Project: Strengthening Somali Media Capacity for Democracy and Human Rights
Evaluation Date: October 2011
Report: [report link]
Lesson Learned:

Additional guidance from a partner organization would probably have helped the grantee make better use of its members’ energy and commitment to engage in advocacy on matters of rights and policy. The project would have benefited from strategic advice. The grantee lacked project management capacity, time and inclination to consider “big picture” policy and strategic issues. The grantee to some extent anticipated its own weakness by suggesting in the project document that an Advisory Committee including UN representatives would be appointed to help it implement the project. Regrettably, the committee did not get established, partly because grantee did not follow up on the idea.

Theme: Media
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