Programme Impact Report 2005

Oxfam GB's work with partners and allies around the world

Introduction and overview (367KB pdf)

Full report (1,145KB pdf)

 

Download individual chapters by Oxfam aim:

The Right to a Sustainable Livelihood (383KB pdf)

The Right to Basic Social Services (353KB pdf)

The Right to Life and Security (357KB pdf)

The Right to be Heard (321KB pdf)

The Right to Gender Equity (338KB pdf)

 

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Introduction

This report is the culmination of our impact assessment process at the end of 2004–05. It has looked at a selection of programmes being implemented with our partners and allies from around the world. Some programmes reviewed this year have been operating for ten years, and the impact that can be achieved through making a long-term commitment to working with partners and communities is evident. In some programmes, for example our response to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, it has been important to assess immediate results, but longer-term impact will need to be assessed in years to come. Our campaigning with others is at a critical stage as this report is being produced. The strength of the call to end poverty from people around the world is unprecedented as we approach the 2005 G8 meeting in the UK, the UN Millennium Plus Five Summit and the meeting of WTO members in Hong Kong at the end of 2005. It is difficult to identify precisely the contribution that individual actors make in campaigning when there are so many constituencies and forces at play, but it will be after the crucial international meetings this year that we shall seek to assess what influence Oxfam and its allies have brought to bear.

Whatever the stage of implementation of each programme assessed, we seek to identify the results achieved so far, and what needs to be done differently in future to achieve greater impact. This means that we must identify weaknesses, failures and challenges, as well as successes and strengths. Staff are now more confident to do this as part of our organisation-wide impact assessment process, and this is reflected in some of our reporting this year.

It is important that readers of this report understand what our impact assessment process involves — both its strengths and weaknesses. Much of the analysis in this report is based on participatory assessments led by Oxfam staff, and conducted with partner agencies and the communities involved in the programme. It may be the staff team most closely involved with the programme that leads an assessment, or other Oxfam staff may lead or contribute particular skills. Partners from other programmes, and other stakeholders, may also be involved in the assessments. There were 41 assessments made of individual projects and programmes this year. Staff also prepared short case studies analysing their experience in a number of other programmes. Regional Programme Impact Reports then drew together findings from these assessments, from a number of evaluations that had been conducted, and from on-going monitoring of programmes. A strength of the assessment process comes from the qualitative judgements that communities, partner agencies, and the staff closely involved with programmes make about changes that they experience or see occurring. A weakness is that often we do not have comparative quantitative data from beyond the programmes to help us judge the influence of our interventions alongside other agents of change.

The report looks at a wide range of Oxfam’s programme work, but it is only a small selection. While it is sometimes possible to draw conclusions that appear to be relevant across an area of work, at other times we have to be cautious in generalising beyond the findings from an individual programme. This is why we undertake a complementary Strategic Evaluation process, in which we review an area of our work more thoroughly with assistance from external evaluators. We have recently completed a review of our work on conflict reduction, and are currently reviewing our education programme.

This year, we have included longer case studies in the report than before. We hope that this will help staff within Oxfam and other readers gain a clearer understanding of what we are learning in the different areas of our work, and the challenges in different contexts. For readers whose main interest is the case studies, we have listed these for easy reference after the page of Contents.

Finally, in introducing this report, we wish to make several acknowledgements and clarifications:

• Much of the impact described in this report stems from the strength and breadth of the partnerships and alliances in which we work, and from the range of knowledge, skills, and influence that they bring. Where a programme is implemented by, or with, just one or several partners, these organisations are named specifically. However, there are sometimes too many groups involved to name them individually. Similarly, we seldom refer to individual Oxfam International affiliates in the report, while acknowledging the extent of our collaboration with other Oxfams, especially in major global campaigns, but increasingly in other areas of our work too.
• Wherever the work being analysed in a case study relates to activities funded from a discrete budget or budgets, we have indicated the financial investment made in the programme for a stated period of time. While we feel it is important to make this first step towards providing financial information alongside our reporting of results in individual programmes, it is difficult to provide consistent information across all case studies. First, programmes are at different stages of implementation. Second, there will be other resources contributed by Oxfam, our partners and communities, which are not represented in financial terms. Third, we may not have captured other financial resources that our partners receive independently from other donors, and which contribute indirectly to the results being reported. We have not acknowledged the individual donors that have supported Oxfam to undertake these programmes with partners, but we wish to acknowledge their contributions.
• We report against each of Oxfam’s five rights-based programme Aims. There are nine Strategic Change Objectives under these aims. One of these is that ‘ethnic, cultural and other groups oppressed or marginalised for reasons of their identity will enjoy equal rights and status with other people’. We have not reported specifically against this Strategic Change Objective this year, because we mainly address the denial of poor people’s right to have their opinions heard, and exclusion on the basis of identity, through our Right to be Heard programmes. Specifically, related to diversity, we continue to support indigenous and minority ethnic groups to strengthen their voice, and we support the disability movement in some areas. We also seek to engage more closely with black and minority ethnic communities in Britain.