Moving beyond boring baseline assessments

Ah, the baseline. The forgotten child of researchers everywhere. Everyone’s least favorite, easy to forget, “let’s get this over with” part of evaluation and learning.

Researchers do it because we need something to compare the real star (endline data) to after practitioners do the things they do. And for many of us, our motto with baseline data is “no news is good news”…if the baseline tells you that things are pretty much exactly as you anticipated, then you sigh a little sigh of relief and tuck it away in a folder until you have to run your pre-post analysis.

But baselines have hidden talents, if we only stop using them simply as a point of comparison. And that was our experience in Kenya for the Strengthening Mixed Health Systems (SMHS) project, which R4D began in 2019 with support from Merck for Mothers.

Read the rest of this blog post here.