Monitoring and Evaluation

SEEK conducts large-scale organizational reviews and programmatic evaluations to help organizations improve their overall performance by helping them set up systems to continuously assess the efficiency and effectiveness of their programs. Our goal with each evaluation is to contribute to organizational learning while improving structures, financing models, and program portfolios. We use a variety of methods, including key informant interviews, focal-group discussions, surveys, tracer studies, quantitative analysis, and field visits. We also design monitoring and evaluation frameworks to help our clients track their own effectiveness, along with creating tailored theories of change.

We believe it is important to share the learnings from evaluation efforts, especially when they can be of benefit in developing country settings. To this end we also conduct workshops and publish findings, where possible, to share best practices and the practical implications of our work.

Clients for our Monitoring and Evaluation services have included the Africa Progress Panel, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, FP2020, UNITAID, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Bread for the World, the German agency for international development cooperation (GIZ), the UN Global Compact, the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm), and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

M&E

Bread for the World (Brot für die Welt)

From 2014 to 2016, SEEK supported Bread for the World – Protestant Development Service, one of the largest recipients of German development assistance, to develop its technical and vocational training (TVET) portfolio, to identify impact factors and good practices for vocational training projects, as well as to provide recommendations for advancing organizational and thematic funding logic to improve the impact of the TVET portfolio. SEEK conducted an in-depth assessment of the portfolio along the five OECD evaluation criteria (relevance, effectiveness, impact, efficiency, and sustainability), with a particular emphasis on gender and the integration of marginalized groups.

The assignment involved a comprehensive desk review of the TVET portfolio, including an analysis to benchmark the project design with international standards, as well as interviews with project managers, cluster leads, and top management. In addition, the team conducted three country case studies – Cameroon, Ghana, and Palestine – through field visits to assess the projects of six Bread for the World partners in detail. Methods used were focus-group discussions, interviews, and Tracer studies.

To highlight best practices and results from the evaluation, SEEK held a workshop in Kumasi, Ghana, in September 2015 with over 30 Bread for the World partners. Final results were presented to the BMZ in January 2016. The evaluation findings were ultimately used by Bread for the World to enhance organizational accountability and to inform key strategic considerations, such as improving internal structure, expertise, overall funding logic, and internal capacity.