Browse by Theme: Aid Effectiveness

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.

When this new government was elected, CARE International UK and our supporters called for four actions in their first 100 days that would demonstrate their commitment to gender equality, tackling climate change and spearheading international development.

By Jay Goulden and Sofia Sprechmann

Virtually all international NGOs count how many people their programmes help: CARE does, and in 2018, our programmes reached nearly 56 million people. But while these numbers help give some sense of the scale of our work, they don’t help either ourselves or others understand the real difference this work is making in the lives of poor and marginalised people. For that, we need to measure the change in the lives of the people for whom we work.

Many of us start working in humanitarian, development or human rights work because we want to change the world or make our country a fairer, better place to live. But in a world where that work is mostly carved up into discrete “projects”, we often end up being satisfied with so much less. If the project we’re working on meets the targets we have agreed with the donor, if an evaluation shows positive change for those we have worked with directly, we have done good work. But is that enough?

When Tropical Cyclone Gita struck Tonga on Monday 12 February 2018 it affected 80,000 men, women, boys and girls – roughly 70% of the entire population. CARE formed a partnership with Live and Learn and MORDI to respond to the immediate needs of those affected on both ‘Eua and Tongatapu. So for others wishing to take this approach, what can be learned from the partnership’s application of localisation principles?

On 4 December 2018 CARE International and British Council convened a workshop in Nairobi with the title “Doing Development Differently in the Global South” to consider how the Doing Development Differently (DDD) global community can better incorporate Southern voices, and how the principles of DDD – its approach to development practice and its aspiration to deliver better results – can be best actioned in the South. The workshop built upon several ongoing discussions across INGOs and the broader development community: primarily, what it would take to realise DDD when working with civil society; additionally, whether DDD and related agendas like Thinking and Working Politically have sufficiently incorporated Southern voices and may even need to be decolonised.

Working in consortium to deliver large, complex programmes has become the norm for NGOs over the last few years. Increasingly, working in consortium is a clear expectation set out in donor tenders and calls for proposals. But is the sector taking this approach for the right reasons? And do donors really understand what it means to work in consortium, or do they just see it as a way for them to save some of their own time and money?