Key Concepts
Activity - What the program does or plans to do in order to achieve the intended impact (Immediate/Intermediate Objectives).
Causal pathway -a planning tool showing the steps that are needed to achieve the program goal(s). It allows you to lay out the program plan and see how each component logically relates to the previous piece. It includes: inputs, activities, outputs, objectives (immediate and intermediate) and goals. This is sometimes referred to as the program logic model.
- “CAUSAL” because it is based on the premise that the activities your program carries out should logically cause desirable results to occur; and
- “PATHWAY” because it is based on the idea that the causal links form a technically and programmatically sound logical progression.
Complex Social Concepts (CSCs) - SRHR programs often address, or need to consider, these concepts but may shy away from explicitly targeting them because they are hard to address and measure. They have multiple dimensions or components, are influenced by culture and social relations, and may be understood and appear differently in different settings. They can and should be targeted by your program and measured in your M&E process.
Examples:
- Reproductive rights
- Sexual rights
- Healthy sexuality
- Women's or youth empowerment
- Gender equity
- Self-esteem
- Assertiveness
- Stigma
- Quality of care
- Client satisfaction
Dose/dosage - amount of the program that each participant receives
FIT program activities/objectives - Frequency of the activity, Intensity of the activity, Target (population) of the activity
Goal or final result - positive, long-term change in the health, education, legal status, rights, well-being, etc. of the population to which the SRHR program seeks to contribute.
Goal statement - technically specific way of describing the program's goal.
Immediate objectives - correspond to the impacts that the program seeks to directly achieve.
Intermediate objective - correspond to the impacts that are one or more steps removed from the program and theoretically related to the final result (goal) to which the program seeks to contribute.
SMART Objectives - objectives that are formulated to be Specific, Measurable, Appropriate, Realistic and Time-bound.
Strategy - a logically-related group of program activities that seeks to achieve a set of closely related Immediate Results.
Outputs - Your program. Program based results of your work. For example, # of workshops conducted, # of participants, # of flyers distributed. Your monitoring data- how your program is actually being implemented- will rely on how you have defined your outputs.
