The £17.5 million Mobilising for Development (M4D) Programme aimed to improve policymakers’ (PMs) and service providers’ (SPs) responsiveness and accountability towards citizens’ better-articulated demands and entitlements, especially adolescent girls (AGs) and people with disabilities (PWD). Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the total budget was £17.5m over a six-year programme cycle (May 2012–18). M4D aimed to build capacity of supply- and demand-side stakeholders and identify Better Fit Approaches (BFAs) to service delivery by combining detailed political economy assessments with the latest thinking on improving governance programming in Africa. The Programme places an emphasis on experimenting with and learning from new and innovative approaches to produce lessons from which DFID and others can draw.
The M4D evaluation was funded by DFID, conducted by Itad (as the IEM), and ran from 1 November 2014 to 15 May 2018, beginning shortly after the inception phase and running parallel with the implementation of the Programme. The evaluation had a focus on both learning and accountability, as expressed in its objective (see Annex 1 Terms of Reference) and purpose:
- To identify and evaluate the causal mechanisms through which the M4D Programme aims to make PMs and SPs in three Nigerian States more accountable and responsive to citizens.
- To measure the level of success of M4D interventions as well as how successful certain interventions were relative to other interventions.
The evaluation included an assessment of specific projects supported by M4D, the strengths and weaknesses of its approach, and the individual approaches adopted by programme partners. Specifically, it encompassed six ‘first look’ case studies, six ‘second look’ case studies, two stand-alone case studies, the development of four learning notes which fed back key learning to the programme team, a ‘first look’, and ‘second look’ case study synthesis findings report, which presented conclusions against the main change pathways in the overall M4D theory of change (ToC). This final report summarises insights from across all of these components.
