Project: Promoting Good Governance among Tribal Inhabitants in Bangladesh (PROGGATI)
Evaluation Date: December 2013
Report: [report link]
Lesson Learned:

The project adopted a one-size-fits all approach to its activities. However, the needs and capacities of the different stakeholders and participants were vastly different. A programme better tailored to these different actors might have yielded better results. Similarly the training could have included a component to ensure application of the knowledge acquired during the programme to the participants’ everyday work would have had more impact.

Theme: Community activism
Project: Promoting Freedom of Information Activism at the Local Level in Brazil
Evaluation Date: April 2014
Report: [report link]
Lesson Learned:

While the network of grassroots organizations was involved in the design of the project, local stakeholders did not participate directly in the process and were not consulted. The different context in each of the five states in which the project was implemented demanded specific competencies that in many cases were not sufficiently developed. The focal points had no political experience. They needed skills to constructively participate in public debate, so that they would not be confined simply to reporting misconduct but could also offer solutions.

Theme: Women's empowerment
Project: Democratic Dialogue through Media in Sierra Leone
Evaluation Date: March 2011
Report: [report link]
Lesson Learned:

Flaws in design and strategy hampered the relevance of the project: lack of explicit engagement with editors/publishers and with relevant high-level institutional actors. These weaknesses were already visible in the project document: the “Situation Analysis” section appropriately identified the needs summarised above, as well as the views of civil society about the media, but did not provide an analysis of the causes of the identified weaknesses. The project document lacked an explicit stakeholder analysis that would have identified the project’s planned level of engagement with each stakeholder, the message directed at them and the engagement techniques to be used. In other words, the project document was built on the assumption that improving journalistic skills in human rights reporting, together with activities such as NGO and community training, would lead to enhanced democratic debate. But there was no explicit description of how these results would derive from the planned activities.

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

While the project component that worked with the journalists was sustainable, a more systematic engagement with the range of key stakeholders would have further enhanced sustainability. A project strategy section with a more explicit stakeholder analysis and a clearer justification of intermediary results would have identified government officials and elected representatives as target audiences needing to be addressed with specific techniques.

Theme: Media
Project: Building Democratic Spaces in Egypt
Evaluation Date: March 2011
Report: [report link]
Lesson Learned:

A number of the individual events, viewed in isolation, seem to have been quite successful. They could have formed a basis for a stream of activities which might have enabled the project to deploy its resources in such a way as to work towards concrete results. The project scattered its resources in such a way that no issue and no social group received continuing attention. There was also no effort to build on what had been accomplished in any of the activities undertaken.

Theme: Community activism