources; holding the space for a greater diversity of values; using the insights from one method to infor the design of another. Ultimately, mixed methods help us understand the story behind the numbers.
Steps 5-8: Implement the evaluation framework
This post focuses on the steps involved in designing a VfI evaluation, from articulating the value proposition, defining criteria and standards, to selecting and aligning data sources and methods to address the agreed aspects and levels of performance. These steps culminate in a documented and agreed evaluation framework.
Subsequently, implementing the framework involves:
Gathering the necessary evidence
Analysing the evidence
Synthesising the multiple streams of evidence through the prism of the agreed criteria and standards to make judgements on the agreed basis, with stakeholder involvement
Reporting the findings in a way that gets straight to the point and provides a clear and robust VfM assessment.
An effective way to present findings is in a table, like the one below, summarising:
The criteria used (the example below is based on the 5Es but this is optional)
The VfM rating given to each criterion (this example is based on four levels labelled excellent, good, adequate, and poor but this, too, is a choice. Note that these terms are not superlatives but carefully-defined terms, with the definitions set out in the agreed standards and included in the report)
The key pieces of evidence (qualitative, quantitative, and/or economic) that support the ratings given
Lessons and opportunities to consider for potential improvements.
A table like this is often included in the Executive Summary of a VfI report, providing key findings in a page or less. The remainder of the report sets out a comprehensive systematic analysis of the evidence for each criterion, ‘showing the working’ behind each judgement, with detailed analysis of evidence set out in appendices.
Conclusion
By applying a VfI framework, we can include what's useful from CBA as well as compensate for its blind spots. Stakeholders and decision-makers are provided with a comprehensive assessment that incorporates the nuances of complex situations and intangible benefits, while still providing clear findings that cut to the chase and answer important VfM questions.
Thanks for reading!
Follow Kris Inman’s Substack, The Peace Room, to explore the intersection of policy, innovation, and scale in violence prevention, peacebuilding, and resilience.
Follow Julian King’s Substack, Evaluation and Value for Investment, if you’re interested in using evidence and explicit values to make good decisions. You can also download free Value for Investment resources at www.julianking.co.nz.
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CBA and SROI are not identical, but a key feature they have in common is their approach to valuing costs and benefits in monetary units and producing a BCR (or, equivalently, “SROI ratio”). SROI includes the same kind of spreadsheet analysis as CBA, but in relative terms, the two methods emphasise different aspects of the process (for example, quantitative rigour for CBA, stakeholder engagement for SROI). It is sometimes perceived that SROI tries to incorporate a broader range of social benefits than CBA. However, the scope of benefits depends not on which method is used but how they are used. Julian argues that a good CBA and a good SROI can and should be conducted to the same standards of rigour and transparency.
Thanks Julian, I would like to see this offered to defence strategists. Very provocative and worthwhile, Thank you, Jo O