Project

Strengthening Youth, Minority and Women’s Organizations in Pakistan

Grantee: Chanan Development Association

The project aimed to improve the understanding and capacity of 150 civil society organizations (CSOs) to mobilize youth, women and minority groups so that they could participate in democratic processes at the grassroots level in 25 districts. Its intended outcomes were: improved understanding among civil society on democracy and advocacy skills for good governance; and increased participation of youth, women and minorities and their organizations in democratic processes.

The design was ambitious in geographic scope and in the number of CSO participants, especially for the level of funding. This limited the number of activities that each CSO could undertake because it spread the funding out between so many different organizations and locations. This resulted in a number of CSOs losing interest in the project. The project also did not tailor its activities to the different needs and context of the different districts and target groups. All of the above affected the project’s relevance.

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Lessons from Project

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There was no information available on expenditures beyond the final financial report, which stated that there were no major deviations between the planned budget and their expenditures. However, without more information, the evaluators are unable to assess the actual use of the budget, its compliance to the program design or its cost effectiveness.

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Only some partners seemed to have signed Memorandums of Understanding at the start of the project, and none reported having had regular project management meetings. Reliance on existing relationships with some focal points and CSOs also contributed to a level of informality that affected all aspects of the project and likely its conformance to the project document.

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Project management, reporting, monitoring and evaluation systems were inadequate for a development project that required tracking results, monitoring implementation and reporting on performance so as to make sure that the project was within budget and able to make payments promptly.

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The grantee gave out double the number of seed grants anticipated to CSOs in 20 project- and two non-project districts in Pakistan. No information on the amounts was provided but several organizations appeared to have received multiple grants with four CSOs implementing 20 percent of the activities listed.

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Pre-and post-training questionnaires were collected for the training of trainers, which according to the grantee showed that 92.5% of participants had significantly better understanding and knowledge on democracy. The data from these tests were not available for the evaluators to review, but several CSO participants noted that that no differentiation was made in trainings between those who were already experienced trainers and novices.

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Most CSOs interviewed appeared to have participated in only one or two project activities, so the actual extent of the training and district level workshop activities is uncertain. There appeared to be no follow up to the trainings or to the issues identified in district workshops/forums. The trainings themselves did not appear to have been delivered on the basis of need.

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