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Building on interviews with colleagues in development organizations, donor & partner governments and foundations, this article explores the adoption of system and portfolio-based approaches in the development sector focusing on organizational motivations and challenges, changes in the network of the development sector actors, and types of collaborative experiments initiated around the novel approach. The aim is to take steps towards understanding how this type of approach for system change...

The Program Cycle is USAID’s operational model for planning, delivering, assessing, and adapting development programming in a given region or country to advance U.S. foreign policy. It encompasses guidance and procedures for: 1) Making strategic decisions at the regional or country level about programmatic areas of focus and associated resources; 2) Designing supportive projects and/or activities to implement these strategic plans; and 3) Learning from performance monitoring, evaluations,...

Digital innovations are constantly redefining the boundaries of what is possible and, therefore, bring with them many challenges: it is important for organisations to scale impactful solutions and bring about positive change on a global level – a scaling toolkit is designed to help with this. With the Scaling Toolkit, a healthcare organisation, for example, can scale a digital health monitoring system, adapt it to the local language, and integrate it seamlessly into existing infrastructure....

The CommunityFirst Framework is intended to be implemented by field teams at MSF. The theoretical aspects and evidence presented on the importance of community engagement are intended for all MSF staff seeking to learn more about why and how to shift the way we work with communities as humanitarians. We believe this guideline, and other tools like it (including OCA’s Person-Centred Approach Guidance07, and MSF Vienna Evaluation Unit’s Guidance for Involving Communities08), to be an important...

Any mission-focused government should be well equipped to define, from day one, what outcomes it wants to bring about. But radically changing what the government does is only part of the challenge. We also need to change how government does things. The usual methods, we argue in this paper, are too prone to failure and delay. There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing...

Doing weeknotes brings together various things I’ve written about weeknotes in different places. This text expands on things I wrote in The agile comms handbook, as well as various blog posts. Quite a lot of it is brand new. - Weeknotes for beginners - Why write weeknotes - The weeknotes rules - Weeknotes within the corporate environment - What weeknotes can bring about - Examples of good weeknotes - How to write weeknotes - Weeknotes tips and tricks - Further reading

Florencia Guerzovich and Alix Wadeson

Social accountability has become increasingly important to development programming since the 2004 World Development Report spearheaded its first generation of programming. In 2016, Thomas Carothers synthesized global experts’ perspectives on what became known as the second generation. With an evolving global context, new research and evaluations and tacit knowledge on how those assumptions played out in practice, the time is ripe for asking what the evidence since 2004 can tell us about what...

The CLARISSA Social Protection Intervention was set us as an innovative social policy intervention for tackling social ills, with a...

When social accountability interventions scale up and their sustainability depends on the interactions of many agents and system components, related results are rarely observable at the end of an intervention. The 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) revamped evaluations criteria for assessing sustainability acknowledges that such results are often emergent, and should be monitored and evaluated with this in mind. It therefore emphasizes a turn towards assessing complex...

The library contains and categorises resources related to Adaptive Management and International Development, with some focus around the use of MEL to support it. At the time of writing the library contains 1907 resources and more than 1 Gigabyte of source documents. The documents include journal articles, books, reports, case-studies, toolkits, courses, blogposts, websites, and other grey literature. The resources are flexibly organised within a hierarchy of categories and sub-categories,...

In early 2021 we were asked to support two initiatives in South-East Queensland by undertaking a developmental evaluation of how they collaborated across multiple partners to reduce, prevent and ultimately end homelessness. The initiatives, Brisbane and Logan Zero, started with the ‘Advance to Zero’ methodology, and adapted this as they progressed. We were asked to track how contributors collaborated to tackle the systemic nature of this challenge. This gave us the opportunity to work with...

Advocacy for public accountability aims to produce certain reactions from government officials or service providers. However, the reactions can be many and diverse, and it is not always clear to advocates how to interpret them and decide on next steps—whether to intensify efforts or back off; continue the same strategy or make adjustments. This paper presents a framework to help accountability advocates and practitioners interpret government reactions to their efforts and move forward...

The CLARISSA Social Protection (SP) intervention provided six months of unconditional cash transfers to every household in the Gojmohol neighbourhood,...

Background: Ex-post evaluation of sustainability has been done for 40 years in global development. However, it has been done far less than 1% of all global development projects, for there is little proof that “sustainable” development is or is not. Similarly, foreign aid projects are implemented to foster sustainability, but without the benefit of evidence from expost evaluations of what drove it and limited research on the benefits of robust exit strategies. Purpose: Transparency in values...

The UNDP has been exploring new approaches to M&E to better understand and address complex systems challenges. Traditional linear project-based planning and evaluation methods are insufficient for dealing with the unpredictable nature of such systems. The UNDP’s new Strategic Plan calls for a shift in M&E practices to align with the complexity of today’s global challenges. Key points from the blog post include: Learning and Adapting: There’s a need for continuous learning and adaptation in...

The Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE) programme was a three-year initiative funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that brought together 20 projects from across the global South to understand the socioeconomic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, improve existing responses, and generate better policy options for recovery. The research covered 42 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East to understand the ways in which the pandemic...

AI already is being used in some areas of process improvement, and the usage of this technology — including generative AI — promises to grow. That’s because it can perform tasks faster and much less expensively than humans alone. But it will never fully replace people — and that poses management challenges.

By Millie Begovic, Head of the UNDP Strategic Innovation Unit