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Project: Gender Equality and Equity - Follow Up to CEDAW and Romani women
Evaluation Date: November 2010
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

There was a lack of continuity and follow-up in some areas of project work. This suggests that the project tried to include too many elements within a single project with limited resources. In the future, it is recommended that RCS be prepared to make some difficult choices in determining priorities, in order to ensure that adequate resources (including management time) are assigned to all project resources. The grantee would have benefited from advice about the benefits of focusing and concentrating its efforts on a shorter list of components, each pursued further, thus enhancing the prospect for impact.

Theme: Women's empowerment

Project: Civil society advocating for quality education & healthcare in Mexico
Evaluation Date: February 2012
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

The project intended to work at several levels. Locally, it targeted the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Hidalgo. At the state level it intended to work through advocacy and informational campaigns undertaken by multi-sector actors, and at the national level through consciousness-raising and advocacy efforts. The national level advocacy and networking with regional and global partners did not occur. The project’s objectives were ambitious and project staff felt working at the national level required more time, attention and resources than they had available.

Theme: Tools for knowledge

Mexico ambition, risk, scale

Project: Strengthening Democratic Participation Among Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico
Evaluation Date: May 2014
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

This was an overly ambitious project (26 outputs planned) that failed to detail from the outset how the strategy would be implemented and the linkage between its many components. The narrative reports, moreover, were more descriptive than analytical, making it hard to accurately determine the project’s actual successes and achievements.

Theme: Community activism

Mexico ambition, focus, metrics, strategy

Project: Towards a better electoral process in Mongolia
Evaluation Date: November 2011
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

The project accomplished its list of tasks, however its design was too ambitious for the resources available and some activities were only marginally accomplished. This included the training for police, judges and media, and the trainer-of-trainer (TOT) aspect of observation training. The loss of focus on TOT limited the project’s potential reach and effectiveness. These areas remain critical ones, especially for the justice sector.

Theme: Community activism

Mongolia ambition, focus

Project: Nigeria Procurement Monitoring Project
Evaluation Date: April 2012
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

The project workshop covered a great deal of complex and challenging material on an intensive basis over two long days. Although materials were circulated in advance, according to participants, only those with a good prior knowledge of procurement and some understanding of the legal provisions of the Public Procurement Act would have been able to benefit fully from the workshop. Given the centrality of this activity to the project, it would have been sensible to eliminate at least one other activity in order to fully support this one.

Theme: Interaction with government

Nigeria ambition, curriculum, technical, workshop

Project: Civil Society Support Initiative on Political Marginalization in the Niger Delta in Nigeria
Evaluation Date: December 2012
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

The decision by the grantee to stretch activities across all nine states in the Niger Delta diminished the level of investment available for activities at each project site. While the geographic span of activity increased the visibility of the project, it reduced the prospect for impact and enhancing prospects for sustainability of results. A more focused project, limiting activities to, perhaps, three states would have provided a more effective basis for testing and refining the methodology, and building the foundation for more ambitious efforts in the future.

Theme: Community activism

Nigeria ambition, scope

Project: Empowered Civil Society Addressing the Democratic Needs of Rural Women in Myanmar
Evaluation Date: January 2016
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

It was hoped that engagement with local authorities on the part of newly capacitated groups would lead to policy advocacy. This was overly ambitious, and assumed that political reforms in Myanmar would move sufficiently towards autonomy for local authorities. The advocacy engaged in during the project concerned very specific administrative and livelihood issues, such as calls for household registration and national identity documents, road building and land allocation.

Theme: Community activism

Myanmar advocacy, ambition, reform

Project: Promotion of Women’s Empowerment and Rights in Somalia
Evaluation Date: June 2016
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

Since the grantee did not have experience in working with such a large number of partners and in running a multi-faceted project of this kind, limiting the project’s complexity in this first instance was sensible. This project broke new ground for those leading and participating in it, and could be seen almost as a “pilot”. Now that lessons have been learned, it could well be replicated or extended to other regions.

Theme: Women's empowerment

Somalia ambition, replication, scale

Project: Democratic Dialogue through Media in Sierra Leone
Evaluation Date: March 2011
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

Placing the media at the centre of a dialogue process with government, civil society and citizens was overambitious because the project was not designed to address the government and other state institutions. The project had the means and methodologies to address the media and NGOs but was relatively ill-prepared to address government officials and elected Members of the Sierra Leone Parliament.

Theme: Media

Sierra Leone ambition, engagement, government relations, project design, strategy

Project: Coalition against Poverty: Oil Revenue under Public Oversight
Evaluation Date: April 2013
Report: [report link]

Lesson Learned:

From a programme theory or design perspective, the project’s unrealistically high ambition was demonstrated in its expectation of behaviour change. The project aimed to change behaviour on three fronts: national and international extractive industry business interests; civil society; and local government. Some frustrations or disappointment could have been mitigated by reviewing the scope and scale of activities so that they were more appropriately matched to the problem analysis and by setting achievable goals and targets informed by better programme theory.

Theme: Community activism

Kazakhstan design, reform

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