Keynote and strategy conversation

The How of Impact

Who changed what because of the work, and what evidence can we show?

A disciplined way to distinguish research activity from changes in decisions, practice and people’s lives, without overstating attribution.

APHRC · HD strategic brainstorming · August 5, 2026 · 20-minute keynote

Discuss this session for your team

Locate the missing change

The keynote distinguishes underreporting, underachievement and underdesign. Sometimes a change happened but was poorly recorded. Sometimes the change has not happened. Sometimes the intended change and its evidence were never specified.

Follow the decision beyond the institution

Publications, meetings and tools are important outputs. The next question is whether another actor changed a guideline, budget, practice or service. The session asks teams to identify the decision-maker, decision window and record that could establish the change.

Make contribution claims inspectable

Participants separate contribution from attribution and consider alternative explanations. The framework asks what changed, whether independent records support it and how the institution’s contribution fits the sequence of events.

Designed to produce

A useful next step.

A shared language for impact and a practical rule for the evidence a team should plan to collect before implementation begins.

Prepared and delivered by Julius Kirimi Sindi, Ph.D., development economist, research leader and author of Changing the Batteries.

Source: The How of Impact, presentation dated 5 August 2026. Institutional names identify the context of the work.