USAID Announces Small Grant Awards: Strengthening Evaluation and Assessment of Poverty Reduction and Conflict/Fragility Interventions

USAID has awarded five small grants that seek to stimulate innovation and knowledge in the area of evaluation and assessment of interventions aimed at poverty reduction and the mitigation of conflict or fragility. Key objectives are to 1) Promote greater understanding of the potential or limits of interventions to promote poverty reduction and conflict/fragility-mitigation; 2) Encourage the development of more meaningful measures of poverty reduction and conflict/fragility-mitigation impacts; and 3) Promote cross-community learning and problem-solving in the area of evaluation and assessment among the poverty and conflict/fragile states communities. Grant activities will be implemented over an 18 month period, with grants being managed by The QED Group LLC in partnership with USAID’s PASSN team. Updates on the grantees’ findings will appear on Poverty Frontiers periodically throughout the award. 
The selected grantees and their projects include the following:

Banyan Global
Banyan Global is utilizing the Business Council for Peace’s (Bpeace) employment generation program targeting women entrepreneurs program in Afghanistan as the model for a proposed assessment and evaluation framework.  The framework will expand on the premise of the linkage between conflict reduction and economic growth by delving into the relationship between conflict dynamics, poverty reduction, and enterprise development and employment generation.  Banyan Global will design and pilot baseline and final assessment tools to measure indicators of poverty and conflict reduction in order to analyze the relationships between the two.

Columbia University
Estimating the impact of development interventions on the incidence of violence is difficult, with assessments often relying on recall, survey data, or scattered official reports.  In response Columbia University is piloting new measures that seek to use cell phone technology to record conflict events data in real time. The measures are being developed in the context of a large scale randomized evaluation of a development program in Africa.

IRIS Center, University of Maryland
The IRIS Center is comparing time horizons for strategic planning and educational goals within the education system in Liberia.  Education systems are typically tiered: the national government, local governments, schools, NGOs, communities and other entities each have strategic plans, budgets and protocols established for achieving their stated goals.  IRIS Center's plan is twofold: 1) To study the synchronicity of time horizons present in strategic planning, financial flows, and expected student outcomes among each institutional tier in the education system and 2) To measure changes in time horizons of institutions and their constituents over time.

Land O’ Lakes
Through the Knowledge Advancing Peace (KAP) dairy zone development program on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, Land O’ Lakes is developing and testing a methodology to assess whether its economic growth programs impact violence and instability.  As both a source and potential solution to conflict, economic development activities must be tracked carefully to ensure that they do not exacerbate tensions already existing on the island.  When a relationship between economic growth and conflict is identified, Land O’ Lakes will use the KAP methodology to assess its scope and size, ultimately aiming to both better understands its interventions and create more effective activities in the future. For more information about the project, please contact Meredith Kruger.

Mercy Corps
Mercy Corps is evaluating the impact of programs that aim to reduce both poverty and violence through integrated programming which combines economic development with explicit peace building activities. This research will examine several "theories of change" that underpin many of Mercy Corps' conflict management and poverty alleviation programs, including the theories that building economic relationships across lines of division or reducing competition for scarce resources will promote stability. In addition, the project will produce a set of field-tested M&E tools for other practitioners to use. To achieve these aims, Mercy Corps is 1) developing tools that more accurately measure the impact of programs designed to promote both poverty alleviation and stability; 2) testing these tools in three Mercy Corps programs while simultaneously measuring program impact; and 3) documenting and disseminating lessons about measures, data collection tools, and program impact to internal and external audiences. For more information about the project, please contact Jenny Vaughan.