Welcome to the ESDinds project website

We believe that the long term success and sustainability of a development project or social enterprise does not only depend on appropriate knowledge or observable behaviour, but also on peoples’ values and beliefs.

Values are often seen as intangible and until now have been overlooked in conventional project monitoring and evaluation activities.

The concept of the ESDinds Project is that ethical values can be measured, when locally defined, by using a combination of indicators based on perceptions and observable outputs, and that this information can help civil society organizations in their efforts to create successful and sustainable programs.

Take Part and Collaborate
The We Value web platform and online community was launched during the ESDinds project and now has over 100 members from around the globe.
Join this online community to have free access to the WeValue indicators toolkit developed through the ESDinds project and explore how to apply it to your context.

International Conference - December 2010
The ESDinds team organised an International Conference in December 2010 in order to bring together an emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values.
View videos from the event on the Making the Invisible Visible conference web pages

Project Achievements to Date
During the first phase of the project, researchers worked with consortium members to identify core values perceived as most relevant to the CSO partners. The values identified were Trust, Integrity, Justice, Empowerment, and Unity in Diversity. A sixth value, Care and Respect for the Community of Life, was added later.

From January to March 2010, field visits were carried out to test the identified and developed indicators. The field visits also enabled CSO projects to adapt and modify the indicators according to their local context and inform the next steps of the project. After the first phase of fieldwork and testing, the Consortium is confident that, when contextualised, values can be measured.

The methodology has already been used successfully with five projects: an Earth Charter project for indigenous school children in Mexico, a Red Cross project for former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, a Mexican university, the Lush cosmetics company in Italy and Peoples Theater in Germany. View the field visit summaries on in the documents section.

The methodology will soon be tested in India, with a financial services company in Luxembourg, and opened to trials by 50-80 other civil society organizations. By December there should be a considerable body of practical experience on values-based indicators to discuss and disseminate to a wider community.