Community Led Development (CLD) Tools

Participatory Community LeD-Development (CLD) Assessment Tool

The Participatory CLD Assessment Tool creates dialogue among stakeholders through participatory reviews at various stages of the program life cycle. These reviews can help programs assess how their interventions align with the CLD characteristics and enable reviewers and stakeholders to course-correct and make their programs more community-led. The tool can also be used to understand how community members perceive the organization's work and their own role and strengthen feedback, learning, and accountability loops.

This tool serves funders and implementers (local and international) and can be used by various project staff, including M&E personnel, community facilitators, and management – as well as communities themselves. Its strength lies in generating evidence locally on the status of CLD at the project and portfolio levels.

A multi-organizational, multi-country team from The Movement for Community-led Development developed the tool. Translated into English, Spanish, and French, the publicly available tool is described as a "living tool." It is iteratively improved via an organic and ongoing feedback system. A form is included allowing users to share their feedback directly with the tool's research lead and help identify where and how the tool needs modifications and strengthening. In addition, MCLD offers free training to support users of varying technical expertise to apply the tool to their respective contexts.

Community LeD-Development (CLD) Evaluation Tool

CLD Evaluation Tool (also known as the Quality Appraisal Tool for CLD Evaluations) is a simple, Excel-based tool developed by The Movement for Community-led Development to ensure that evaluations are rigorous and congruent with the principles of community-led development. Completing the assessment tool results in two simple weighted scores that provide an overall quality rating and a CLD-specific rating. Through 13 questions, the tool comprehensively covers assessment of quality at all evaluation stages – from design to data collection, analysis, and reporting, while also encouraging and capturing the involvement of local stakeholders. The tool is method-neutral; it can be used for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, thus busting the myth that local actors’ inclusion and participation in evaluations are only for evaluations with predominantly qualitative methods.

The tool can be used to review single projects/program evaluations and to create portfolio diagnosis of areas for improvement and celebration. The tool is designed for commissioners of evaluations and those who conduct the actual evaluations. The primary intended users include monitoring and evaluation specialists, sector/technical specialists, program quality specialists, evaluation managers and consultants. Although the foundational understanding of robust evaluation approaches are helpful skills when using this tool, the tool is meant to be simple enough for any staff member to make an objective quality appraisal of their evaluation reports.