Measuring the Benefits of USAID’s Integrated Programming in the DRC

The benefits of integration are not easy to measure. Cross-sectoral integration is a pillar of the USAID/Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS). As part of the CDCS Mid-Course Stocktaking, the Mission tasked its Mission Strategic Support Program (MSSP) to conduct the Integrated Programming Assessment (IPA) to understand to what extent the implementation of the strategy’s integration pillar contributed to the progress of its Development Objectives (DOs).

To carry out the IPA, MSSP introduced Participatory Adaptive Modeling (PAM), a participatory process that leverages the experiential knowledge of implementing partner (IP) staff to create a comprehensive model of an activity's approach to creating change among its target populations. Collaborating with two complex multi-sector resilience activities, MSSP was able to build visual action-based Theories of Change (TOCs) and infuse these TOCs with information on the strength of contributions along results chains to build a Bayesian Decision Support System (DSS) for each activity. Through scenario analyses of the DSS, the assessment team was able to provide precise estimates of the added benefits of integration.

The findings and lessons learned were shared with the Mission during its MCST; and sparked critical discussions about the implementation of ongoing and future integrated programming, needed adaptations to the CDCS, and how to facilitate improved collaboration within the Mission and its partners. MSSP intends to continue to use and refine the tool to provide a structured process to systematically assess projected results achievement and adapt to context changes throughout the project cycle.