I recently took this fascinating course on Research Design for Social Impact, hosted by Jess Oddy at DFSI. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a great foundation course to applying an equity lens to designing social impact. The course had some great guest speakers, and one of the ideas discussed was the framing of approaches to our work. We discussed a deficit vs asset-based approach to our work, and looking at how we can move towards an asset-based approach to social impact.

I see a lot of interesting potential in combining both these ways of seeing our work, and was mulling over how to apply this lens of looking at project design to PMEL.

I put together this checklist that compares the two, and you can see the usefulness of combining some of these ideas – looking at centring community expertise with a solid risk management approach that can more equitably help to determine resource allocation.

What else would you add here? Do you see your projects using either of these approaches more than the other – and if so, which ones?