Capacity strengthening for partners of Brot für die Welt (BftW) in Southern Africa
Brot für die Welt (BftW)
Capacity Strengthening Project Overview
In this case study, we share our model for providing capacity strengthening, technical support and capacity strengthening for grant-making organisations. Since 2020, Southern Hemisphere has been providing consultancy and support services (CSS) in Outcome- and Impact-Orientated (OIO) program planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning (PMEL) to 57 partner organisations of Brot für die Welt (BftW) in Lesotho, Eswatini and South Africa.
In this case study, we highlight the outcomes that the support services are having on the partner organisations and why we feel so privileged to support organisations that work towards social justice.
BftW is a globally active development and relief agency of Protestant Churches, based in Germany. The organisation has a deep passion for addressing issues of inequality and injustice.
Project Statement
BftW is asking grantees to implement results-oriented monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems, and to report on outcomes, instead of activities and outputs. This change has been challenging for many organisations, and they struggle to formulate envisaged outcomes and report on change.
Therefore, BftW contracted Southern Hemisphere to support their grantees with MEL and strengthen their capacity for:
- Impact-and outcome-oriented project planning, thus ensuring a stringent analysis of outcome and impact logic
- completion of funding applications
- design of indicators and data collection tools
- design of monitoring, evaluation, reporting and learning plans (MERL plans)
- coherent and accurate project activity and narrative reports
- preparation, planning and management of formative and summative evaluations
With this consultancy, we aim to strengthen compliance with BftW systems and to empower the partners to improve their knowledge and MEL systems, improving their sustainability in the long run.
What We Did
We have designed a process to support BftW and their partners with their MEL capacity building:
Understanding BftW
Getting to know the partner organisations
Providing technical support and capacity strengthening
Outcomes
Project implementation is strengthened through a combination of training and one-to-one support. When partners attend M&E systems capacity building, they are exposed to new techniques and tools. They can then request a consultant to help them with implementation.
We ensure that organisations build their their confidence and capability in PMEL through our developmental approach to capacity building. As a result of their participation in the CSS, partner organisations are getting better at project design, gathering more and better data that is readily available for project improvement and reporting, and can implement more systematic monitoring, reporting and learning. It does, however, take time, and partners are at different levels.
BftW is getting better proposals, and stronger outcomes-oriented reporting, so that they can assess the impact that their funding is making in Southern Africa.
In Southern Africa, BftW supports an amazing variety of very important organisations that advance social justice, and we are thrilled to be supporting them with this work.
