This guide aims to provide practitioners with a broad framework for carrying out project level Participatory Impact Assessments (PIA) of livelihoods interventions in the humanitarian sector. Other than in some health, nutrition, and water interventions, for many interventions there are no 'gold standards' for measuring project impact. This guide aims to bridge this gap by outlining a tried and tested approach to measuring the impact of livelihoods projects. The tools in the guide have been field tested over the past two years in a major research effort.

Objectives of the Guide

1. Provide a framework for assessing the impact of livelihood interventions
2. Clarify the differences between measuring process and real impact
3. Demonstrate how PIA can be used to measure the impact of different projects in different contexts using community identified impact indicators
4. Demonstrate how participatory methods can be used to measure impact where no baseline data exists
5. Demonstrate how participatory methods can be used to attribute impact to a project
6. Demonstrate how qualitative data from participatory tools can be systematically collected and numerically presented to give representative results of project impact