Grantmaking practice
Strategy implementation
In this article:
Strategic decision making
The transparency, participation and accountability (TPA) team has five ‘rough guideline’ areas for grantmaking
When, in 2015, the Hewlett Foundation added a greater focus on participation to its transparency and accountability strategy, it identified five areas to be used as ‘rough guidelines’ for grantmaking. These five areas, which had the potential to overlap, guided grantmaking towards:
1. Creating and reinforcing norms and standards that enable greater transparency and participation.
2. Ensuring that information about resources and service quality is collected and can be used (and, in some cases, generated) by citizens.
3. Strengthening citizens’ ability to speak and act collectively around service delivery challenges.
4. Building and strengthening channels that provide citizens constructive ways to engage with all levels of government.
5. Enhancing the Hewlett Foundation’s impact through active collaboration across portfolios.
(TPA Strategy, Hewlett Foundation, 2015)
The TPA strategy was one of two subcomponents in the ‘Amplifying Voices’ component of the Gender, Equity and Governance program. The second subcomponent was Evidence-Informed Policymaking (EIP) strategy.
The role of TPA in this collaboration was to ensure that citizens had the information, capacity, and channels needed to hold their government accountable for improved social service delivery. Whereas the EIP grantmaking focused on ensuring that government officials had the information, ability and incentives necessary to make good decisions on the policies and programmes best able to serve citizen needs.
Programme officers have a lot of decision-making autonomy
Interviewees told us that board members and senior management trust TPA programme officers, which leads to the TPA programme officers having significant autonomy for making decisions on grantmaking practices, selection and renewal processes, portfolio development and exit strategies.
This finding aligns with that of the Mexico evaluation (OTT, 2021: 11), which also concludes that in practice it is the programme officers’ ability to understand the reality of the country and their capacity to fund grantee that are able to meet the country’s demands that ultimately shapes the success of the portfolio.
We found three common criteria used to inform decisions about where to work
Initially, TPA strategies were pursued in the US and in neighbouring Mexico, where the foundation had locally based staff until April 2014 (with one national grantee organisation based in India). But through grantmaking to INGOs that were supporting initiatives in East and West Africa — particularly in the extractives industry — the strategy’s geographic implementation gradually spread.
The TPA staff found that, despite an existing concentration of grantmaking in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, they did not know enough about the breadth of activities of civil society, the contextual factors (both country specific and region wide), nor the particular opportunities that existed in those countries to develop clear priorities. They had comparatively less experience supporting aligned civil society organisations in Francophone West Africa, and fewer relationships with donors doing relevant grantmaking in the region.
For East Africa, the Hewlett TPA team therefore developed an implementation plan that included a visit to the region and a process of defining and refining focus areas. In West Africa, the team commissioned an in-depth scoping study on transparency, participation and accountability in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Senegal, which identified opportunities for the Hewlett Foundation to take a regional approach to its intervention in West Africa and to contribute to fostering more coordination in the TPA efforts for possibly greater impact.
Common across both reviews were the following criteria, which informed the Hewlett Foundation’s decisions about where to work, on what issues and how:
Opportunity: Based on the contextual factors observed, including the presence of existing actors and funders, where is there the greatest opportunity for Hewlett’s engagement? The focus areas will reflect areas of the greatest opportunity.
Effectiveness: Based on research and case studies, what types of citizen engagement do we believe will be most effective in improving service delivery? The focus areas will reflect areas where we expect a high level of success.
Replicability and learning: While we will aim to be responsive to context and specificity, our focus areas will likely reflect levels of engagement where we believe there is potential for learning and replicability, at least within the region.
(TPA sub-strategy for East Africa, 2016)
Programme officers worked hard to ensure grantee priorities
Hewlett Foundation TPA staff indicated that they — and especially programme officers — insist on and have invested a lot in achieving high levels of alignment between grantee priorities, the TPA strategic priorities (including sub-strategies) and the Hewlett Foundation’s values and objectives.
We did not have sub-strategies before; the process of developing them helped to focus the portfolio and [the programme officer] was explicit in terms of not holding back in getting people aligned. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
The evaluation found no evidence to suggest that grantees shifted their priorities to secure Hewlett Foundation funding. The foundation’s TPA team proactively identifies potential grantees who appear to have overlapping priorities and it is usually easy to check a grantees’ work to assess the extent to which a proposal is purely a fundraising exercise or in line with their stated strategies.
The TPA team also undertakes an annual review of the alignment of grants with their sub-strategies and priorities. The alignment process allows organisations to clarify their strategies and objectives and articulate clearly how they intend to reach their targets or goals, and although most Hewlett Foundation TPA staff agreed that adjustments were sometimes necessary, they felt that these were usually within scope and not completely new priorities.
My gut is that it seems like people are not adjusting to fit our strategy because our strategy is so broad so you could make a case without feeling like you had to engage in mission drift, it was more about describing the work you do in the strategy.
The approach we use is to identify grantees, we don’t take unsolicited proposals. We get them from funding partners or follow their work on their website until relevant to our strategy and use this as a basis for our conversation. I don’t find them trying to pivot in a particular way to suit our strategy. (Hewlett TPA staff member)
For the handful of grantees that have been misaligned, either the grantee was able to adjust their strategies to overlap more with the Hewlett Foundation’s TPA sub-strategies or, in a handful of cases, grants were phased out.
Programme officers used the availability of the Hewlett Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness grant to ensure organisational alignment with overall strategies. Where grantees are co-funded there might be a mismatch with aspects of their work but enough synergy with some deliverables to justify continued support and funding.
Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL)
The Hewlett Foundation’s outcome-focused philanthropy framework reflects the foundation’s commitment to being rigorous, flexible, adaptive, transparent and open, while also staying focused on results and active learning at every juncture (Wang et al., 2018).
MEL is crucial to this and the Hewlett Foundation sees it as serving both a learning and an accountability function, helping them to track and measure progress and identify key lessons that can be learned from implementation successes and challenges. The foundation also emphasises the importance of ongoing monitoring and learning across all the four stages of its strategy life cycle.
Challenges to MEL at the strategic level
To measure success, the foundation relies primarily on implementation markers, which it defines as interim steps towards medium- to longer-term outcomes set out in its strategy.
These implementation markers take different forms, such as Hewlett Foundation TPA staff and grantee activity, grantee capacity, contextual factors and some short-term outcomes, and are identified, set, assessed and reported on by Hewlett Foundation TPA staff.
For example, the President’s Annual Strategy Update requires Hewlett Foundation TPA staff to recount progress against agreed implementation markers in their respective sub-strategies, indicating both successes and failures. Staff compile these progress reports by drawing on various sources of information, including check-ins with grantees, information obtained from grantee reports, media reports and evaluations.
Although implementation markers are intended to help assess the success of the foundation’s strategic goals and outcomes, interview data suggests this method has for the most part been ineffective. To begin with, there is no MEL system in place; formal reporting on implementation markers is done annually and very little time and effort is dedicated towards this activity. According to one member of the Hewlett Foundation TPA team, this is because monitoring implementation markers is an unfunded activity:
I don’t think the implementation markers are effective in measuring the foundation’s progress. Monitoring implementation markers is an unfunded mandate and we do this on top of our normal work … We report on implementation markers annually but no one really has time to spend on monitoring them because it is no-one’s specific job and hence it does not get done or we don’t do it in a meaningful way. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
One interview respondent added that, by failing to adequately monitor implementation markers, the Hewlett Foundation misses an opportunity to learn and make informed decisions.
Some Hewlett Foundation TPA staff also indicated that the TPA strategy’s ultimate goals are big and broad, which makes it hard to clearly map out whether they are on track. The breadth of these goals is in part due to the fact that the TPA team takes a multisectoral approach and works across countries and themes. For example, grantees cover a wide range of issues including women’s issues, education, health and the water sector. There was also consensus among interviewees that transparency, participation and accountability goals and the governance sector in general are hard to measure.
The challenge is that TPA works in a space where it is difficult to measure success. Putting in metrics for service delivery monitoring and governance is not easy and we struggle with this. There are too many variables and the field is so broad and you never know what to tackle. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
The foundation played a key role in supporting better MEL at the grantee level
Despite challenges faced in improving MEL at the strategic-level, the Hewlett Foundation TPA team has played a key role in supporting and promoting MEL in various ways at the grantee level.
This support includes Organizational Effectiveness grants to improve MEL, ensuring that grantees report progress against both output and outcome indicators, and funding project evaluations. This support helps grantees to promote ongoing organisational learning and increase their capacity to communicate results.
Most of the grantees in this evaluation have MEL systems in place; however, the extent to which these are effective in measuring change varies.
Some organisations have clearly articulated theories of change and M&E frameworks, which help them to measure progress towards intended outcomes more effectively. These grantees also have dedicated human and financial resources for MEL, and frameworks that are geared toward activity and output reporting as well as for outcome reporting.
The Oxfam South Africa programme, for example, developed a stakeholder analysis that defines beneficiaries and programme partners and a MEL system that identified root problems and established a clear, strategic plan and theory of change, set of SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely) goals and expected outcomes. A formative evaluation of the Oxfam programme found that this effective MEL system contributed to everyday programme management and its overall success (Oxfam South Africa, Formative Evaluation Report).
One of the interviewees emphasised that some grantee organisations have put in place measures to document impact stories and this is a key achievement in measuring progress.
Several of our grantees have their own MEL systems and they collect impact stories about how their contribution has led to outcomes. Grantees use their databases to collect information systematically and synthesise the data into impact stories. These impact stories are often short and clearly articulated. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
Providing financial resources to help grantees develop and improve their organisational MEL systems and capacity.
For example, in 2019 the Hewlett Foundation provided an organisational effectiveness grant to ACODE to enable it to establish a consolidated, organisation-wide MEL system (ACODE Application Summary, 2019). With this financial support, ACODE aimed to (1) design appropriate MEL tools, (2) procure the necessary software for the MEL system, (3) build capacity for MEL within the organisation, and (4) deploy and test the system by collecting M&E data and documenting impact of their work.
This grant also sought to help ACODE to achieve more integration and cohesion across its projects. Through these Organizational Effectiveness grants, TPA has been able to promote good MEL practice among its grantees. Effective MEL systems are key in enabling grantees to not only prove their impact but also to improve their work as needed.
Funding and supporting evaluations of grantee projects.
The purpose of the evaluations has been to understand what has been achieved in terms of implementation and outcomes and to learn from what has or has not worked in the TPA field.
The Hewlett TPA team plays a key role in funding evaluations of grantee projects (as well as contributing technical expertise). These evaluations have been useful in helping grantees and the foundation to assess the extent to which projects are successful — in some instances, demonstrating outcomes that MEL frameworks would not have.
For example, an evaluation study of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) I Am Aware project reveals that the evaluation team was able to identify many more intermediate outcomes than CDD-Ghana had recorded in its monitoring data. This suggests that evaluations funded by the Hewlett TPA team have played a key role in helping to effectively articulate project impact and fill the gaps left by ineffective monitoring systems.
Challenges for grantee MEL
The document review revealed a few gaps in existing grantee MEL systems and approaches. For example, the National Taxpayers Association (NTA) evaluation report found weaknesses in the project’s TOC and its MEL framework (Report of the Evaluation of the NTA SRC School Report Card). The project’s TOC failed to adequately describe how change was expected to happen, making it difficult to see how certain project outputs would generate the anticipated outcomes. There was also no consideration of contextual enabling or constraining factors, and only limited analysis of the assumptions underlying the project’s goals. According to the report, the TOC is premised on the assumption that capacity building would ultimately contribute to increased parental participation and improvement in schools; however, it fails to clearly articulate the causal links that support the achievement of these outcomes.
A lack of resources hindered some grantees’ ability to effectively measure progress. For others, it was also the lack of a clear MEL strategy. For example, the Integrity Action SIDA mid-term evaluation report (2019) revealed that, although Integrity Action had been collecting vast quantities of data through the Development Check database, it was unable to benefit from this significant body of information because it had been done without any clear MEL strategy or plan. Subsequently, an Organizational Effectiveness grant was provided to Integrity Action by Hewlett TPA to improve its MEL systems and practice. TPA staff confirmed that the organisation has since recorded impressive gains in MEL since receiving the OE grant.
Capturing project outcomes is one of the key challenges that grantee organisations face. In some instances, their MEL systems are designed in such a way that they capture only limited outcome data, focusing instead on project activities and outputs. A review of the NTA evaluation reports shows that its MEL system only captured data about number of schools reached, number of people trained and SRC reports (and didn’t capture or report on the impact of the work or the quality of the implementation processes or outputs). In addition to this, unintended outcomes are often neglected, which limits the ability of grantees (and the Hewlett TPA team and the wider field) to effectively measure change and to learn.
In addition, a few TPA staff who were interviewed indicated that the foundation has not done enough to prioritise internal and external evaluations.
We don’t have a good MEL system and we are not evaluating along the way. There hasn’t been an evaluation between this strategy and the last and this contributes to the problem of exiting from some grantees. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
Learning about what fosters or inhibits good governance
From the beginning [of the strategy period] we were intentional about learning from the field, contributing to the field, and learning from grantee partners who are closest to the problems and solutions and bring lived experiences, valuable knowledge and expertise to the goals we are both working towards (TPA blog)
As part of its commitment to learning, the Hewlett Foundation TPA strategy set out to deepen understanding of the interaction among global norms, regional efforts and national practices. In particular, it identified the need to understand how best to support subnational groups, such as teachers’ and parents’ associations, youth groups, women’s organisations and school management committees (TPA Strategy, 2015).
In addition to its field learning sub-strategy, the Hewlett Foundation TPA team developed a set of learning questions and undertook a range of activities to test the assumptions that underlie its governance interventions.
Many of these learning activities have also contributed positively to understanding and implementation efforts among grantees (see section on support given to grantees) and the wider field. In this section, we focus on those activities that the TPA team felt shaped their own knowledge and learning.
Funding and supporting research and evaluations: Although Hewlett Foundation TPA staff noted a lack of monitoring and evaluation at the TPA strategy level, one of their key contributions to MEL was in funding and supporting evaluations of grantee-level projects and programmes. These evaluations appear to have helped Hewlett Foundation TPA staff gain a better understanding of what has or hasn’t worked in advancing TPA.
These evaluations also often form the basis of the foundation’s various learning events. For example, the Hewlett Foundation supported a workshop learning event, designed and facilitated by Colectivo Meta, that brought together 23 grantee organisations in Mexico to share and discuss findings from the TPA strategy evaluation conducted by ITAD in 2018.
Information sharing also occurs between the Hewlett Foundation and other funders in the governance and TPA space:
We share reports with fellow funders and give them informal updates on what we learnt, however, this is not done systematically. (Hewlett Foundation TPA staff member)
Regular engagement with grantees as part of grantmaking practice: The supportive and collaborative approach of Hewlett Foundation TPA programme officers, as noted by an overwhelming majority of the grantees we interviewed, has also helped to contribute the foundation’s learning about governance:
I think we promote learning through general operating support and taking time to talk to grantees. This allows for better flow of information. We also make sure we read institutional newsletter received from grantees and discuss any key issues in our meetings. (Hewlett Foundation TPA staff member)
Engaging in learning events and communities of practice: The Hewlett Foundation TPA staff were active participants in learning events and communities of practice. For example, programme officers played an important brokering role in the Transparency Breakfasts in Mexico, which offered an efficient way for them to learn about the context and interact with grantees, without having exclusively bilateral meetings (OTT, 2021). During the Mexico learning event to discuss the 2018 ITAD evaluation, TPA staff heard from grantees about their experiences and thoughts on the main themes that had emerged. Learning events also provided productive spaces in which TPA staff to reflect and learn about GESI in relation to the TPA field.
Coordination with other funders
We characterise ‘coordination with funders’ as the Hewlett Foundation TPA team’s relationships, engagement and collaboration with other funders to increase grant effectiveness towards achieving common transparency, participation and accountability objectives in its focus countries. Here’s what we learned:
Coordination mechanisms varied according to the nature of collaboration
For example, in West Africa the Hewlett Foundation TPA programme officer has met with other funders to connect them with potential grantees, to ensure they do not overlap in programme areas, sharing relevant information and where they are co-funding, they have tried to align the reporting requirements by the grantees. Whereas engagement with the Transparency, Accountability Initiative (TAI) funder network is more structured with regular meetings and memorandum of understanding.
The foundation’s programme officers have divided their coordination with funders according to regions and they have one programme officer coordinating engagement with TAI.
Coordination with other funders has helped to multiply grantee support and scale smaller projects’ effects.
One co‑funder explained that a key reason for pursuing a co-funding option with the Hewlett Foundation was to give more funding to a grantee, to help increase their visibility and strengthen the organisation structurally to pursue their TPA goals. Likewise, Hewlett is also exploring possibilities to raise more funding for other grantees in the TPA field through donor collaborations.
The collaborative efforts to support grantees help to build organisational structures and strengthen the grantees’ efforts to achieve their TPA objectives. The networking and information sharing platforms scale the learning and advocacy to increase the diversity of cultures and practices, equity, and inclusion among peer funders and grantees.
Coordination is not without challenges and limitations
The different funders’ goals, organisational systems, and contexts can present potential coordination obstacles. The Hewlett Foundation and its co-funders operate and work with grantees from different geographic areas, across multiple time zones, and employ different grantmaking approaches. Coordination therefore requires logistical planning, time commitments and extensive negotiation to agree to common goals and approaches. And more time spent on overcoming these challenges limits the time available for providing substantive input and exchanging information and learning to actually deliver the desired TPA outcomes.
And as one interviewee from the Hewlett Foundation reflected, this pressure on time is a barrier to more and improved coordination generally:
The challenges for both of us are that we just have so much to cover and very stretched, and working on policy and programs reporting outputs. This often means that we don’t have the kind of time that we would like to be able to spend on providing inputs and sharing materials, having more open sort of collaboration exercises just because we are all so busy. (Hewlett Foundation staff member)
Three main types of coordination models: multilateral funding, strategic collaboration and technical assistance
The Hewlett Foundation’s coordination with other funders takes many different forms and covers many different activities, which include providing mutual financial assistance to grantees, networking and connecting grantees to policymakers and peers (particularly through regional networks), jointly organising and participating in information sharing and knowledge exchanges. We can group these activities into three different coordination models: multilateral funding, strategic collaborations and technical assistance.
Multilateral funding: In some cases, the Hewlett Foundation’s provides funding to grantees and programme activities that are also receiving funding or financial assistance from other grant makers, governments or development agencies. For example, it has made grants to the ATAF and the TJN-A, which are both also funded by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
With multilateral funding, the Hewlett Foundation provides financial resources at the same scale as other funders and does not interfere with or provide direction to how grantees manage their programme/project; grantees — who have existing and well-recognised expertise in the TPA field and the capacity to independently undertake activities to advance TPA priorities — are given strategic and decision-making autonomy, under the direction of local leadership.
This approach of non-interference creates a flexible learning environment in which grantees can select and adapt approaches according to their local context and more easily navigate multiple funding agencies’ requirements using different programmatic approaches. One funder respondent noted:
As we work as part of the government, we are restricted within our limits in terms of what we can prioritise. They [the Hewlett Foundation] have more space, more freedom, and more flexibility. So, we benefit from being able to work with that and combine our efforts. And perhaps on an efficient level where our time frames are very limited, we have to meet this financial date at a certain time, there is a bit more flexibility around this and the logistics of it from Hewlett Foundation, and this is important in terms of being able to reach partners and have that consistency. (Co-funder)
Strategic collaborations: These are essential for coordinating strategic plans and improving learning and approaches to achieve common objectives. Unlike in multilateral funding, the TPA team is more involved in planning, implementing and evaluating transparency, accountability programmes and activities, and its involvement takes the form of multilateral joint programming, technical assistance, networking for learning and information sharing activities. As one co-funder explained:
We are not trying to manage the project jointly, but we are supporting the same organisation. We let each other know what our plans are and share notes about what we see and share thoughts about that — I share my reports and notes with the Hewlett Foundation about what I have seen [and] what is right and they share their reflections and opinions. (Co-funder)
For example, the Hewlett TPA team worked closely with fellow co-funders of the Open Government Partnership evaluation (the FCDO and the Open Society Foundation) to develop the evaluation terms of reference.
Technical assistance: Through strategic collaborations like this, co-funders can augment their efforts to pool resources by also pooling their technical expertise to advance a common objective. Other organisations and grantees can ‘tap in to’ the foundation’s human resources capacities and strengthen their internal programmatic planning. The foundation facilitates this through information exchanges and technical assistance between the foundation and other grantmaking co-funders. One co-funder noted that these strategic collaborations with the Hewlett Foundation have benefitted the learning and knowledge of their staff members:
I think we get a lot from the sort of the intellectual capacity of Hewlett and the quality of their staff in terms of having another set of eyes on this work and another perspective as they come to me with a sort of different geographic perspective. In other areas of collaboration, there is a bit of sharing mainly through the TAI, platforms of membership. (Co-funder)
These strategic collaborations are further enhanced by networking and the sharing of knowledge products such as blogs and other resources. In other strategic partnerships, learning between funders is facilitated through membership platforms such as the TAI donor collaborative, which the Hewlett Foundation also co-finances. The co-funders convene grantees for exchanges and introduce them to further funding opportunities.
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