Research Practice

Creating ethical and inclusive evidence for social change

Evidence for Change (E4C) is CMS's research, evaluation, and learning arm that helps organizations determine the gaps and efficacy of their programs, understand their progress, and as a result, make better decisions.

We aim to ensure that the money, time, and effort invested in development programs reach the people they are meant to impact and create real, lasting change in their lives. E4C works to attest that development decisions are founded on evidence at every level.

Our approach

The communities we study are not only data points, but the reason our work exists. We use participatory methods, conduct our work with informed consent and data protection protocols to ensure that our findings reflect the ground realities. Our work informs change makers at multiple stages

What we inform

E4C’s work reaches three interlocking levels. The communities and households at the centre of the programs we study. The organizations and funders whose decisions our evidence shapes. The government systems and national policies that our findings ultimately inform. They largely include

National policy and government systems

Funders and investors directingdevelopment capital

Program teams and implementing organization

Academic and knowledge communities

Civil society and implementing organizations

Communities and households

Our Services

Impact evaluations and program evaluations.

Assess whether and how much a program has changed outcomes by using experimental, quasi-experimental, and mixed-method designs.

SROI and economic valuation.

Calculate the social and economic return on a program's investment using SROI Network standards, including rigorous adjustments for deadweight, attribution, displacement, and drop-off.

MEL system design and implementation.

Build monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems from the ground up, such as Theories of Change, results frameworks, indicator sets, management information systems, and real-time dashboards.

Technology-enabled monitoring.

Build real-time data dashboards and digital monitoring infrastructure using SurveyCTO, CommCare, ODK, Power BI, Tableau, ArcGIS, and custom data pipelines for organisations to track their work on a day-to-day basis.

Formative research, baselines, and feasibility studies.

Help organizations understand a problem before committing to a solution through household surveys, community assessments, landscape analyses, and village microplanning.

Portfolio MEL and grantee capacity building.

Serve as the MEL partner for multi-grantee foundations, designing shared Outcome Harvesting frameworks, facilitating cross-partner learning, building digital knowledge platforms, and supporting individual grantees to document and use evidence.

Partners

Our Work

CSR Programme Evaluations

We assess whether CSR programs, especially in skilling, livelihoods, health, water, environment, or worker welfare, are achieving what they set out to do. We use methods suited to the programme's stage and scale: process evaluations for ongoing programmes, quasi-experimental impact evaluations for established ones.

Social Return on Investment (SROI)

We calculate the social and economic value generated by the program relative to the resources invested by using SROI Network standards with rigorous adjustments for deadweight, attribution, displacement, drop-off, and discounting. This gives corporate boards and investors credible, audit-ready evidence of value creation.

Baseline, Midline, and Endline Studies

We design and conduct surveys at each stage of your program's lifecycle by establishing the starting point, tracking progress, and measuring final impact.

ESG and Worker Wellbeing Research

We research working conditions, health outcomes, and economic security among workers in factories, garment supply chains, and informal settings. We generate evidence that can inform internal ESG strategies and external reporting.

Standardized M&E Across Implementation Partners

For corporate CSR programs that work through multiple NGO implementing partners, we design common MEL frameworks that generate consistent, comparable data across all partners which enables portfolio-level results reporting.