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Comic Relief Urban Slums Programme (Africa): Four Cities Initiative; Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning

Year - 2013 - 2015

Client - Comic Relief

Project Brief

Our wholly owned subsidiary, IPE Triple Line was awarded a contract to develop monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) systems for Comic Relief Four Cities Initiative. The initiative supports civil society organisations working in urban slum developments in Cape Town, Freetown, Kampala and Lusak

 

 

The objectives were to:

 

  1. develop monitoring and evaluation frameworks with civil society within each city.
  2. develop an approach to learning and collaboration.
  3. assess the MEL capacity of civil society.
  4. agree approaches to measure progress and results of their work individually and collectively at a city level.

A follow on contract was awarded to IPE Triple Line in 2014 to:

  1. provide additional MEL capacity support.
  2. review baseline data.
  3. analysis civil society reports.
  4. test two different approaches in two cities to foster collaboration and learning at the city level.

Our Approach

Through creating and facilitating highly participatory workshops, IPE Triple Line led a process to design MEL frameworks in each of the four cities. At the centre of this work is an understanding of the context of slum development in each city and what results and impact civil society (or grantees) wanted to achieve.

Working closely with Comic Relief, we:

  1. identified common themes between civil society so that they could compare and measure their achievements and setbacks and identify opportunities to collaborate and learn together.
  2. provided expertise to help the grantees identify and agree city level indicators to report against and explore areas for shared learning.
  3. introduced appropriate tools to develop a simplified approach to measure collaboration, policy and advocacy work.
  4. led the development of MEL capacity support to old and new civil society organisations which have been funded under the Comic Relief initiative
  5. assessed collective progress and identified opportunities for collaboration in two cities.
  6. A key component of this project was the facilitation of an in-country workshop in Kampala to road test an approach to foster grant-holder collaboration and learning.

Key Achievements

The collaborative nature of our approach meant that objectives were met, including:

  1. the successful co-design and co-facilitation of collaborative and participatory workshops in four African cities.
  2. a city level MEL framework with a set of agreed outcomes and indicators across a group of grantees for each city
  3. a survey of MEL capacities and systems completed and MEL capacity reports for each grantee were produced
  4. a top line MEL framework across the four cities was developed