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Government offices are filled with siloed, sector-specific digital systems that strain their capacity to make decisions, use data effectively, and achieve ambitious sustainable development goals. Public investments in digital development, transformation, and infrastructure can only meet citizen needs if data and systems are consolidated and interoperable. While interoperability is a sensible approach to building digital public infrastructure, transforming existing systems is easier said...

After eight years, I am leaving Porticus. From January 2025, I'll be starting a new chapter - working in a freelance capacity to support systems change efforts through strong learning, evaluation and strategy. Having worked with the amazing Porticus UK team for the first four years, I moved to Amsterdam in 2020 to work in the central strategy and learning team, supporting colleagues around the globe to embed strategy, evaluation and learning in their work. I loved this work. I learned a...

Explore Climate KIC’s S-ToC guide A practical and flexible resource designed to help teams and partners navigate the complexity of systems change in the face of the climate crisis. Our S-ToC approach integrates systems thinking to support adaptive monitoring, evaluation, and ongoing learning. This guide empowers users to analyse systems, identify leverage points, and co-create change-oriented strategies that evolve with context. Whether you’re working on a small-scale pilot or a...

This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence. --- A framework for embedding learning in systems change strategies and for testing strategic uncertainties. Learning and evaluation approaches that accompany systems change efforts need to fit with and support the emergent...

The Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) toolkit is a practical resource designed to help humanitarian practitioners overcome monitoring challenges in reduced access environments. Reduced access can be caused by natural disaster, conflict, political instability, or other factors, and typically makes it difficult to conduct normal monitoring of program implementation. The RAAM toolkit offers technical and managerial tools for a menu of analytical methods that can fill information gaps...

Over the course of this paper we lay out the basis of the Carve-Out method, an approach that leverages a behavioural framework to allow organisations (even those burdened with layers of bureaucracy and entrenched ideas) to create intentionally designed environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas. Ideas that may go on to transform the core of their organisation. The Carve-Out method is based on a simple insight: That if we want to...

By Robert Ricigliano and Anna Muoio

With growing evidence of what works in education, governments and their partners strive towards scale. While implementation research to adapt solutions holds promise for testing what works, where and for whom, its use in education is limited. Sixty-three international education stakeholders from government, academia, think tanks, local and international non-governmental organizations, multi- and bi-laterals and foundations offer insight into three modes of implementation research that differ...

Editor’s Note: This article, first published in print and online in 2014, has been republished by The Foundation Review with minor updates. Whether implicit or explicit, social justice and human rights are part of the mission of many philanthropies. Evaluation produced, sponsored, or consumed by these philanthropies that doesn’t pay attention to the imperatives of cultural competency may be inconsistent with their missions. The American Evaluation Association’s Statement on Cultural...

Exploring two systems change mental models in philanthropy [ https://evaluationinnovation.org/publication/systems-mental-models/ ] it is an increasingly shared truth: If we want to tackle society’s worst problems, we must bring a systems lens to our social change efforts. We define “systems change” here as the practice of confronting the causes of social problems rather than treating their symptoms. Many in philanthropy are taking this stance, and are shaping their portfolios, strategies,...

Reflecting Forewords is an unashamedly ambitious book. Full of lessons from the past that are relevant for the future, it is a compilation of inspiring forewords from books written by Robert Chambers; one of the most influential and prolific scholars to write about participation, poverty, and knowledge in development studies. Tessa Lewin, Robert’s colleague and an experienced practitioner and researcher, has worked with Robert to weave together the forewords alongside a series of reflections...

Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is an evidence and innovation-generation programme funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), responding to the challenge of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is a challenge characterised by a poor understanding of its drivers and a lack of evidence on what works to combat it. To handle such fundamental uncertainty, the programme adopts a...

Discover the future of organizational structure with the Platform Organization Manifesto. Our guiding principles provide a blueprint for dynamic, adaptable businesses designed to thrive in a constantly changing marketplace. Harness the power of entrepreneurial spirit, cooperation, innovation, and key design principles to empower corporate evolution.

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....

As the trust-based philanthropy wave is washing over the sector once again, concerns over its ability to prove impact, facilitate learning, and evaluate previous approaches are bubbling up. As a philanthropy professional with over …

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...

Because trust-based philanthropy shouldn’t mean blind faith.

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...

Though the concept of place-based philanthropy is common parlance in community development scholarship and practice, there is still uncertainty around its meaning due to the multidisciplinary nature of its study and definitional variation among and between scholars and practitioners. This article presents findings from a recently edited volume created by a binational research team. Ten cases of philanthropic initiatives were explored to develop a transnational understanding of foundation...