Global Resilience Partnership: Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) aims to help millions of vulnerable people in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia better adapt to shocks and chronic stresses and invest in a more resilient future.

Objectives

Set up in 2014 by three founding organisations, which are now its executive sponsors (The Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), GRP combines the critical know-how, tools, and processes required to improve, build and scale up climate resilience thinking and capacity.

GRP has four key aims:

1. To support measurement approaches to quantify and qualify the financial and social impact of resilience efforts. This includes creation of tools to help measure, visualize and predict resilience needs.
2. To use unconventional financing instruments to mobilize additional private capital for resilience and increase sustainability of resilience initiatives.
3. To use insights, evidence and GRP’s global convening power to foster enabling environments that prioritize resilience for humanitarian and development work.
4. To fill knowledge gaps in cross-cutting areas relevant to resilience (e.g., gender) and rationalise disparate learning initiatives and cultivate communities of practice.

Our role

Itad has been engaged by GRP as a Learning Partner in the Impact Unit to design and deliver a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) system for the programme. We are responsible for revision of the programme Theory of Change (ToC) and indicators, production of a learning agenda, design of a monitoring information system and provision of direct support to project grantees in systematically collecting and reporting results.

The MEL system is designed to facilitate adaptive and flexible programming and is focused on translating robust evidence into knowledge as to what works and what doesn’t in strengthening resilience.

The MEL activities are clustered into three phases:

1. GRP Priority support phase, during which we conduct a literature review to identify best practice metrics and indicators. We will also review and finalise the programme-level ToC, LogFrame and project-level ToCs, work with GRP stakeholders to identify learning questions, issue draft M&E guidance notes, and develop ICT tools for M&E.
2. During the M&E Inception phase, we’ll provide on-going support for grantee data gathering and reporting, further develop the GRP evaluation and learning agenda.
3. The Implementation phase will begin in April 2017 and its activities will be agreed on and defined during inception phase.

The evaluation is being delivered by a team of experienced evaluators specialising in climate resilience, the use of ICT for M&E, and the use of monitoring and evaluation to support learning across scales and contexts.

Image © River City, Vietnam. Photo Credit: Julia Maudlin (CC BY 2.0)