Browse by Theme: Partnership

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?

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.

On 4th August 2020, one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history devastated large parts of the Lebanese capital. At least 200 people lost their lives, over 300,000 were left homeless and the blast caused an estimated US$15 billion in damage. Three months on, CARE’s Emergency Shelter Advisor – one of the first CARE staff to deploy during the global pandemic – shares five lessons on responding to a complex crisis in the time of COVID-19.

By Huong Hoang and Céline Mias

The global fashion industry is one of the most female-dominated industries in the world. It is a goliath of an industry which includes the textile, clothing, and footwear sectors, which is estimated to employ about 60 million to 75 million people, 80% of which are women. Although countless women are behind this US$2.4 trillion industry which, if it were a country, would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, women workers are disproportionately represented. They are, in fact, found heavily concentrated in the most vulnerable and marginalized positions in the industry where they work for poverty wages and under harsh conditions. These women workers often face gender discrimination, exploitation and suffer from the impact of violence and harassment not just in the workplace but in their homes and on their way to and from work.

If you work in international development, you have probably experienced that pressing need for support. You need to conduct an assessment, your proposal design should have started yesterday, and the capacity building for your partners is right around the corner – the list could go on and on. You need short-term support, but you also need the best and brightest, the one who knows the context and subject matter, writes and analyzes thoroughly, and can meet the deadline. You aren’t just looking for someone who is available to do the work – you are looking for the ‘expert’.

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).