Baseline and Context Analysis

• We help you to map out a system of 9 key PRM processes in your policy sector and at your tier of governance (central, province, district or municipal). And help draw up baseline measures for the capacities of supply and demand actors in each process.

• We help you analyse whether legislative provisions will enable or constrain your efforts to make PRM processes more efficient, effective and socially accountable.
• We help you identify what perceptions, behaviours and capacities need to be changed in selected PRM processes, or what policies or legislative rules, need changing, to make processes more efficient, effective and socially accountable.
• We help to identify whether PRM processes are systematically integrated across tiers of governance. And if they are integrated with governance institutions.
• We also help you do a power/political economy analysis to understand how vested interests and unequal resource distributions may be blocking the effectiveness of PRM processes, undermining governance institutions and stifling service delivery.

Intervention Design

• We help you develop a Theory of Change for making PRM processes more efficient, effective and socially accountable. We use rigorous baseline information on the thinking, behaviour and capacities of supply and demand actors in your policy context. Then we use SAME indicators to identify what ideas, behaviours and capacities to target for change.

• We help figure out what activities and interventions, and what existing social accountability monitoring and advocacy (SAMA) tools, you could use to change targeted ideas, behaviours and capacities. We develop guidelines for you, and help you adapt any of the following SAMA tools, for use in your context (or help you develop new ones):
• Needs Assessments,
• Strategic Plan Evaluations,
• Resource Mobilisation Plan Assessments,
• Budget Analysis,
• Expenditure Tracking Reviews,
• Revenue Collection Reviews,
• Performance Analysis,
• eviews of Preventive and Corrective Action,
• Oversight Reviews
• If needed, we can help you turn your Theory of Change into a compelling funding proposal, a programme document (ProDoc), or a strategic (or operational) plan for your organisation.

Implementation Support

• We can provide customised training to you on how to use SAMA tools.
• We provide support, mentoring and advice to organisation leaders, management and staff during project implementation.

• We can also help you adapt your organisational structure to ensure you implement your Theory of Change.
• We also provide project management, if you need this.

MELAR Framework

• We can help you to develop an integrated monitoring, evaluation, learning, adaptation and reporting (MELAR) framework for your social accountability intervention. We adapt this framework to fit your Theory of Change and organisational structure.

• We provide guidelines and customised Outcome journals for monitoring evidence of your impact in changing the thinking, behaviour and capacities of target actors (or boundary partners, if that’s what you call them).
• We help you evaluate whether the techniques you are using to change the thinking, behaviour and capacities of targeted actors are working, and to identify those that aren’t, and in which circumstances.
• We help you use MELAR to integrate a process of ongoing learning into your work practices.
• We help you use MELAR to amend your Theory of Change and adapt your intervention activities to improve your impact.
• We help you use MELAR to integrate data collection, assessment, learning and adaptation into your management and reporting processes. It will make reporting to your Board and funders a breeze. It also allows you to account for your activities, outputs and expenditure using OECD evaluation criteria (of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability and impact) with ease.
• MELAR will enable you to provide evidence-based contribution stories that demonstrate your impact, where you have achieved this. And explain what adaptations and refinements you intend to make to your Theory of Change, where you haven’t.
• So, go ahead and upgrade to MELAR. It will contribute to your sustainability. It will enable you to justify to your funders why they should continue to support your work. And will allow governance programme officers in funding agencies to provide firm justifications to their head offices (using OECD criteria), for why support to your programme should be continued.

External Evaluations

• We offer high-quality, independent, rigorous and external evaluations of governance and social accountability interventions. (Mid-term reviews and end of project/phase evaluations)
• If you want a rigorous external assessment of your performance, with diagnostic findings and clear and practical recommendations to strengthen your impact, we provide this.

• We provide accurate measures of how organisations are performing in changing the thinking, behaviour and capacities of key actors within PRM processes. And of progress in helping make these processes more socially accountable, and of any contributions to improving service delivery.
• We don’t produce rose-tinted reports that focus on isolated service delivery improvements, or gloss over poor performance, weak impact, and the inefficient use of funds.
• Organisations who want to learn from their mistakes, and want to use our findings to amend their activities and improve their impact do not shy from the rigour of our evaluations.
• Funders who want to arrive at a rigorous account of the performance of supported projects, and want to engage candidly with the financial and human resources needed to build required capacities, welcome the rigour of our evaluations and the diagnostic precision of our recommendations.