Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis - Overview

Overview

The PIPA theory describes plausible impact pathways by which project outputs are used by others to achieve a chain of outcomes leading to a contribution to eventual impact on social, environmental or economic conditions. Impact pathways are a type of logic model, that is, they constitute a model that describes the logic of what the project will do, is doing, or what it did.

PIPA helps workshop participants surface, discuss and write down their assumptions and theories about how their project activities and outputs could eventually contribute to desired goals such as poverty reduction. The description of these assumptions and theories is a description of the project’s (or program’s) impact pathways. PIPA has helped workshop participants with the following:

• Clarify and communicate their own project’s logic of intervention and its potential for achieving impact
• Understand other projects and identify areas for collaboration
• Generate a feeling of common purpose and better programmatic integration
• Produce an impact narrative describing the project's intervention logic
• Produce a framework for subsequent monitoring and evaluation