This story is related to the landscape initiative “The Mosaik Initiative”, and originally published on SourceUp.
Technical Paper: First Assessment of Gawi Bapakat’s Impact
Gawi Bapakat aims to develop sustainable villages; the interventions are expected to increase household income and economic resilience through village development planning based on local potential, support for sustainable production practices, and livelihood diversification.
The impact evaluation developed by Svara and Kaleka is a monitoring tool for Kaleka’s program implementation, including Gawi Bapakat. The main aim of impact evaluation is to provide an approach that supports data- and evidence-based policies and strategies. Thus, this evaluation is also useful as a benchmark, not only for Kaleka to improve ongoing programs and plan future activities, but also for the community, potential donors, the Seruyan regional government and other relevant programs from various sources and implementers.
The impact evaluation will be conducted using rigorous methods and will require a counterfactual or control group (what would have happened if the intervention had not been implemented) to understand “what would have happened” without the intervention. The hypothesis indicates that the impacts or outcomes of Gawi Bapakat cover economic, environmental, and social factors. The use of Theory of Change (ToC) in the analysis clarifies the relationship between a program’s activities, the intermediate steps (short and medium-term outcomes), and the final impact (long-term outcomes) by explaining how and why change is expected to happen. Besides Gawi Bapakat, it is possible to analyse other Kaleka’s interventions both individually and collectively at the district level.
Impact evaluation of Kaleka’s activity can be done periodically, depending on the period of intervention and its process from input to output. For example, the result of capacity building and training activities is relatively instant; it can be seen less than a year from the intervention. Palm oil plantation needs time, around 3–4 years or medium term, land restoration’s result can be seen in the long term. Thus, the proposed theory of change considers those different time periods. The long-term impacts indicate that Kaleka’s program is beneficial not only for farmers who are intervened but also for Seruyan’s community, as the programs can contribute to improving welfare, sustainability, resilience, and better environment/ecosystem conditions.
At this stage, this study aims to analyse the outputs and the first order of outcomes, see the ToC (Figure 1). The first order outcomes are divided into (1) environment, (2) economic, (3) social and health aspects. In particular, with the development of the current situation –natural disaster–the environmental framework can be adjusted with the focus on environmental sustainability and protection. The data is collected in 17 villages across Seruyan District, as Gawi Bapakat’s intervention is majorly conducted in Seruyan, including one outside Seruyan; comprising eight intervention villages as the treatment group and nine villages as the control group, with a total of 665 respondents from both groups. The data is collected between 14 and 28 November 2025. The sampling design aims to balance cross-sectional data.
Acknowledging that Gawi Bapakat interventions are on sustainable farming and have started since 2022, at this stage, this impact evaluation finds strong evidence on environmental aspects, in particular, positive improvement of technical understanding and better smallholders’ awareness of sustainable farming practices due to Gawi Bapakat interventions. The intervention is also successful in encouraging the adoption of input-based organic farming practices; in the end, these new practices can increase product derivatives and boost small-holders’ income or economic aspects. Those impacts channel to social and health aspects, such as strengthening farmers’ cooperatives and balanced nutritional intake. Considering the program implementation period is still around three years, while the crop life cycles vary, the short cycle is around 2 years after planting, the medium one is around 4–5 years, and the longer one is up to 10 years. In the next impact evaluation, the impact can be stronger than at this stage. Some refinements in data collection, sampling selection and data analysis are required.
Full report can be downloaded here: https://kaleka.id/publication/gawi-bapakat-impact