Building Resiliency in Northern Ghana through Collaborative Project Adjustments

The Resiliency in Northern Ghana (RING) program is a five-year, $60 million, Feed the Future program that seeks to reduce household poverty and malnutrition in 17 districts in Northern Ghana. The program delivers a variety of activities through local District Assemblies in the following technical areas: agriculture, livelihoods, nutrition, governance, and water sanitation and hygiene (WASH). This case study examines the adjustments that RING made in its first few years of implementation to strategically sequence and layer complementary interventions to achieve better poverty and nutrition outcomes. RING utilized many principles of CLA including extensive collaboration with partners, testing and refining a theory of change, using M&E for learning, building on an existing technical evidence base, and adapting programmatic interventions accordingly.  

Initially, RING worked closely with government partners to define and offer a tailored and integrated suite of activities to each district. As results were analyzed after the first year of implementation, it became apparent that the Village Savings and Loan Activity (VSLA) had an immediate and greater impact than some of the other program activities. Data showed the districts who had implemented VSLA activities not only achieved desired outcomes for the activity itself, but also had better results in other non-VSLA activities as well. RING shared this program monitoring data with partners and they were convinced of the need to adopt VSLA across the board. Over the next years of implementation, RING successfully scaled up the implementation of VSLAs in all 1,500 target communities to enhance development results.