FRANCAISEntraide et Fraternité / Broederlijk Delen - Comments
Institutional learning
-EF and BD claim to assess the impact and the performance of their programs through monitoring and evaluation. However, EF, unlike BD, has published a document explaining how it evaluates its global organization, its human resources management, its finances, and its programs and projects. Internal assessments are called for by the management team, usually on an annual basis. They focus on the impact of programs and projects, their results, their relevance, their efficacy, their efficiency, their sustainability, the quality of their partnerships, their consideration for earlier-defined budgets and timelines, as well as specific problems and the capacity to follow up recommendations. As for external evaluations, they are called for either by the board of directors or by the management team in line with contractual agreements EF has with some of its donors.
-Program evaluations can be found in annual reports under every of EF’s four pillar (food security, children, civil and political rights, citizen initiatives). They specify how much of the budget was allocated to the programs, give anecdotal evidence of their impact, and acknowledge the efforts of the different local partners. The reports allow insight into the effectiveness of programs through both quantitative summaries and qualitative elaborations.
-Yet in the case of BD, the information provided in yearly reports do not give details about external and internal evaluations. Yearly reports mention the total number of people reached. In 2018, for example, BD’s annual report stated that the NGO and its partners worked “with 96,000 rural households” on sustainable agricultural production. It also mentioned “350 market groups and cooperatives that process and commercialize their members’ products”. But it did not elaborate on what these numbers concretely meant in terms of efficiency. Likewise, there’s no available documentation showing a sense of reflexivity about past mistakes, for instance in Rwanda. This calls into question whether BD and EF have detailed protocols in place to guarantee accountability to their partner organizations, local communities, and donors.
