EEA and Norway Grants and Evaluation

Date posted

27 Jun 2018

I have been involved in civil society projects funded by the EEA and Norway Grants since the beginning, that is, so far a total of eight projects located in Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania, and Slovenia (EEA and Norway Grants n.d.a). While being very differing projects in their focus, they can be subsumed under the heading "social development". I believe strongly in the importance of the rationale and mission of the EEA and Norway Grants, and I am thankful and proud to have been involved in these projects in Eastern Europe, a region that used to be a white spot on my map of global development work and investment operations.

In sharing my experiences with working on these projects I find it correct to be direct, and not just serve panegyrical statements. Furthermore, I do this on the basis of a strong practical background in professional work in international development aid since 30+ years, as well as the Founder and Chair, Bulgarian Monitoring and Evaluation Network (Bulgarian Monitoring and Evaluation Network n.d.a).

In the majority of these projects the implementing NGO or organization had the necessary knowledge and capacity, managed the project in a professional way, and with a successful outcome. However, in a couple of projects the implementing NGO or organization did not:

Have the required technical and administrative knowledge and capacity, and/or
Base their work on correct assumptions about the situation in the project area, and/or
Handle the situation in the project area correctly (e.g., as it turned out to be more complex than anticipated – including as regards conflicts).

In this situation the role of the Norwegian partner NGO tends to become a difficult one. This basically boils down to a choice between three options:

Not be concerned about implementation and hope for the best,
Do nothing once the problem(s) appear, or
Report to the Financial Mechanism Office (FMO), Innovation Norway (for some projects in Bulgaria and Romania), or the national fund operator.

In one particular case I opted for the latter approach, with mixed results as regards my interactions and the outcome of the issues I reported on. The outcomes were partly a result of seemingly less than correct remedial actions, and partly that they came too late.

Crucially, for me there were important lessons to be learned from the experiences of working on these problematic – even failed – projects. Those lessons have guided me in several ways, including:

Be critical about which NGO to partner with,
Not do work that the NGO should do, beyond a certain time period where one provides necessary training (case in point: write the funding proposal and project reports), and
Learn the "danger signals" and act upon them early on.

The reason I share this is because I believe that the EEA and Norway Grants should learn from successful projects as well as from problematic projects. It is actually possible that one can learn as much or more from the latter type of projects. This presupposes that there is an institutional focus on this, and that there are ways and means of eliciting this experience, evaluating it, and sharing it broadly. Judging from the published evaluation reports it is not my impression that EEA and Norway Grants has paid much – and certainly not enough – attention to problematic projects, and to learning from them.

An important aspect of the present concern with evaluation is of course that it is not just the implementing NGO that makes mistakes (if 'mistake' is the correct term). The Norwegian partner NGOs are also likely to make mistakes – mistakes that, if publicly shared, would benefit future NGOs that consider getting involved in such projects. Furthermore, a constructive approach, on the part of the EEA and Norway Grants, towards providing advice to prospective NGOs that get involved in such projects would likely contribute substantially to preventing such problems from occurring in the first place, and, if and when they occur, to their successful resolution.

A couple of comments from the point of view of professional evaluation:

The EEA and Norway Grants projects that I have worked on (as well as several that I have followed over the years) have in common that they have too little or no concern with devising and using an exit strategy, and
A good approach to organize projects, one that aids in measuring results, would be to structure implementation in terms of: (i) input, (ii) output, (iii) outcome, and (iv) impact. This set of terms is an example of a logic model to project implementation. It facilitates the construction of useful and good indicators, and aid in evaluating the effectiveness of projects.

In conclusion, I am proud of my involvement in several projects that have received funding from the EEA and Norway Grants, and I would like to hope that the projects I may work on in the upcoming funding period will be as interesting and useful (some are already under preparation).

Lars T Soeftestad

Notes
^1/ This is a longer version of a comment contributed to EEA and Norway Grants' Facebook page on 18 June 2018.
^2/ Image credit: EEA and Norway Grants. This is the official logo, as available on the website.
^3/ Relevant Devblog articles: "EEA and Norway Grants: evaluation of own projects" (to appear) | "EEA and Norway Grants: donor country partners" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/eea-and-norway-grants-donor-country-partners | "EEA and Norway Grants: my project portfolio" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/eea-and-norway-grants-my-project-portfolio | "EEA and Norway Grants and evaluation" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/eea-and-norway-grants-and-evaluation | "Anthropology and development cooperation" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/anthropology-and-development-cooperation
4/ Further relevant Devblog articles: "Devblog: on Roma" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/devblog-roma | "Poland and Norway: transparency and trust" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/poland-and-norway-transparency-and-trust | "Bulgaria: Roma in the penitentiary system" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/bulgaria-roma-penitentiary-system | "Roma and health awareness 2" at: https://devblog.no/en/article/roma-and-health-awareness-2 | "Roma and health awareness 1" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/roma-and-health-awareness-1 | "Train or be trained vs eat or be eaten" at: https://www.devblog.no/en/article/train-or-be-trained-vs-eat-or-be-eaten | "Ethnographic film and advocacy" at: https://devblog.no/en/article/ethnographic-film-and-advocacy
^5/ Permalink: https://devblog.no/en/article/eea-and-norway-grants-and-evaluation
^6/ This article was published 27 June 2018. It was revised 21 February 2023.