Meta Analysis

Private Sector and Market Systems Engagement: Time to Move Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility

A summary of CARE Bangladesh's work on engaging the private sector to transform market systems to end poverty. Read More...

A decade of results in Social Transformation for Pastoralist Women and Girls

CARE Ethiopia has spent the last 25 years working to better understand the lives of pastoralist communities in Ethiopia and how best to work alongside them for sustainable development. In the past decade alone, CARE Ethiopia has undertaken several analyses - studies, evaluations and assessments - that have provided valuable insight into how best to support pastoralists (women, men, girls and boys) to build a sustained quality of life. Pastoralists in Ethiopia are found in seven regions including Afar, Somali, SNNP, Oromia, Diredawa, Benshangul Gumuz and Gambella Regional States.

CARE has been at the forefront of encouraging a change in thinking in Ethiopia acknowledging that pastoralism should be regarded as a viable and economically effective livestock production system, and increasing awareness that widespread policies and practices are needed to reverse historical marginalization and address the now disproportionate levels of poverty and vulnerability faced by many pastoralist communities. Read More...

A Decade of Results in Social Transformation for Chronically Food Insecure Rural Women

CARE Ethiopia recognizes that gender-transformative approaches are ambitious, and context-specific, and that change is an incremental process instead of an endpoint, 4 but critical pause points to reflect on learning are key, and thus this document captures the critical knowledge and results CARE Ethiopia has identified over the past decade relevant to their first impact group “Chronically Food Insecure Rural Women” (CFIRW). Read More...

A Decade of Results in Social Transformation for Urban Female Youth

In Ethiopia, ensuring that both women and girls participate in and provide leadership through the urbanization process
is key and can only be accomplished by removing economic and socio- cultural barriers. Evidence from a series of
independent studies funded by USAID, the World Bank and the UNDP in 2017-2018 clearly show that urbanization and
industrialization processes in Ethiopia must be gender responsive in order to deliver sustainable outcomes.
CARE Ethiopia would challenge this and state that it must be gender transformative. For CARE Ethiopia this means
ensuring that: urban girls and women are empowered to equally access economic and social opportunities and
services; institutions become more responsive to the specific and contextual needs and priorities of urban girls and
women and with a focus to understand the heterogeneity of women and girls and their specific vulnerabilities, and that
socio-cultural norms and practices should promote gender equality. CARE Ethiopia’s Theory of Change for resource poor
urban females (see Figure 2), moves beyond individual self-improvement, towards transforming the power dynamics
and structures that served historically to reinforce gendered inequalities in urban communities. Read More...

Learning from the SAFE Justice Community Score Card: Final Learning Report

The SAFE Justice Community Score Card process was a local adaptation of Community Score Card models used globally and in Nepal in other sectors. Its design was led by CARE Nepal, through a participatory process with DFID and IP-SSJ partners, and focused on GBV response services provided by the Nepal police and Judicial Committees. This report details the final reflections of CARE Nepal and partner project staff on how the process worked and what could be strengthened in future. It also provides a set of recommendations for the sustainability and institutionalization of the CSC in the justice sector.

The CSC models introduced within SAFE Justice and in Search for Common Ground’s Pahunch project (around the same time) were the first to be trialed in the justice sector in Nepal. The CSC model CARE has implemented through SAFE Justice was informed by CARE’s extensive global experience with CSCs, but is also heavily based on the outputs of a co-design workshop with CARE Nepal, Search for Common Ground Nepal, SAFE Justice partners, and DFID Nepal, in Kathmandu in August 2017.1 This local model was documented and set out in a bespoke manual (SAFE Justice Community Score Card: A Field Guide for Nepal),2 and that manual was then updated and re-issued based on findings from a review and adaptation process in 2018, and then again based on the final reflection process outlined in this report (in August 2019).3
Overall, the chosen sectoral focus of the justice sector, and in particular the application of the CSC model in the midst of Nepal’s transitioning subnational governance structure, was an ambitious choice within SAFE Justice. Despite this, the process has demonstrated strong positive results, particularly in terms of improved police-community relations and community awareness of, and connection to, the new Judicial Committees.
However, the context did necessitate a particularly flexible and adaptive approach, in order to shift the structures and stakeholders involved with the CSC, in step with major political changes. While the CSC was not set up as a formal ‘pilot’ per se, CARE tried to treat it as such, scheduling deliberate junctures to reflect on the functioning of the model, hear from frontline staff on what is working and what is challenging, making and documenting concrete adaptations along the way. Read More...

CARE International Advocacy and Influencing: A Review of Pathways to Success

This report constitutes a review of 208 advocacy and influencing initiatives that reported having successfully influenced policies, plans and budgets. A sample of 31 cases were included in for review. These comprised influencing outcomes across 16 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and Europe. We estimate that outcomes these initiatives influenced have so far improved the lives of more than 4.2 million people, with the potential for future impacts for a further 116 million people. 20 cases were from national or local level policy, plan or budget influence in the global South, and 11 case from the global North, influencing donor strategies or international negotiations.

Overall, the top 4 strategies employed across the North and the global South were: (i) lobbying-decision-makers; (ii) coalition building; (iii) public forums and (iv) method replication. Twice as common as any other strategy was lobbying decision-makers. This was also judged to be the most effective strategy in both the South and the North. 23 initiatives employed some form of lobbying decision-makers, and in 19 of these it was ranked as the most influential strategy. This lobbying was commonly a form of “insider” approach where CARE and partners already had a good relationship with government line ministries, having built credibility and trust over a number of years. Particularly in the South, advocacy efforts were part of a strategy over more than five years. Such efforts demonstrate that long-term investment is required for policy change to materialise into impact. The main tactics or strategies which did not feature strongly were activism and campaigning such as marches, petitions and use of social media, and evidence for the use of research was also uneven. We consider why this may be the case in greater detail toward the end of the paper
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Literature Review of Gender and Power Analyses in the Provinces of North and South Kivu Kivu, DRC

This report is a literature review of gender and power analyses in the provinces of North and South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was commissioned by CARE DRC. CARE DRC aligns with the CARE 2020 Program Strategy1, which emphasizes that ‘at its root, poverty is caused by unequal power relations that result in the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities between women and men, between power-holders and marginalized communities, and between countries'. CARE believes that poverty cannot be overcome without addressing those underlying power imbalances.

Incorporating a gender and power analysis3 to inform programming is the first commitment of CARE International Gender Equality Policy4. CARE DRC’s Strategic Plan5 highlights its experience in programming for gender justice and reducing GBV as a strength. Therefore this contextual analysis of gender and power relations in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu aims to ‘provide elements to update the problems, the underlying causes, aspirations and specific potentials for women and men, girls and boys, male and female youth in these two provinces’ so that CARE DRC programs, especially the future GEWEP III and MAWE TATU II programs (see brief description in Box 1) as well as any new proposals, will in the future be more transformative. Read More...

Evidence of Change In Gender Equality and Women‘s Empowerment in the Balkans 2005-2012

This is a report about CARE’s work to advance gender equality in the Balkans and what we have achieved over the past seven years. Our goal is to give account and to demonstrate our commitment to change the lives of the people we serve. We want to illustrate the real life impact of the work we do with our partners and to document the process, methods and the tools used. We want to show that what we and partners have achieved, is relevant to the regional context and that our approaches and methodologies make a demonstrable difference. We also want to learn from our challenges and limitations, and we will use these lessons in our future work. Read More...

Learning From Failure 2019

Driven by a wish to learn more from what goes wrong in our programming, and to examine where changes to the broader organization and system can improve our programming and impact globally, in 2019 CARE undertook its first evaluations-based failure meta-analysis. This analysis draws learning and evidence from 114 evaluations of CARE’s work from 2015-2018 to understand the patterns and trends in what goes wrong. This helps us take a data-driven approach to strategic investments and action plans to live out CARE’s commitment to high program quality and continuous improvement across the board.
The review draws from project specific data, but deliberately anonymizes the data and focuses on overarching trends to remove blame for any specific project team or set of individuals. This exercise is designed to help us learn more about how we can change our processes and patterns of support and engagement around weak areas to improve our work. CARE is using this data to build action plans and next steps to continuously improve our programming.
Read More...

Desk review to conduct assessment of ‘value for money’ provided through CARE International’s programmes to vulnerable and marginalised populations in Asia

This case study has been prepared as part of a study commissioned by CARE International (CI) to assess its long-term impact achieved in the Asia Pacific region between 2005 and 2010. As part of this process CI explored the extent to which socio-economic cost benefit analysis could be applied on a sample of CI projects, using an adapted form of the Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology1.
The aim of the study was to gain a better understanding of CI’s ability to deliver added benefit and value to participating communities and their societies, given invested resources, whilst testing the feasibility of applying an adapted form of SROI to projects. The study is also expected to contribute to a wider discussion on the usefulness, and applicability, of demonstrating value for money within the contexts CI works.
Given CI’s focus on empowerment, and especially of marginalised and vulnerable women, this case study presents the analysis and findings of four projects: Plantation Community Empowerment Project (PCEP), Sri Lanka Social & Economic Transformation of the Ultra Poor (SETU), Bangladesh Integrated Rural Development and Disaster Mitigation (IRDM), Cambodia Poverty Alleviation in Remote Upland Areas (PARUA), Laos
It is important to note that the projects selected for analysis were initiatives within wider programmes and, as such, were not intended to be illustrative of the overall programme’s magnitude or effectiveness. The SROI methodology is a good fit for CI’s projects due to its participatory nature and valuation of things that matter to stakeholders. However, due to the desk-based nature of this study, these findings should be seen as purely indicative as field research would be required to build a definitive and an accurate picture of impact. Read More...

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Agriculture AIDS Basic and Girls' Education Cash Vouchers Child Health child marriage Child Nutrition Civil Society and Governance Climate Change Conflict Mitigation COVID 19 COVID 19 RGA disaster risk reduction Economic Development Education Emergency Environment Food Security Garment Workers Gender Gender Based Violence Gender Equality Global Affairs Canada Humanitarian Aid Livelihoods Maternal Migration Natural Resources nexus Nutrition refugees Reproductive Health Resilience RGA Sexual Shelter Usaid Vaccination Value Chain Vsla Wash Water Women's Economic Empowerment Women's Empowerment Youth