What does a theory of change primarily describe?

• A. How and why a program will produce outcomes
• B. What is the budget?
• C. Which stakeholders are involved
• D. What is the randomization scheme

Answer: (A)

A theory of change describes how and why a program is expected to lead to its intended outcomes by laying out the causal pathway from activities to impacts and the assumptions that connect them. It explains the sequence: inputs and activities produce outputs, which lead to intermediate outcomes and ultimately to impact, along with the mechanisms that make that change possible. It also calls out the external conditions that must hold for the pathway to work, and where changes in behavior or environment are needed for the theory to hold.

Budgets and resources are about what it costs to run the program, not the logic of how change happens. Identifying who is involved speaks to stakeholders and roles, not the pathway of change itself. A randomization scheme concerns evaluation design—how you test whether the change happened—rather than the explanation of how or why the change is expected to occur.