Browse by Theme: Monitoring & Evaluation

By Dina Hanania, Katherine Mercer, and Andrew Wells-Dang

CARE’s impact data over the last five years has shown that nearly half of our total impact comes from advocacy and influencing that stretches beyond the direct implementation of programs. This striking number points to a clear conclusion: advocacy to influence policies and programs is a powerful pathway to scale and is key to multiplying impact. But what types of advocacy work? What combination of advocacy tools and tactics yields initiatives that bring impactful wins to fruition?

How does an INGO like CARE contribute to sustainable, systemic change at scale, far beyond the direct work we and our partners carry out with communities? That is the challenge we’ve put at the heart of our new 10-year strategy. Drawing on learning from within CARE’s programs and within the wider scaling up community, we have also developed a new guidance note, outlining six pathways to Impact at Scale. These pathways are framed around Riddell and Moore’s three approaches of scaling up, scaling out and scaling deep.

We asked CARE’s teams responding to COVID-19: what would you change if you could do it all over again? The answers showed that, as ever, CARE staff show remarkable learning, adaptability, and ambition to change the world – even in the face of a global pandemic.

By Cari Jo Clark, Sudhindra Sharma, and Kathryn M. Yount

The recent Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty,” and on-going collaboration with CARE colleagues on the Tipping Point randomized controlled trial (RCT) offers an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned in research-program partnerships involving RCTs. We offer our reflections on the possibilities and tensions of RCT designs to evaluate programs designed to prevent critical social problems that primarily affect girls and women—such as child, early and forced marriage and other forms of gender-based violence (GBV). Discussions about RCTs are underway in various fields, including in a special series in the journal World Development. The field of GBV prevention has not yet had the same level of public debate, so we share our contribution here.

By Anne Sprinkel, Project Director, Tipping Point Initiative; and Dipendra Sharma, Team Lead, Tipping Point Nepal

When we joined CARE’s Failing Forward podcast, we had little idea that we would discuss everything from logistical nightmares to ethical conundrums related to Tipping Point’s Phase 2 research study. On air. Live. And the day after the famous “Randomistas”, Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, were awarded a Nobel Prize in economics for their use of experimental methods in evaluation – also known as the randomized control trial (RCT).

Adaptive management in its various incarnations has long been a focus of a development community that is more and more frequently bumping up against the barriers of complexity, and looking for ways to overcome its challenges. In a field where we consistently have to deal with multifaceted problems, which have many causes and symptoms, we have clung to agendas that seem to offer solutions. Adaptive management appears to be offered as a potential way of dealing with the vast and unpredictable consequences of context.

By Tom Aston and Jay Goulden

Measuring the impact of advocacy may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Yes advocacy is different, but it’s not necessarily more complex or ‘hard to measure’ than governance or market systems programming, let alone ‘blue marble’ change. We think we’ve made some real progress in this area across CARE, and this blog aims to share some of our insights – and contribute to recent lively discussions across the sector.