Project Type

Facts & Figures

LOCATION

Abidjan, with a regional office in Ouagadougou and four other offices in West Africa

TIMELINE

2018–2021

CURRENT NUMBER OF PROJECTS

  • 13 learning partnerships with TRECC pilots
  • 4 other research projects in Côte d’Ivoire

KEY OUTCOMES

  • 42 waves of data collection
  • Baseline, midline, and endline reports for 13 pilot projects

DELIVERY MODEL

  • Technical advisory and capacity-building for partners to build learning-oriented monitoring and evaluation systems
  • Independent process evaluation to validate program approaches and inform decision to scale-up

Partners

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About the project

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a research and policy non-profit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty problems. IPA supports TRECC’s partners to use data and evidence to learn about and improve their programs, and also conducts rigorous program evaluations using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). IPA has been working in Côte d’Ivoire since 2010 and established a permanent office in Abidjan in 2015.

Challenge

The success of a program can be boiled down to the program design (i.e., the solution to an identified problem) and its effective implementation (the way the solution is put in place, in practice). Evaluations often prioritize the program design side of the equation, which bears the risk of evaluating the impact of programs before knowing whether they are well implemented. When connected to a theory of change and focused on building organizational learning, monitoring systems can provide credible and actionable data. In turn, this approach enables organizations and donors to gain important insight into how to manage and improve programs.

Solution

IPA brings together researchers and implementers to design, iteratively refine, and then rigorously evaluate solutions to ensure that the evidence created is used to improve the lives of the world’s poor. IPA provides capacity-building through the design of the overall monitoring and evaluation strategy and ongoing support to implementers to collect monitoring data during the implementation phase. IPA supports partners in the iterative development of a learning agenda that is prioritized, achievable, and integrated with program management decisions. IPA provides support at various stages in the cycle of creating and using evidence. The CART (Credible, Actionable, Responsible, Transportable) principles are used to prioritize data collection activities to find a monitoring and evaluation approach that meets the needs of TRECC’s partners.

In parallel, IPA conducts independent data collection and analysis to inform an overall evaluation of the pilot projects. The main goal is to help assess, based on evidence, which pilots are eligible to scale within the context of GMM2.

Results to date

IPA is currently monitoring 13 TRECC pilots, in the context of its partnerships with the cocoa and chocolate industry, providing technical assistance on the overall monitoring and evaluation strategy and independent evaluation. As of the first quarter of 2019, three final reports have been delivered and used to inform decisions on the next iteration of the pilot projects. If key challenges are identified during the pilot evaluation, IPA recommends priority areas for improvement and appropriate steps to validate that those challenges have been solved before scale-up.