From Evidence to Action (E2A)

This case study shows how USAID/Philippines and the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting for Improved Development (CLAimDev) activity used CLA to highlight USAID/Philippines’s role in thought leadership in the international development community, expand its external collaboration with stakeholders, and strengthen the mission as a learning organization by strategically and widely disseminating evidence from evaluations and focusing on USAID and stakeholder learning and knowledge management. USAID invests considerable resources evaluating its activities to generate evidence for learning and adaptive management. Evidence generated through evaluations typically is shared mostly within USAID and the implementing partner. Public outreach generally is through a single, limited audience presentation and uploading text- and jargon-heavy evaluation reports to the Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC). A 2016 seminal study on evaluation utilization at USAID lamented that, while evaluations were disseminated internally within missions and with implementing partners, USAID- evaluations were mostly not planned or shared with country partners and other stakeholders. The COVID pandemic created an opportunity for CLAimDev to experiment with new ways to disseminate and learn from evaluation. CLAimDev, with the active support of its COR, invested unused fieldwork travel funds from evaluation budgets to create new knowledge products, such as visually-engaging, interactive web-based evaluation reports, explainer videos, and graphic evaluation briefs, expand the audiences for evaluation learning events, and engage external stakeholders in the planning and conduct of evaluation dissemination, learning, and use. These investments paid off. Participants from national and local governments, private sector, civil society, academia, implementing partners, and even the beneficiaries themselves participated in and benefited from these learning events and accessible knowledge products, enabling conversation, decision-making, adaptive management actions.