Mid-Term Review of the AGIR Programme - Sida

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y
CSOs have struggled to find an effective M&E system that is useful in terms
of accountability, learning, and the reporting requirements of the programme.
Capacity strengthening within the AGIR programme of the CSO partners is
on-going and training in areas such as administrative, financial and human
management, results-based management, gender, human rights and fund raising
is contributing to improve organisations’ internal capacities and their addressing
of important issues such as gender, human rights, HIV/AIDS. Although
there are some challenges, such as adjusting the approach to gender
training to the conditions of the partners, improving and consolidating internal
governance, and adopting results-based management, the programme has
good potential to succeed in attaining the objective of strengthening organisations’
internal capacity and eventually in creating the conditions for selfsustainability.
Overall, gender and HIV/AIDS-based monitoring remains weak. The four
AGIR intermediaries have recognised this weakness and have applied some
of their first capacity strengthening efforts to this area through the testing, in
2012, of a new change-oriented gender training approach that has produced
good results. The intermediaries have agreed to use this training method within
2012 and funds are available. It is expected that this should greatly improve
the documentation of results through the use of cross-cutting gender indicators
in 2013 (this is stated with the caveat that partners would need to improve
their reporting of results and intermediaries would need to better systematise
and improve their reporting in the joint results matrix so that results, not only
in gender, are clearly related to indicators).
AGIR’s approach on sustainability as a multidimensional element is consistent
and adequate for its purpose - to ensure that civil society is strengthened
from multiple angles, and perspectives ensuring the quality of activism,
the effectiveness of the participation of civil society in addressing its needs
and that its voice is heard by a responsive and accountable government. As
mentioned earlier, many of the AGIR partners’ initiatives contribute to improving
access to rights, to eliciting more accountability and to promoting
good governance. Some of these results, however, are only immediate and
will not necessarily lay the ground for the perpetual reproduction of a strong
civil society able to hold the government responsible. Consequently, AGIR
needs to continually identify those elements that are likely to produce impact
and reproduce practices that will guarantee the sustainability of the results
achieved.
The key recommendations of the mid-term review are:
Intermediaries Coordination Role
The intermediary management body – ICC – needs to concentrate more on
programme-level strategic planning, the coordination of implementation activities,
consistent data collection, and reporting on programme results. This
could be accomplished by the ICC as it exists, as this insight is not simply
about the creation of another level of management but rather the need to take a
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