Impact review of DFID Programme Partnership Arrangement (PPA) with CARE UK (2016):

PPAs are agreements between DFID and civil society organisations. They provide unrestricted funding to CSOs with global reach and expertise, and they achieve real results in terms of poverty reduction and provide good value for money (demonstrated through competitive selection).  

The assignment focused on CARE’s work in three areas: Women’s Economic Empowerment, Resilience to Climate Change and Local Governance and Accountability. It addressed 4 questions that are potentially relevant to the planned Partnership Facilitation Unit: How effective was strategic funding in supporting innovation, learning and capacity building? What evidence is there that PPA funding offers value for money and why? How and why are innovative pilot practices funded by PPA adopted and scaled up by third parties to multiply impact? How and when are CARE country offices able to optimise the use of unrestricted funding?

The evaluation included: intensive engagement with CARE staff to define scope of review; development of a methodology and refinement of evaluation questions to enable CARE to unpack dynamics of how pilots are scaled up (opening the ‘black box’); design of country visits to Bangladesh and Kenya as well as assessment of global CARE facilities such as their climate change and resilience partnership and support function; leading mission to Kenya and interviewing banks, mobile operators, NGOs and others to assess process of scaling up village savings and loan arrangements and process of dissemination and take-up of Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis tools; leading development of a model (described by CARE as ‘genius’) to illustrate channels of how innovations are scaled up; overall intellectual leadership and drafting of final report.