SYPO believes that at this moment there is too little attention in private development aid for measuring results. It is easy to assume that any form of aid has some effect. The general notion exists that the good intention of giving aid is already sufficient. However, since only a very limited amount of money is available to help Africa, SYPO believes that it is important to be convinced that its projects are sufficiently effective. We must ensure that the little money available is spent as efficiently as possible, so that we can help as many people as possible. Through feedback from the very people that we are trying to help, we can be guided by what works and what does not work, and make sure that development aid continues to seek innovative ways to have more impact. SYPO tries to estimate for all its projects what the impact has been. When we see that a project is successful, we invest more, while we look for different approaches if it appears that a project has little effect.

For our own projects and in order to contribute to private development aid as a whole, SYPO aspires to develop a method to measure the effectiveness of small scale aid projects. This is undertaken by the work group of the Microdevelopment project. We hope that we can develop a way to quantify how well a project is doing: how much impact it has had on the welfare of the target group. The method will be based on existing questionnaires that measure well-being, adapted to be better fit for development aid in sub-Saharan Africa.