Impact II

Impact in my development language means a long-term sustainable change that is a result of a development intervention. Assessing impact is thus measuring whether this long-term and sustainable change has occured and whether it has occured as a result of a specific intervention.
Measuring impact of something tangible, like school construction project seems possible, but measuring the impact of an intangible process like "capacity building" can be quite challening.
If a consultant comes to interview me and asks me what is my impact - I would be unable to answer. Wanting to be polite I would think that the consultant's definiton of impact and concept of time, is very different from mine.

Impact I

Once upon a time there was a water project in North-Eastern Kenya. Foreigners came and for some years wells were digged and pipes laid. Sometime after the project closed down, the equipment stopped functioning and the women had to struggle even more for their families. Besides water, they now needed to look for a special plant, dig the deep roots, pound the roots and mix them with water to make a paste. This paste was used to protect the skin of the very pale children they now had in the village. I guess we can say that the ladies of that village have a knowledge of how to prevent skincancer.
Talk about impact - the change your activities have contributed to. Maybe impact is less what we eventually accomplish, and more the images and memories of how we have intereacted with our surroundings.