Supplement to Agreement No. AID-7200AA18CA00009: Developing Locally-Relevant Measures of Commitment

The program delivers research-driven solutions to field-sourced development challenges in USAID interest countries. A consortium led by Purdue University, with core partners Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame, Makerere University, and Catholic Relief Services, implements the LASER PULSE program through a growing network of 2,300+ researchers and development practitioners in 56 countries. The program collaborates with USAID missions, bureaus, and independent offices and other local stakeholders to identify research needs for critical development challenges. LASER PULSE funds and strengthens the capacity of researcher-practitioner teams to co-design solutions that translate into policy and practice. The program's research focuses on developing locally relevant measures of commitment, which is a key component of the Journey to Self-Reliance. A collaborative research study was designed to provide guidance to USAID staff and other stakeholders on articulating potential indicators and approaches for understanding commitment. The study explores local level commitment in two sectors, education and health, as well as from a gender perspective in a local Ugandan community. The research generated two outputs: highly contextualized documentations of how program participants and other stakeholders conceptualize and assess commitment, and a "ground truthing" of a pilot study approach for developing indicators of commitment that are locally relevant to stakeholders in other contexts. The study adapted the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology to come up with locally sensitive commitment indicators. The EPI is an ideal approach to develop indicators for difficult-to-measure concepts like commitment, as it is built on participatory research methods where local communities are best placed to conduct research to understand the local-level context. Case subjects were participants of Just Like My Child (JLMC), an NGO training program at the local level in Laredo, Uganda. The research team developed four personas to characterize the commitment that community leaders and members perceive and expect. The four personas reflected the aggregate of different program participants' and community leaders' perspectives and priorities regarding commitment data. While the study tried to elicit sector-specific conceptualizations of commitment, many candidate indicators appear to be sector-agnostic or relatively easy to adapt to different sectoral programs and outcomes. The study produced candidate evaluation and research questions to consider when interrogating the locally relevant conceptualization of commitment, and from a subset of these, candidate commitment indicators. The intent is for these questions and candidate indicators to be used to provide rich descriptions of the Ugandan context, community-level characteristics, events, and other variables for a local understanding of commitment. The research findings have implications for USAID staff and implementing partners in Uganda, who may use the study's outputs to assess changes in commitment over the course of a program. The study's approach and findings can also be applied to other contexts, providing a framework for developing locally relevant indicators of commitment.