STOP, in the Name of Learning: Reflecting and Adapting Ethiopia’s Approach to Attaining Feed the Future and Economic Growth Objectives

At USAID/Ethiopia, we found that although we were on track to meet some of our output-level indicators, it was unlikely that the mission would meet the high-level outcome indicators linked to the Feed the Future strategy and development objective. Evaluations suggested several factors that may have contributed to this disconnect and questioned some of the assumptions underlying our “push/pull” hypothesis.

CLA Approach

• Pause & Reflect: Our economic growth team undertook a “looking back, looking forward” listening exercise during one of our quarterly partners meetings to assess what lessons we had learned from evaluations and activity implementation and consider what improvements we could make.
• M&E for Learning: Based on the evidence and learning, the team agreed on a set of recommended adaptations. Although many of the new approaches have yet to be implemented, our new Country Development Cooperation Strategy will capture the learning behind them, and they will be evaluated over the next five years.

Lessons Learned

• Ensuring that activity-level indicators are linked to the development hypothesis and the higher-level outcomes that projects and activities are designed to achieve is crucial for effective learning from monitoring and evaluation.

Outcomes

• Our evaluation team is now considering evaluation approaches that will provide insights into the efficacy of our new, integrated “push/pull” hypothesis. We are developing relevant custom indicators to improve monitoring of higher-level outcomes.