AÇEV's Earthquake-Region Program Delivers a 1:6.34 Social Return, with Simulations Pointing Toward 1:10.18
The SROI analysis, covering June 2023 to August 2024 across 11 earthquake-affected provinces, clearly demonstrates that the program is highly efficient in terms of resource utilization and exhibits strong cost-effectiveness. Achieving such a level of return even under challenging and unpredictable post-disaster conditions provides solid evidence of the resilience and effectiveness of AÇEV’s model. Unlike standard cost-benefit analyses, the SROI methodology captures lived experiences: the psychological recovery of a child who had stopped speaking; the moment a mother replaced punitive discipline with open conversation; a father attending his child’s learning session for the first time. These transformations are given monetary proxies and weighed against total program investment, yielding the 1:6.34 ratio. A simulation reducing first-year infrastructure costs projects a long-term SROI of 1:10.18.
The distribution of value is as telling as the ratio itself. Children received 65% of total social value, expressed through gains in fine motor skills, emotional regulation, cognitive development, and social competence. Mothers accounted for 28%, with particularly strong outcomes in psychological wellbeing and awareness of women’s rights. Fathers, though representing only 3% of total value, showed meaningful shifts away from punitive discipline toward active, nurturing involvement, precisely the behavioral change that intergenerational models suggest has the highest multiplier effect.
To complement the broad, ecosystem-wide lens of the SROI, which relied heavily on caregivers’ own observations, AÇEV conducted the Preschool Education Program (PEP) Impact Research: a purely experimental study, using a randomized control group, focusing directly on the children themselves. Conducted in 2024-25, it confirmed that structured early learning is not merely helpful but decisive. Children enrolled in AÇEV’s center-based programs showed statistically significant gains across cognitive, social, and emotional domains. Critically, program participation outweighed socioeconomic background as a predictor, a finding with profound implications for early childhood investment policy in crisis and post-crisis contexts globally.