Compare methods

	Community Scorecard	Participatory Impact Assessment
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	2014
Originator	CARE Malawi (developed within the social accountability movement); disseminated by the World Bank	Andy Catley and colleagues, Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
Type	Community-based social accountability monitoring tool	Participatory project impact assessment method
Seminal source	CARE (2013). The Community Score Card (CSC): A Generic Guide for Implementing CARE's CSC Process to Improve Quality of Services. Atlanta: CARE.	Catley, A., Burns, J., Abebe, D., & Suji, O. (2014). Participatory Impact Assessment: A Design Guide. Somerville, MA: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University.
Aliases	CSC, Community Score Card, Community-Based Scorecard, Community Performance Scorecard	PIA, Participatory Impact Evaluation, Community-Based Impact Assessment, Participatory Impact Measurement
Related	4	4
Summary	The Community Scorecard (CSC) is a participatory social-accountability tool for community-based monitoring of public services, in which both the users and the providers of a service rate its performance and then meet face to face to agree improvements. Developed by CARE in Malawi in the early 2000s and widely disseminated by the World Bank, it operates at the local facility level — a clinic, school, or water point — and is qualitative and dialogue-driven, generating immediate, actionable feedback rather than statistically representative ratings.	Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) is an approach to measuring the impact of development and humanitarian projects in which the affected communities define the indicators of change and use participatory tools to quantify it. Developed and codified by Andy Catley and colleagues at Tufts University's Feinstein International Center, largely through work on livestock and livelihoods programmes in pastoralist settings, PIA adapts participatory rural appraisal methods to the disciplined logic of impact evaluation — combining locally meaningful indicators with before-and-after and with-and-without comparisons to assess what a project actually changed.