System Pathways Measurement Toolkit

Abstract

This toolkit’s purpose is to support the measurement of system status and change in systems-oriented development projects. Measuring change in a market system (or another complex development system) is challenging because of the system’s complexity: it is difficult (1) to know which parts of the system to measure and (2) how to interpret what a collection of diverse measurements tells us about change in the system.

To address both of these challenges, the System Pathways Measurement Toolkit relies on a system map to capture the structure and interconnections of the system, then layers measurements onto the system map to enable the collective interpretation of diverse data on wide-ranging parts of the system. Tools are provided to interpret the measured map by zooming in and out to understand the progression of change in the system, diagnose problems and explain success. Guidance is provided in deciding which parts of a complex system to measure and in developing indicators that can be interpreted easily on the map, based on either available or to-be-collected data.