How do you know whether bringing together key figures in a community did indeed prevent violence in a strategically located Afghan village? More broadly, how do you measure the success of peacebuilding initiatives, especially when there are many variables that go into conflict prevention and management?

Those are just two of the difficult questions that USIP’s Andrew Blum is setting out to answer this year.

Named in December 2011 as the Institute’s first director of learning and evaluation, Blum is charged with enhancing the Institute’s existing monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems. The new position comes in part as a response to the desire of USIP’s board of directors and staff to build off of successes, and understand the reasons behind those successes. In doing so, Blum will ensure that USIP’s programs and projects are fulfilling their goals and to help the Institute as a whole learn from its well-earned successes as well as its mistakes made. This is not his first experience in evaluating and ensuring programmatic effectiveness and efficiency.

Most recently, Blum had been a senior program officer in the USIP Grant Program and the Centers of Innovation. In that role, he oversaw the Sudan North-South Border Initiative and the Communication for Peacebuilding Priority Grant Program. Blum also partnered with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and launched the “Peacebuilding Evaluation Project: A Forum of Donors and Implementers” in order to improve evaluation practice in the field overall.

While USIP’s programs already have monitoring and evaluation mechanisms in place, Blum’s challenge is to improve existing mechanisms, and then attempt to synthesize information into broader, institute-wide ‘lessons learned’ and overall assessments.

In sum, he will be assessing the efficiency, effectiveness and the relevance of programs – and thus, how well taxpayer dollars are being spent. Blum will ask of each USIP program: How is progress being measured on the ground? As he looks at each program, he will also examine whether current projects are serving a real need – or if the need has been made obsolete by the context. For example, he is already working with a project in Iraq focused on civic education to help the USIP project team understand whether their efforts with education officials and teachers will be effective, sustainable, and scalable throughout Iraq.

He is also supporting USIP’s Center of Innovation for Sustainable Economies in their efforts to assess whether a program designed to support responsible mining practices in Afghanistan succeeds in reducing conflict and instability. The project will use community-based monitoring and data collection, including in comparison communities where no project activities are taking place. In other words, the local population will interview others in the community, and document various aspects of their community, from levels of violence and pollution to new economic and job opportunities.

If the project is successful, the program will serve as an important model for Afghanistan’s booming mining industry.

As this professional field is relatively young, Blum will also act as USIP’s representative to the community of practice for knowledge and information exchanges. As such, Blum must also communicate externally the results of USIP’s evaluation initiatives – focusing on evidence-based reporting of the USIP’s hits and misses.

Blum takes this assignment seriously, noting that as a federally-funded organization, we must be held accountable and ensure transparent reporting of both successes and challenges with USIP programming.

The challenges ahead for Blum are significant. As the USIP board stated in a memo announcing the position: “We clearly recognize that peacebuilding is fraught with complexities and intangibles which in the past have been used as excuses for not conducting rigorous evaluations. However, with the creation of this position the Institute will create the capability to implement an effective system for ensuring projects receive proper monitoring and evaluation.”

Ultimately, this endeavor will better advance the Institute’s goals of enhancing national security, enable the U.S. government to manage conflicts before they escalate, reduce government costs and, in the long run, save lives of both American personnel and local populations in zones of conflict.