The most important thing to know about theories of change is that they are intended to be
helpful and practical. They are not an academic exercise to make your work more difficult, but
instead, a tool to improve the design, implementation and assessment of your programs.
This guide is to help you understand and use theories of change and to provide you with
resources and information that you can draw upon in that process. It distills insights from
development policy and practice, as well as from the analysis of researchers, to give you the
most up-to-date material to construct theories of change for development programming