This article is part of Busara’s Tafakari 2025 yearbook. You can download the whole yearbook here.
In mechanics, impact describes the collision of bodies. For instance, in the case of a baseball bat colliding with a skull, we might try to quantify the bat’s kinetic energy. Such questions of ‘how much’ will, however, not be of significant interest to judges, the police, or relatives who seek answers to other questions: Was the attacker under the influence of drugs? Had the victim assaulted the attacker so that we might argue for a case of self-defense? Do the aggressor and victim have a shared past? Along similar lines, I argue that, at Busara, we should be wary of exclusively investigating the quantitative assessment of impact as many people involved—funders, community members, policy-makers—are also interested in understanding why an intervention worked. Instead of reducing ourselves to mechanics of society merely interested in answering if a project had an impact and then quantifying it, we should focus on the multiple causes and reasons for why an intervention was successful or why it failed in a specific context, questions that are crucial if we want to understand more about an intervention’s scalability.
Communities are not skulls, and projects are not baseball bats; the analogy only goes so far. Maybe we like ‘impact’ precisely because it suggests a powerful, direct, and lasting effect even though many of the consequences of development projects are diffuse, too small to be seen without quantitative methods, and sometimes unintended. A mechanical understanding of impact thus also hinders us from realizing that the aggregated impact of an intervention often differs from its impact at specific community points.
Let me refer to an example from my research on unconditional cash transfer programs. It has broadly been accepted that these have a positive impact. They reduce poverty, are cost-effective, and even increase school attendance. Yet, most of these effects are not only exogenously defined—we rarely ask people what impact development projects should have on their lives; they are at the mercy of global fashions and trends—but rely on aggregated numbers that overlook the fate of individuals. Viewing impact from a human-centered and endogenous perspective might result in a different perspective. It could also make visible if harm is being done. During my research with recipients of an unconditional cash transfer program and those who had rejected the program in Homa Bay County, for example, I heard stories about marital conflict and witnessed heart-breaking moments of self-blame. These might be outliers but were directly caused by the project—impacts that might not matter statistically but impacted individuals dramatically and harmfully.
Many of these adverse effects were related to or directly caused by rumors that claimed the unconditional cash transfer NGO was a satanic organization known as the Illuminati in Kenya. Such rumors also made some eligible recipients reject being drafted into the project. Many of the cash transfer recipients whom I met during my fieldwork believed that the project was a collaboration between the Kenyan politician Raila Odinga and former US president Barack Obama, which, for many, was reason enough to think that the project was genuine. The problem is, however, that the project had nothing to do with Obama. Sometimes, it seems, a project’s positive impact might be caused by misinformation.
How can we change our one-sided view of impact as a quantitatively measurable parameter whose ultimate cause often does not interest us? I suggest employing forms of ethnographic research in collaboration with local actors—I am currently trying this at Busara by training and engaging ‘citizen ethnographers’—will allow us to create more intimate and long-lasting relations with the communities we serve. By equipping local actors with the skills to collect and analyze qualitative data, we move beyond calls to listen to local communities, which often ignore the hierarchies between powerful NGO employees and community members with little or no research experience. Teaching local actors the skills to talk to us as experts in qualitative methods will not only help us to co-design endogenous understandings of impact but also make us aware of unintended negative consequences (in other words, harm) we did not expect, as well as assist us in uncovering some of the hidden causes that helped the projects to become a success. Occupying a critical position between external scientists and directly impacted community members—being the baseball bat and the skull if you want—citizen ethnographers can furthermore act as antennas, sensing the needs, complaints, and misunderstandings of different members of communities as well as their disagreements.
Qualitatively bad or even morally-dubious interventions can have beneficial impacts in as much as qualitatively and morally impeccable interventions can have adverse effects. This should make us cautious to rely exclusively on questions of impact. A home run in a baseball match and a scattered skull might be caused by a comparable amount of kinetic energy, yet we rightfully judge them differently.
