Performance - Efficiency

IICD Country Programmes are comprehensive and well thought-out interventions, covering angles that escape most agencies’ work (eg. a explicit capacity development programme, a network for knowledge sharing/policy involvement). As was mentioned in Ecuador, “IICD’s model of intervention is complex and complete”. In these circumstances effectiveness takes precedence over efficiency.

This said, there were aspects of the Programme that should have display higher efficiency:

• Project formulation. Give the projects characteristics (implementation period, budget) they take longer than usual. Most of them took a year, and in Zambia closer to two. This can negatively affect the interest of some project partners. And it particularly noteworthy given IICD’s  intensive involvement in project formulation .

• A related issue, and related to the above, is the relatively high complexity of project documents. While the resulting documents are excellent, some of their monitoring and management features (indicators, SWOT analysis) are not used often or at all. Thus, the high quality of the project documents may be overly done.
• A more assertive management style may have helped with efficiency, even in places with more difficult operational contexts, like Zambia.

A significant factor affecting efficiency was high staff turnover rate. A majority of the projects suffered this problem, in both countries. The case of ZARD (implementing WIDNET) in Zambia, was extreme, as many as 7 people leaving in two years of implementation (the project had 3 staff). But this was also the case in IICD and HIVOS – eg. IICD changed staff in most posts related to both countries (including for Country Director). While looking for ways to maintain staff longer would be useful, it´d probably be more effective to factor staff turnover into programme and project management, so that explicit measures are taken to minimize its negative effects, eg. content or documentation being organized in standard fashion regardless of who is working at the time.

Read more