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Effective learning is a key driver of market systems change, with the potential to enhance system competitiveness, resilience, and inclusiveness. Shifting the Locus of Learning: Catalyzing Private Sector Learning to Drive Systemic Change recently outlined a rationale for enhancing the scale and quality of learning in a system and identifying 10 strategies programs can contextualize to catalyze learning. These strategies are also backed with robust examples from 13 programs doing this work...

This document describes key principles of the Value for Investment evaluation approach and provides guidance on how to use it to design and implement evaluations, using the evaluation of the Youth Primary Mental Health and Addictions (Youth PMHA) initiative as an illustrative example.

This document offers practical guidance for assessing the Value for Money (VfM) of government- and donor-financed programmes and policy interventions. In line with OPM’s focus and mission, it has been predominantly applied in the international development sector, but the approach upon which it is based is also used in the context of domestic public policy and programmes.1 There is increasing scrutiny on VfM in international development, but a lack of appropriate methods to support its...

How can we measure and learn when promoting systems change? It’s a challenge that has inspired Laudes Foundation to develop a rubrics-based methodology to help us, our partners and the wider field of philanthropy, understand our contribution to change, while learning and adapting to new and unforeseen circumstances. Change cannot be captured by numbers alone because metrics put the focus on what can be counted, not always what’s most important. Rubrics are a framework that set a standard...

Coalitions—groups of organizations and individuals that work together to pursue a common policy goal or reform—are crucial to development. Some of The Asia Foundation’s longest-standing and most successful development programs and portfolios have used coalition-building as an implementation modality. This paper examines successful initiatives in Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. By delving into each of these, we shed light on this coalition-building...

Systems thinking approaches are gaining traction as an effective way of understanding and working with increasing complexity. They are being put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as the World Health Organisation as a way to tackle the complex and unpredictable environments we now operate in. As the world has become increasingly interconnected, national or local boundaries cannot isolate and control social problems. The climate emergency, war and...

Audience This guidance is primarily aimed at development and humanitarian professionals who design or manage monitoring and evaluation processes to support design and implementation of qualitative monitoring using Most Significant Change (MSC), Outcome Harvesting (OH), or Outcome Mapping (OM), which are participatory, outcome-focused qualitative methods. Purpose This guidance is a resource to strengthen qualitative monitoring, specifically addressing commonplace gaps or weakness in the...

This paper synthesises the findings of a set of country studies commissioned by the RISE Programme to explore the influence of politics and power on education sector policymaking and implementation. The synthesis groups the countries into three political-institutional contexts: - Dominant contexts, where power is centred around a political leader and a hierarchical governance structure. As the Vietnam case details, top-down leadership potentially can provide a robust platform for improving...

Most development practitioners have long recognized that deep contextual knowledge is crucial to understanding how projects interact with their local systems and, in turn, to navigating these systems. Moreover, this knowledge must complement projects' technical solutions, or they will fall flat and may even undercut project objectives as they clatter down. What, then, explains practitioners' particular interest in TWP as an explicit strategy and more than just "doing good development"? This...

This study mainly aimed to look at adaptive management in the program cycle (throughout Program Cycle processes, including strategy, project, and activity design and implementation) and to look at the Enabling Conditions: how an organization’s culture, business processes, and resource allocation support adaptive management. It explores elements of adaptive management that correspond to the objectives of the study as follows: 1) Assess grantees’ level of understanding of adaptive management...

This guidance seeks to ensure that UK Aid Direct applicants and grant holders understand what the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) means by beneficiary feedback mechanisms, and more specifically, that they: • Understand the terms used that relate to beneficiary feedback mechanisms in UK Aid Direct guidance and templates • Understand beneficiary feedback mechanisms and why they are a useful tool for project monitoring and learning • Learn how to use beneficiary feedback...

This CDI Practice Paper by Tom Aston and Marina Apgar makes the case for ‘bricolage’ in complexity-aware and qualitative evaluation methods. It provides a framework based on a review of 33 methods to support evaluators to be more intentional about bricolage and to combine the component parts of relevant methods more effectively. It discusses two cases from practice to illustrate the value added of taking a more intentional approach. It further argues that navigating different forms of...

The CLARISSA Nepal team collected and analysed 400 life stories of children and young people engaged in or affected by the worst forms of child labour (WFCL), particularly in the “Adult Entertainment” sector in Nepal, which includes children working in Dohoris (restaurants playing folk music), dance bars, spa-massage parlours, khaja ghars (tea/snack shop) and guest houses. Stories were also collected from children in CLARISSA’s focus neighbourhoods, children in this category...

Process tracing is a causal methodology that can help people understand how a particular large-scale change actually happened within a complex dynamic environment. Much of the existing literature provides important information about the method; we wrote this brief to help more people operationalize the concepts and learn about practical steps for using this method more easily, with quality, and toward a more equitable world. This piece was written based on our experiences implementing...

In order to support the digital transformation of government operations Digital Learning Modules for Civil Servants are available, an off-the-shelf package of capacity development in form of replicable training modules to empower public servants at both the local and central government level to be leaders of digital transformation for delivering better public services. The modules cover a multitude of fundamental areas: comprehending digital government and services, human-centered design...