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Module 3: Your Objectives

• A Rights-Based Social Justice Perspective on Some Common SRHR Objectives
• Choosing Among Well-Written Objectives
• Examples of Activities, Immediate and Intermediate Objectives, and Goals (without Inputs and Outputs)
• Integrating a Rights-Based Social Justice Perspective into Your Objectives
• Is Your Agency Walking the Talk?
• Should You Use Targets in Your Objectives?
• Some Activities That Incorporate a Rights-Based Social Justice Approach
• What If Your Program Used a Different Program Planning Tool?
• What Kind of Verbs Are Best for Objectives?

A Rights-Based Social Justice Perspective on Some Common SRHR Objectives

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Choosing Among Well-Written Objectives

Once you have a number of well-written objectives, you will need to choose carefully among them. Selecting your program objectives implies making a commitment to be accountable for producing those changes. Even though some change may logically be needed to achieve the long-term SRHR goal, your program may not be able to commit to achieving that change given the time and resources at your disposal. Ask yourselves:

• Although necessary, is the intermediate change closely enough related to your program activities for you to commit to making it happen? (Or do so many other factors influence it that we can't attribute it to our program?)
• Is there enough time for a certain intermediate change to take place?
• Can you measure it with the resources you have?
• Can you obtain more funds to be able to measure the intermediate changes you feel are most important?

Only select those objectives that can reasonably be influenced by your program, can occur in a timeframe that is reasonable for your program and your M&E process and that can be measured with the resources you have. This last criterion will depend on your budget as well as on the kinds of indicators you will need to measure the change.

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Examples of Activities, Immediate and Intermediate Objectives, and Goals (without Inputs and Outputs)

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Integrating a Rights-Based Social Justice Perspective into Your Objectives

Review the following questions and make sure that you can answer positively to all the ones that are relevant to your program.

• Do the objectives reflect a rights-based perspective? Are the rights and desires of the population and ways to strengthen their capacity to fulfill those rights and desires built into the objectives?
• Do the objectives address the broader social factors that contribute to the problem?
• Do the objectives focus on widening the range of services provided and on filling gaps identified as important by the priority population?
• Do the objectives reflect an understanding of the gender dynamics that are influencing the final result you hope to achieve? If the objectives are achieved will they contribute to some form of change in gender values, norms, power, etc.?
• Do the objectives reflect positive attitudes to sexuality throughout the life cycle, respect sexual diversity within the population you are serving, and help to foster sexual pleasure while avoiding coercion and health risks?
• Do the objectives foster greater participation of women's groups, civil society, community groups, and inter-sectoral collaboration?
• Do the objectives reduce vulnerability, stigmatization and marginalization of key groups?

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Is Your Agency Walking the Talk?

It is important that your agency be comfortable with the rights-based social justice perspective that you will be using throughout this Toolkit in order to avoid tensions that could arise through internal inconsistencies as well as at the time of planning new program directions based on your M&E findings.

• Decide if you are concerned about whether your entire agency is on board with the rights-based social justice perspective used throughout this Toolkit. If you are, then decide if you want to foster a parallel process by asking the questions in Is Your Agency Walking the Talk?

Integration of the rights-based social justice perspective throughout your agency may require a long-term process but here are some questions to begin a conversation that can foster change within your agency:

Internal Consistency

• Does your agency operate in a way that is consistent with what it expects of its programs?
• Are there any inconsistencies that might be so great as to create difficulties in the M&E process and/or rejection of the findings?

Ask yourselves the following questions:

1. Are the rights of staff and marginalized populations respected within the agency?
2. Is there acceptance for diversity within the agency itself?
3. Do women have an equitable role in decision-making and are the voices of young people on staff heard?
4. Are efforts made to incorporate the voices of diverse populations in determining internal policies?

New program directions

• Will tensions likely arise if some programs go in a direction consistent with the rights-based social justice perspective and other programs go in different directions? For example, if one program focuses successfully on gender-based violence, but staff in other programs do not fully understand what gender-based violence is or why it is important to work on it, then they may be resentful if the program expands and assumes more and more resources of the agency.

Ask yourselves the following questions:

1. Are the rights-based social justice perspective broadly integrated through the agency or confined to specific projects?
2. Are there some programs that violate some of the rights-based social justice perspective or that actively resist them?

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Should You Use Targets in Your Objectives?

Some objectives contain targets that specify how much or how many of something you want to do. For example, ‘improve knowledge about HIV prevention among 60 peer educators’ rather than simply ‘among peer educators,’ or ‘increase condom use by 50%’ rather than simply ‘increase condom use.’

Targets are useful because:

• they help program staff stay on track by identifying just how much of something should be happening
• they identify how many units of something there will be and thus aid budgeting
• some donors may require that you include targets in your objectives.

When establishing targets, make sure they are justified. You will be setting your sights too low if you set out to improve knowledge among 60 peer educators if in the past your organization has successfully recruited 200 peer educators. Likewise, if you have only ever been able to increase condom use by 15% in previous interventions, using 50% as a target is probably not realistic, and your project will seem like a failure even if it achieves what might otherwise be considered an impressive 35% increase.

To justify your targets:

• read about similar programs in the literature, and see what they were able to accomplish
• talk to colleagues in similar organizations and/or
• reflect on what your own organization has been able to accomplish in previous work.

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Some Activities That Incorporate a Rights-Based Social Justice Approach

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What If Your Program Used a Different Program Planning Tool?

It is probably not very different from the Causal Pathway. It will contain similar components but may use different names. Convert the elements into the Causal Pathway framework. Another popular term for a causal pathway is a program logic model.

Here are some terms that are roughly equivalent:

• Goal - final result - impact
• Intermediate objectives - results - medium and long-term outcomes - effects
• Immediate objectives - results - short-term outcomes - effects

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What Kind of Verbs Are Best for Objectives?

Use change-oriented verbs such as:

Increase
Decrease
Strengthen
Improve
Reduce

Avoid activity-oriented verbs such as:

Train
Establish
Provide
Conduct
Implement

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