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In an evolving international development landscape, the push for localization has gained urgency. Global South Intermediary Organizations (GSIs) are emerging as key players, offering a promising pathway to achieving localization programming. To harness their potential, it is crucial to develop a deeper understanding of their functions, structures, and strategies. However, they should complement—not replace—direct funding relationships with grassroots organizations. The Trust,...

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...

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...

This report addresses the well-recognized evidence gap1 on the longer-term impacts created by marketdriven programming; specifically, programming influenced by market systems development (MSD) principles. It does so by presenting the findings of an ex-post study conducted three and a half years after the close of USAID’s Feed the Future Senegal Naatal Mbay Activity (hereafter Naatal Mbay) in 2019. It examines the scale and sustainability of changes resulting from Naatal Mbay’s introduction...

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 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...

Multiple aid agencies often try to support change in the same places, at the same time, and with similar actors. Surprisingly, their interactions and combined effects are rarely explored. This Policy Briefing describes findings from research conducted on recent aid programmes that overlapped in Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and from a webinar with UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advisors and practitioners. The research found three distinct categories of ‘interaction...

Executive Summary When Christian Aid (CA) Ireland devised its multi-country and multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017-2022), they opted to move away from a linear programme management approach and to explore an adaptive one. Across seven countries: Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, CA and partner organisations support marginalised communities to realise their rights, reduce violence and address...

The Method Positive Deviance (PD) is based on the observation that in every community or organization, there are a few individuals who achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers, despite having similar challenges and resources. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants, and adopting their solutions is what is referred to as the PD approach¹. The method described in this Handbook follows the same logic as the PD approach but uses pre-existing, non-traditional data...

This report presents six learnings from four pilot projects conducted by the Data Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) initiative, a global collaboration between the GIZ Data Lab, the UNDP Accelerator Labs Network, the University of Manchester Center for Digital Development, and UN Global Pulse Lab Jakarta. The pilots seek out grassroots solutions to development challenges that range from the interaction between livestock farming and deforestation to gender-based violence and insecurity in dense...

This Flagship report analyses 20 years of governance programmes in Nigeria funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the North-western states of Jigawa (since 2001), Kano (since 2005) and Kaduna (since 2006), as well as the North-eastern state of Yobe (since 2011). The report’s main research question is whether, how, under what conditions and for whom UK-funded state-level governance programmes in Nigeria...

The first case of COVID-19 in Nigeria was confirmed on 27 February 2020, with the first lockdown orders issued on 30 March 2020. The pandemic and resultant containment measures have had farreaching socio-cultural, economic, financial and political implications, globally as well as in Nigeria. For the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn (PERL) and its partners, the pandemic has required considerable adaptation of their strategic approach and working practices. This report reflects on...

- The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)’s standard economy, efficiency, effectiveness/cost-effectiveness and equity (4E) framework is still relevant for approaching, measuring and managing value for money (VfM) for adaptive programmes. • However, this framework needs to be reframed to capture and incentivise flexibility, learning and adaptation. • VfM appraisal and reporting should be done in a way that draws on beneficiary feedback and informs good...

A discussion of initial learning emerging from the SLRC ’Adaptive approaches to reducing teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone’ action research project.

Pressure is mounting on international development cooperation agencies to prove the impact of their work. Private and public commissioners as well as the general public are increasingly asking for robust evidence of impact. In this context, rigorous impact evaluation (RIE) methods are increasingly receiving attention within the broader German development system and in GIZ. Compared to other implementing agencies such as DFID or USAid, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale...

How does adaptive implementation work in practice? Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, this paper contrasts the ways in which an adaptive component of a major health care project was implemented in three program and three matched comparison states in Nigeria. The paper examines the bases on which claims and counterclaims about the effectiveness of these approaches were made by different actors, concluding that resolution requires any such claims to be grounded in a...

How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and...

This paper examines adaptive approaches to aid programming in Nigeria. Through field research and desk reviews, we have investigated some of the assertions around the ‘adaptive management and programming’ approach, which has arisen in recent years as a response to critiques of overly rigid, pre-designed, blueprint and linear project plans. This is the second of three case studies in a series which explore if and how adaptive approaches, including rapid learning and planning responses, are...

The Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) was a £14 million programme that has helped Nigeria to transform its governance of the oil and gas industry. FOSTER ran from 2011 to mid-2016, and used an explicit ‘thinking and working politically’ (TWP) approach. It was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by Oxford Policy Management (OPM). This paper seeks to identify the factors that drove – or constrained – FOSTER’s achievements, and...