18 - 19 May - Prosperity Initiative's Lead Economist, Bob Baulch, attended a three day meeting of the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED) results measurements initiative in Jakarta. The DCED and its partners are developing minimum standards for quantifying achievement in private sector development. Prosperity Initiative is one of seven NGOs worldwide that has agreed to undergo a DCED audit to assess the impact and effectiveness of its work to reduce poverty.

Organisations already involved in DCED's minimum standards as well as new organisations interested in learning more participated in the event. To date, three organisations worldwide have completed pilot DCED audits: GTZ value chains project, Thailand; Katalyst in Bangladesh; and International Development Enterprises (IDE) in Viet Nam. Prosperity Initiative will complete its pilot audit later this year, along with several of the other organisations that attended the meetings.

Fifteen participants from Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Viet Nam attended the workshop, most of whom were new to the DCED minimum standards. Baulch gave a presentation on Prosperity Initiative's poverty projection approach as part of the first day's meetings and acted as a resource person during the second.
The material will be used in a larger 3 day training course on the minimum standards in the second week of September in Asia, which staff from Prosperity Initiative will attend. Another training course is also to be held in West Africa.

Following this meeting, Prosperity Initiative will be working on fine tuning its results chain for the Mekong Bamboo industrial bamboo programme, refining its intermediate indicators and preparing the documentation necessary for its DCED audit.

According to Baulch, "Prosperity Initiative sees our participation in the development of the DCED standards for private sector development as integral to our wider efforts to measure the impact that we are having on poor people's lives".