Success - Impact

Impact for any development intervention is usually felt (if at all) some time after its completion. The evaluation attempted to capture early indications of impact, both at the programme as well as the project levels

Country Programmes

In the context of a rapidly advancing ICT panorama in Ecuador, the new IICD Country Programme was indeed timely. Projects partners and other CP actors have strengthened  their capacities to use ICTs for developmental purposes, and will likely network more effectively over the next few years.

In Zambia, a re-shaped Country Programme is poised to finally achieve tangible results and gains for ICT4D after a prolonged presence IICD dating back about 8 years. The extensive membership of the IN (eBrain) and its actions on national ICT policy and awareness raising on ICT4D may be the single most important driver of change from the Country Programme.

ICT and capacity development for information/knowledge management

All project partners report to have increased their human and institutional ICT capacity, some significantly like C-CONDEM or ZARD with very low starting levels. Also, most project partners claim that the ICT capacity gained is allowing them to improve how they manage their organizations, as well as to expand their possibilities for work and in their projects. ZARD’s executive director, said that “the WIDNET project had been mainstreamed into ZARD, transforming the organization in the process.”

One aspect of capacity on which impact has been scant, however, is that of knowledge management (KM). Organizing information and documentation is only one of the preliminary steps for knowledge management, but seems (at best) to be the upper limit reached by most project partners. For example, while ZARD expresses the need to become a knowledge-based organization, it showed little awareness of issues related to content generation and presentation, communications, networking, training of trainers or systematization which need to be examined and operationalized. In fact both INs did not do much better, failing to practice effective knowledge sharing practices or explicit KM strategies.

Policy Involvement

One of the most probable impacts of the CPs is the participation in policy decisions by the Information Networks (and thus by civil society). eBrain is already an active player in national ICT policy discussions in Zambia. InfoDesarrollo in Ecuador is a considerably smaller network, with reduced influence on policy dialogue, but which may grow over the next 2-3 years if it can sort out its operational problems.

Organizational visibility

The impact on organizational visibility of project partners has been modest at best as a result of their participation in the Programme. They were already relatively well-known in their countries; after all, they had been supported by HIVOS for years. As mentioned before, the INs did not contribute much in this regard. Moreover, the projects are not mature enough for achieving recognition.

M&E and project management

The impact of M&E practices on individual projects is deemed to be indirect. M&E data are not usually provided per project but on a sectoral basis instead. Though in Ecuador project-level data has occasionally been provided at the request of some projects, they didn´t have much of a chance to alter their practices based on M&E findings – the first report was produced only in January 06. Indicators defined in the project documents are seldom reported. However, there is high awareness in the projects on the importance of the M&E function, based on their participation in the surveys and at focus groups meetings.

Promotion of the HIVOS-IICD partnership

The HIVOS-IICD Partnership will have gained international visibility in the ICT4D arena through events like the ‘Building Inclusive Information Societies’ dialogue or the South-South ICT4D workshops. However, it is yet not widely known that HIVOS holds a special interest in ICT4D.

At the country level, there was lower than expected awareness of the role of HIVOS. To most involved in the Country Programmes, these are essentially perceived as IICD initiatives. IICD should have been more forthcoming in terms of making visible the partnership at the country level. But this low awareness is even more a consequence of little communication by HIVOS with the projects. It seemed that HIVOS was content with essentially providing funding to IICD and play a part in project approval, and letting IICD carry out all the rest. At the same time, HIVOS has probably exceeded its human resource commitment in the MoU, of 15 days per Country Programme of staff time – an easily reached figure.

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