Regional/Global

Systems-Level Impact through the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill

In a global context of rising numbers of people affected by increasingly frequent and severe food security crises, CARE advocated for essential amendments in the 2018 Farm Bill to strengthen critical international food aid programs. CARE's advocacy for the 2018 Farm Bill was rooted in its focus on gender equality and systems change, which in this case meant advocating for a shift away from monetization in support of CARE’s long-term goals for transforming food aid from a commodity-centric model to one that enhances effectiveness, efficiency, and focus on systems change.

Central to CARE’s asks in the 2018 Farm Bill were efforts to end the mandate of monetization and provide greater certainty in the use of the Community Development Funds. Both of these asks would strengthen Food for Peace, a program authorized in the Farm Bill that provides in-kind food aid directly to communities and supports community self-sufficiency. CARE recognized the 2018 Farm Bill reforms, including ending mandatory monetization and expanding Community Development Funds, could strengthen local food systems, empower farmers, and build community resilience by prioritizing sustainable and effective food aid delivery. Read More...

Youth Skills Development Impact Brief

Globally, an estimated 282 million young people (aged 15-24) are not employed, in education, or in training (defined as NEET),1 and young people are three times as likely as adults to be unemployed.2 Nearly 75% of the world’s 1.8 billion young people lack the skills needed for the labor market.3 Strong economies hinge upon youth having the skills to secure meaningful, well-paid work. CARE’s programs help young people succeed in jobs, entrepreneurship, and ongoing career learning. CARE provides comprehensive strategies that support and collaborate with national governments, employers, educators, parents, and youth to develop the workforce for today and tomorrow. We build our programs to connect
young people with mentors, training providers, and employers. We train youth in soft skills (such as critical thinking, time management, decision making, self-confidence, and others), financial literacy, and market-demanded technical vocational skills to meet the needs of the labor market.

CARE’s youth skills & workforce development programs primarily support Sustainable Development Goal 8 - Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Since 2020, CARE’s programs have supported 22 million people in increasing their economic empowerment and participation in dignified work in 67 countries. Read More...

KEYSTONE PARTNER SURVEY 2023 CARE International

In 2023, CARE expressed its interest in conducting a Keystone Partnership Survey to understand how 304 local partners assessed their experience of working with CARE in an international development partnership. This report provides credible perceptual data from a partner perspective on how well CARE performs its role in the partnership.
Keystone’s partnership survey enables INGOs to benchmark their performance ratings against the experiences and perceptions of over 8,000 local partners of more than 90 INGOs (listed below in Table 1) that have taken the
survey.
Thematically, the survey explores the most important operational dimensions to international development partnerships – learning, monitoring & reporting, communications, financial support, and non-financial support.
CARE’s technical competence is further assessed through a series of questions about its sector-specific knowledge, leadership reputation, and value adding abilities. Overall relationship dynamics are captured through questions
about how well CARE learns and adapts, how CARE compares to other international partners, and the extent to which the local partner would recommend working with the CARE.
The report presents overall results for each survey question in a single graphic chart. For rating questions, Keystone employs Net Promoter Analysis (see Annex 6), allowing it to compare and benchmark CARE’s current responses against a benchmark drawn from Keystone’s global cohort of social change organizations.
Respondents indicated their region of work, budget size, type of organization, the type of work they do, and whether they were women-led. This enables us to analyse the data by these respondent characteristics without compromising anonymity. Where organizations of a particular characteristic (e.g., location or size of budget) vary from the average, we do not present it in a separate chart, but highlight these variations in the text accompanying
the charts. Read More...

7th Pacific Regional Conference on Disability

Video with interviews with some of the forum's participants.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ravvpwL8Woubq6ARNSJYuCKV1_96s8oD/view
Read More...

CARE’s Fast and Fair COVID-19 campaign: Comprehensive local-to-global impact

Report available in English, French and Spanish

In November 2020, CARE launched the Fast and Fair campaign to push for fairness and efficiency in the global COVID-19 vaccination effort. We skillfully leveraged our global reach and influence to build and maintain support for more comprehensive funding for vaccine delivery while working hand-in-hand with national and local governments in 34 countries to get the vaccines into the arms of those most in need. Our advocacy and influencing of US and global policy, along with our deep engagement in communities and years of programming investments drove systems-level change that contributed to 21.2 million people getting fully vaccinated in 29 countries. To determine the comprehensive impact of the Fast and Fair campaign, we utilized country case studies, internal program data, and an external evaluation. These sources all affirmed CARE's advocacy and influencing contributions to the global vaccination effort, resulting in millions of vaccinations at the last mile. Read More...

Fast and Fair Country Case Studies: Mini Advocacy and Influencing Impact Reporting (AIIR) Tool Analysis

Fast and Fair Country Case Studies: Mini Advocacy and Influencing Impact Reporting (AIIR) Tool Analysis Read More...

Global Covid-19 Supplemental Campaign: A case study to assess the efficacy of CARE and the coalition’s advocacy strategies

Between December 2021 and late March 2022, CARE and five close allies led an ad hoc coalition advocating for US government approval of $17B in supplemental funding for global COVID-19 relief, specifically for resources to support vaccine delivery and front-line health workers. The purpose of this case study is to assess the effectiveness of the advocacy strategies employed by CARE and allies and draw out lessons to (1) inform future campaigning and (2) better integrate this type of assessment in CARE’s MEL activities. Read More...

Fighting for the Least Vaccinated

The global vaccination effort was generally considered inequitable and ineffective. Vaccination rates mostly followed an income-based pattern both in terms of onset of large-scale vaccination efforts and numbers of people vaccinated. Despite global efforts to address vaccine inequity, vaccination coverage in low-income countries has remained low, though the gap is shrinking. CARE USA, an international poverty fighting and human rights organization, began its Fast and Fair COVID vaccine initiative and advocacy campaign in late 2020 –relatively early in the pandemic period. As the campaign’s name suggests, CARE wanted to help steer the global vaccination effort down the path of fairness and efficiency. This evaluation is an assessment of whether and to what extent CARE, in collaboration with its partners, achieved its objectives Read More...

Integrating Local Knowledge in Humanitarian and Development Programming: Perspectives of Global Women Leaders

This report examines local knowledge integration in the context of global development and humanitarian aid work. It builds upon a recently published report by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) called "Integrating Local Knowledge in Development Programming". That report sought to “share knowledge of how development donors and implementing organizations leverage local knowledge to inform programming.”2 This study aims to extend the original methods to better understand grassroots actors’ own interpretations of local knowledge and its integration into programming in their communities. It examines the perspectives of 29 grassroots leaders from women-led organizations around the world, looking deeply at the ways in which they conceptualize local knowledge and local knowledge stakeholders, their approaches to designing their own projects based on local knowledge, and their experiences sharing knowledge with international actors and donors. This builds the broader evidence base on integrating local knowledge to incorporate the perspectives of grassroots actors into the same conversation as the original study.
Key takeaways from this research span two broad categories – how local leaders conceptualize local knowledge and what the effective use of local knowledge in practice looks like to them. Within these categories, interviewees explored the many challenges they face in identifying and sharing knowledge; their various approaches to designing projects based on local knowledge; some of the tensions they often find themselves balancing; unique ways of measuring the contribution of such knowledge to the success of an intervention; and experiences with and strategies for sharing their knowledge with non-local actors.
In terms of how women leaders tend to conceptualize local knowledge, the research reveals three distinct but interconnected definitions of the term: 1) knowing what a community is like; 2) knowing what a community needs and where the solutions lie; and 3) having a profound connection with the community. The first definition indicates knowing a community well enough to understand the dynamics within it. The second goes a bit further to say that local knowledge means knowing both the specific needs present in a community as well as the relevant solutions for addressing them. As one respondent told us, “Contextual expertise is having experience in a certain context and being able to solve problems based on it.” And the third conceptualization indicates having a deeply rooted connection with the community or the grassroots. Some described this as “having your heart” in the community. Key to this third definition appears to be both consistency and the ability to perceive change over time. Interviewees said that local knowledge depends on people having gone through different “contexts, histories, processes, and experiences” together, and having learned from them collectively. Therefore, it is difficult, if not impossible, for international actors to acquire the same level of investment in communities that is quasi-synonymous with local knowledge unless they have lived, worked, and built relationships within them long enough to meet this consistency standard. Instead, this level of knowledge of a community and its context is fairly unique to local actors. Read More...

Driven by Impact – CARE’s progress against Vision 2030 as of May 2023

CARE International approved Vision 2030 in June 2020. V2030 lays out an overall direction for the Confederation of the impact we seek, the organisation we will become and the resourcing we need to achieve our impact. This report takes stock of the impact we have achieved after 2 years; it outlines what programme leaders of CARE will do to deepen and scale our impact and makes recommendations to National Directors and Council regarding priority areas of progress required in our organisation and our resourcing to accelerate our programme impact.

In Annex 1, you will find detailed analysis by impact goal, Annex 2 highlights the main documents reviewed to feed into this report and Annex 3 indicates who was interviewed/consulted. Read More...

Filter Evaluations