PCI (Project Concern International) convened a Congressional Briefing hosted by Congresswoman Susan Davis, Congressman Scott Peters and Congressman Juan Vargas on Friday, May 9th titled “Measuring the Hard-to-Measure: Assessing Economic and Social Empowerment of Women — the Implications on Foreign Aid.”

The event brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss key challenges and actions required in order to refine and develop the tools necessary for better measurement and analysis in the field of social and behavior change at the individual and group levels. The briefing explored best practices for multi-dimensional measurement of programmatic impact across social and economic empowerment interventions.

“In 2014, women are still disproportionally affected by the interrelated causes of poverty and lack social and financial opportunities to better their lives and the lives of their children,” said Sarah Emerson, PCI’s Women Empowered Director and event moderator. “Measuring social change can be challenging because of a lack of standard definitions and differences in interpretation across cultural contexts. In order to ensure effective programming that promotes social changes linked to sustainable improvements in quality of life, it is essential to understand the kind of impact development and corporate social responsibility programming, targeted at women and girls, truly has on the lives of women.”

“We’re trying to now understand longer term kinds of outcomes and it’s harder to do,” commented Jason Wolfe, Senior Household Economic Strengthening Advisor, Office of HIV/AIDS at USAID. “It’s more complex to do, but the good thing is we now have the commitment to do it, and I think that is leading us into a better direction of measuring things that are more important to our beneficiaries and in showing the effectiveness of our work.”

Other panelists included Jeni Klugman, Director Gender and Development at The World Bank; Reid Hamel, Associate Director of Design, Monitoring, Evaluation & Research/Department of Hunger and Livelihoods at Save the Children; Nisha Singh, Senior Program Director at The SEEP Network; and Janine Schooley, Senior Vice President of Programs at PCI.