Consider
Women Win’s Theory of Change
Women Win has developed a theory of change that focuses on leadership and serves as a foundation for all our programmes and activities. Women Win defines leadership as the ability of a girl or young woman to exercise her rights and drive change.
We frame the changes in leadership based on a framework called B.A.C.K.S., which stands for Behaviour, Attitude, Condition, Knowledge, and Status. A foundational assumption of our definition is that leadership is a set of skills, behaviours, and attitudes that can be learned, practised, and refined through experience, mentorship, and education. We use the Prepare - Practise - Play framework to describe the process of how this happens in sport and life.
For more information, go to our website to learn more about our Impact work as well as our Theory of Change.
Measuring the impact of a sport programme on adolescent girls as well as the surrounding community provides important information for organisations, not only to help prove what they are doing drives positive and social change, but also to improve their own strategies and approaches. Measuring impact through research, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), helps to ensure that organisations’ empowering strategies and programmes are as effective as possible in their efforts to achieve results on both the short and long term. The data gathered can help persuade communities to embrace sport as a strategy for girls, particularly in places where society is hesitant to let girls play.
Create a Theory of Change
A theory of change (TOC) can be defined as all of the pieces or building blocks required to realize a long-term goal1. Basically, it outlines how your programme or organisation will bring about the change it wants to see, in this case, adolescent girls using sport as a tool for empowerment. Although different labels can be used— including logic model, programme logic, programme theory, theory of change, causal model, results chain, and intervention logic -, they all aim to show the logic between activities, expected results and long term goals. Theories of change can come in many forms and there are differences in how theories of change developed and drawn (formal documents, pictorial representations, graphs, etc.).
The development of a theory of change is very important because it helps an organisation identify a pathway for change, design goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) and develop interventions specifically to help realise those goals. Make sure your theory of change is specific to how sport will have an impact on adolescent girls, and not just sport’s general benefits . This will make your case stronger.
Resources
- Center for Theory of Change
- Better Evaluation
- International Platform on Sport and Development – Creating a Theory of Change