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DO I NEED THIS TOOLKIT?
WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW?
WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?
ØDeveloping OVC Policies
ØBackground data
ØConsulting with stakeholders
ØDeciding what to do
ØCommon pitfalls
ØTargeting
ØMonitoring and evaluation
ØRoles and responsibilities
ØCosting issues

WHAT'S SPECIAL ABOUT MY SECTOR?

 


  Deciding what to Do

 

Selecting a Package of OVC-policy interventions or project features

At this stage, you should have a long list of interventions or project design adjustments that would maximize the positive impact of your project on OVC, while minimizing its negative impact. If you are a policy-maker concerned with developing a national OVC policy, you will have a long list of potential policy initiatives. Realistically, you are unlikely to have the resources required to implement all of the ideas you came up, so now you need to narrow them down using an objective set of selection criteria. Below is a list of possible selection criteria that can help you narrow down your list of options.

  • The intervention is technically feasible within the scope of the project;
  • The intervention is politically acceptable to the Government and the Bank
  • The intervention is seen as necessary and positive by stakeholders;
  • The intervention is justifiable when comparing incremental costs with benefits;
  • The intervention appears to be sustainable;

Before applying your selection criteria, you may want to give them weights. This ideally should be done within the context of a participatory stakeholder meeting. Meeting participants would each been given a certain number of votes – let’s say 10 - that they could cast as they wish. If they feel that one criterion is extremely important, they could use all of their 10 votes on that one criteria. If they feel that all criteria are equally important, they could disperse their 10 votes evenly across the 5 criteria. The votes per criterion are then counted and a percentage weight is calculated, using the total number of votes cast (which should be 10 multiplied by the number of participants) as the denominator.

Here is an example of what the results of this weighting exercise might look like in a stakeholder meeting involving 25 participants:

CRITERIA

POINTS

%

The intervention is technically feasible within the scope of the project;

76

30%

The intervention is politically acceptable to the Government and the Bank

37

15%

The intervention is seen as necessary and positive by stakeholders;

37

15%

The intervention is justifiable when comparing incremental costs with benefits;

50

20%

The intervention appears to be sustainable;

50

20%

.

250

100%

At this stage, you may not have all the information you need to make an informed assessment of whether or not a proposed OVC intervention meets one of these selection criteria, but realistically, you don’t have the time or money to gather all of the necessary data to respond with 100% certainty. Under these circumstances, use the information you have available to make your best judgment. If this activity is done by a group of stakeholders, you can feel more confident that the group’s collective knowledge should guide the decision-making in the right direction.

Click here to see how these criteria have been applied to a list of project options for a MAP project.

This ranking exercise will hopefully lead to a consensus on which interventions should be priorities within the context of your project. This exercise may also be adapted for use by policy-makers seeking to define a viable OVC strategy. A more complex approach for assessing policy options is included in the section of this toolkit entitled Making National OVC Policies.



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