The most important thing to know about theories of change is that they are intended to be helpful and practical. They are not an academic exercise to make your work more difficult, but instead, a tool to improve the design, implementation and assessment of your programs.
This guide is to help you understand and use theories of change and to provide you with resources and information that you can draw upon in that process. It distills insights from development policy and practice, as well as from the analysis of researchers, to give you the most up-to-date material to construct theories of change for development programming.
This Briefing Paper will cover the following:
1. Defining theories of change and how they are relevant (Section 1.1) 2. Constructing theories of change (Section 1.2) 3. Introducing and explaining how to use the Theories of Change Matrix and Primers in defining your programmatic theories of change (Section 2.1) 4. Presenting the Theories of Change Matrix (Section 2.2)
