Project Design: Getting Started

Designing Impact-Oriented Projects. Discover how to design a project and how to group basic building-block activities into comprehensive programs that meet your objectives.

This is the process for developing sustainable projects:
Project Development: Getting Started
   1. Ensure sustainability: use participatory needs assessments and focus on community identified needs
   2. Researching the project theme for evidence based activities
Project Examples Overview and Project Examples Directory
   3. Combine the activities into an integrated project
NGO/Donor Partnerships
   4. Build project ownership: request community feedback on project concept
   5. Write a project fact sheet
   6. Donor Mission and Input: request donor input on the project concept
The Architecture of Project Design
   7. Developing a logframe, budget and project schedule
   8. Writing a draft proposal
   9. Forge partnerships and ownership: Request donor input on proposal draft
   10. Revise the draft into a final proposal
   11. Submittal
Field Training: Front-line field staff need to be prepared
   12. Knowledge Transfer
   13. Train field-staff in how to work within communities
   14. Provide community members with lasting learning tools
Impact Evaluations: Is your project working? Did it have impact?
   15. Conduct Impact Evaluations
   16. Expand into additional communities by scaling up programs

Would you like to learn how to do this?
Check our our training, workshops, & professional services:
   For Donors and International NGOs (INGOs)
   For NGOs working on the ground in-country (In-Country NGOs)
   Experiential Learning: Workshops and Hands-on Field Courses

Getting Started:

Step 1: Participatory Needs Assessments.

Good project development begins with a community based participatory needs assessment. The purpose is to uncover needs identified by community members. Community members understand what challenges their communities face. By creating an encouraging environment where they can establish their own needs lists — and participate in the decision making process for solutions — projects have a greater likelihood of sustainability.

Example: By using the participatory 10-Seed Technique, community members discuss various needs and prioritize them with a 10-Seed vote. The resulting needs list may contain education, health, water, food security or infrastructure challenges.

Projects will not be sustainable after the NGO leaves unless the village has ownership of the project. They need to participate in their own needs assessment and prioritize their own needs. Based upon their priority list, you can select appropriate activities from the matrix to share with the community.

By presenting alternative project scenarios to the community, they are participating in designing the solution. In the process of developing long-term trust, your initial project design should focus on solutions, chosen with the community, that address their prioritized need.

Building trust in this manner will create a relationship where you will be able to discuss other activities that can solve problems they hadn’t prioritized — but could be solutions for larger issues.

Step 2. Research the Project Theme: Evidence-Based Best Practices.

Isn't it time to begin choosing development interventions based on evidence that they work? The project examples are based upon a series of building blocks called Evidence-Based Best Practices. Each of these Best Practices is a discreet activity – hand washing would be an example. Best practice activities are organized in:

• Step-by-Step Self Sufficiency: individual activities organized by sector in a step-by-step approach
• Project Examples Directory: Activities integrated into a ready-to-execute project designed to provide a synergistic solution