Whole Person Approach in Evaluation of Global Humanitarian Partnership

After three years of the first Global Humanitarian Partnership between C&A, C&A Foundation and Save the Children, it was time for an evaluation. The partners wanted to gather lessons learned and to inform the decision of the continuation of the Partnership (or not). Adam Smith International was selected for the task and Isabela Souza, our Principal Consultant, was the Team Leader.

We brought the Whole Person Approach (WPA) to all the phases of the project, from proposal writing to evaluation design, delivery, results and the final phase of an “evaluation of the evaluation”. One of the implications of using the WPA was a focus on people and an increase of the time evaluators and evaluatees spent together. The dark brown boxes in the figure below show different phases from “traditional” evaluations.

Another main difference from this WPA evaluation was that the client was open to try new ways of working. There was a positive reception towards the co-creation end of the engagement scale below and thus it went beyond participatory approaches.

The lessons learned were so rich that we have recorded videos interviews with a few of the team members and C&A Foundation so that they could give their own account of how it was for them to use WPA in this evaluation. Scroll down and check it out! Isabela and Lee A. Risby, Head of Effective Philanthropy at C&A Foundation also shared their experience with this evaluation at the European Evaluation Society annual conference and the American Evaluation Association annual conference. They talked about how this evaluation felt like therapy and how the WPA helped the truth come out.

We believe that learning does not happen with reading a report. Yet, there is no way out and we have written a report too… besides the “traditional” written report, we wanted to do something else. We have piloted reporting the results from the Brazil case study (annex IV of the full report) in the form of an animation.

The icing on the cake: all of these is public. C&A Foundation shows leadership amongst corporate foundations and publishes all their programme evaluations in full!!! Scroll down and follow the links to deep dive into the evaluation results!