No impact assessment can be considered credible if it ignores or creates avoidable harm for the people whose experiences it seeks to understand.
Ethics is often the least visible part of an impact assessment. Methodologies are often scrutinised and sample sizes are debated. Statistical techniques are questioned.
Yet the credibility of an impact assessment depends just as much on how evidence is gathered as on how it is analysed.
Since the launch of the IAAF Impact Assessment Accreditation Standard and our benchmarking services, one pattern has consistently emerged.
Principle 7 – Ethical Integrity and Safeguarding receives the lowest scores.
That surprised us. More importantly, it prompted an important question:
Why is the very principle that protects participants also the one that receives the least attention?
Ethics in impact assessment is about protecting people from the unintended consequences of being assessed.
India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 has fundamentally changed how organisations must think about data collection.
Every beneficiary survey. Every interview recording. Every photograph. Every GPS location. Every voice note. Every beneficiary list. Each is potentially personal data — and collecting it is no longer simply a research exercise. It is an ethical and legal responsibility.
For impact assessors, this means asking harder questions before asking survey questions:
The best impact assessment is often the one that collects the least.
One of the most persistent misconceptions is equating consent with a signed form.
Imagine evaluating a CSR-funded digital literacy programme in a rural village. An evaluator arrives bearing an organisation ID card. Local leaders introduce her as someone "from the company." Women beneficiaries are gathered in a community hall. Consent forms are distributed in English.
Everyone signs.
Was that informed consent?
Certainly not.
Did participants understand that refusing to participate would have absolutely no effect on their future project benefits? Did they know their photographs might appear in a public report? Did they know they could stop the interview at any moment?
Ethical consent is about genuine understanding and voluntary choice and not paperwork. Sometimes verbal consent, recorded in the participant's own language, is ethically stronger than a perfectly formatted legal document.
Many impact assessments involve schools, nutrition programmes, child protection initiatives, or scholarship schemes. Yet reports rarely explain how children were protected during data collection.
Interviewing children requires far more than parental permission. Children should themselves understand why questions are being asked. Questions must be age-appropriate. Interviews should occur in safe environments, with safeguarding protocols in place. And photographs should never become marketing material simply because parents signed a form.
Consider this scenario: an evaluator is interviewing a twelve-year-old girl about school attendance. During the conversation, the girl quietly mentions that she has been facing harassment on her way to school.
What happens next?
If the evaluator simply records the response and moves on, the assessment has failed one of its most fundamental ethical responsibilities.
Ethical assessment demands referral mechanisms and safeguarding protocols before entering the field and not after discovering a problem.
One of greatest ethical risk in impact assessment is power.
Consider a livelihood programme funded by a corporation. The evaluator conducts interviews while local leaders who support the project sit nearby. Every response becomes positive. No one mentions delayed payments. No one raises programme failures. The report concludes that beneficiary satisfaction stands at 98%.
Did the programme succeed or did the power imbalance simply silence honest voices?
Power shapes every interaction: men speaking on behalf of women, village leaders responding for marginalised communities, teachers answering instead of students, parents replying in place of adolescents, officials seated beside the very people being interviewed. Even the evaluator's clothing, language, and institutional affiliation influence what participants are willing to say.
Ethical assessments deliberately dismantle these asymmetries through private interviews where appropriate, female investigators for sensitive discussions, local-language facilitators, and clear, unambiguous assurances that criticism carries no consequences.
Many reports proudly note that "names have been changed." That alone is insufficient.
Imagine reading: "A widowed woman from Village X with two daughters described domestic violence..."
In a village of 300 households, everyone knows exactly who she is.
Confidentiality means ensuring people cannot be identified and not merely removing their appellations.
Many evaluators exercise care during data collection and then leave unencrypted beneficiary interviews on a shared laptop, send photographs over personal WhatsApp accounts, or store consent forms in an unlocked cabinet.
Consider a skilling programme for adolescent girls. An evaluator collects names, photographs, attendance records, and mobility patterns from 200 participants. The data sits unencrypted on a personal laptop after the report is submitted. The device is stolen. Suddenly, the identities, daily movements, and programme participation of 200 girls are exposed. It can have consequences for their safety.
Secure data keeping means asking: Where is data stored, and who can access it? Are devices encrypted and password-protected? Are files transferred over secure channels? And critically, how long will this data be retained, and when will it be permanently deleted?
Data that is not retained cannot be breached. There is also the question of what happens when the engagement ends. Third-party evaluators and consultants hold sensitive beneficiary information that must be formally handed over, restricted, or destroyed at contract close. Retention schedules should be defined before fieldwork begins and honoured when the engagement closes.
A credible impact assessment treats data security not as an IT concern, but as a field responsibility that begins the moment the first survey opens and continues long after the final report is filed.
The IAAF Standard defines Principle 7 broadly:
'informed consent, confidentiality, safeguarding of vulnerable groups, responsible data handling, conflict-of-interest disclosure, evaluator independence, and protection against plagiarism. Ethics is expected to be embedded throughout the assessment lifecycle and not appended as a final paragraph.'
Ethics is fundamentally about trust. Communities invite evaluators into their homes, their schools, their lives. They share experiences that are often deeply personal, sometimes painful. That trust is fragile. Lose it, and we lose the very evidence upon which credible impact assessment depends. Every credible impact assessment begins and ends with one principle:
The dignity of the participant must always matter more than the data they provide.
Impact Assessment Accreditation Forum