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NNGO Voices: Leader Perspectives on Locally-Led Development

July 6, 2023

The development sector is moving towards shifting power to local development, decolonizing aid, and building a more equitable development architecture. Funders, INGOs, national/local NGOs (NNGOs), and governments play crucial roles in making these changes a reality. Humentum has published reports exploring different stakeholder perspectives, and this report focuses on the perspective of NNGOs. It presents insights from senior NNGO leaders in six African countries, discussing their perspectives and recommended solutions for power shift. This report is a valuable critical to the Collective Journey to Equitable Development series.

Regional Portrait of Catholic Care for Children in Eastern Africa: A study based on information from Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia

May 16, 2023

Catholic sisters are champions of care reform. Working with governmental, civic, and church leaders, and within their local communities, they are leading efforts to transition from institutional care toward family- and community-based care. Their leadership, service and spiritual witness have advanced the common good through a profound commitment to working on behalf of the vulnerable and marginalized. Focused on east Africa, this regional portrait offers data and information on care reform and the significant shifts and progress led by Catholic sisters in the region.

CTAP Final Report: The COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Journey So Far

May 1, 2023

The pandemic has both exacerbated and exposed existing health sector challenges across the world. During the second phase of the COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP), partners across 9 African countries utilized the multiple challenges of the crisis as a window of opportunity to advance health policy priorities.The organizations leading the CTAP work on the ground pivoted to create inclusive platforms for citizens to be informed and heard at the grassroots level, build coalitions with other CSOs to have greater collective impact, and call on governments for change through advocacy, and increasingly, collaboration to design and implement better policies going forward.This report provides a brief overview of what we did and what we learned, illustrative snapshots from each CTAP partner country, as well as insights into cross-country collaboration and the way forward. Together with our partners CODE and BudgIT, Global Integrity has helped to facilitate the CTAP journey since 2020 and served as a learning partner for the implementing organizations in Africa.

“This Is Why We Became Activists”: Violence Against Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Women and Non-Binary People

February 14, 2023

According to interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with 66 lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) activists, researchers, lawyers, and movement leaders in 26 countries between March and September 2022, forced marriage is one of ten key areas of human rights abuses most affecting LBQ+ women's lives. Human Rights Watch identified the following areas of LBQ+ rights as those in need of immediate investigation, advocacy, and policy reform. This report explores how the denial of LBQ+ people's rights in these ten areas impacts their lives and harms their ability to exercise and enjoy the advancement of more traditionally recognized LGBT rights and women's rights:the right to free and full consent to marriage;land, housing, and property rights;freedom from violence based on gender expression;freedom from violence and discrimination at work;freedom of movement and the right to appear in public without fear of violence;parental rights and the right to create a family;the right to asylum;the right to health, including services for sexual, reproductive, and mental health;protection and recognition as human rights defenders; andaccess to justice.This investigation sought to analyze how and in what circumstances the rights of LBQ+ people are violated, centering LBQ+ identity as the primary modality for inclusion in the report. Gender-nonconforming, non-binary, and transgender people who identify as LBQ+ were naturally included. At the same time, a key finding of the report is that the fixed categories "cisgender" and "transgender" are ill-suited for documenting LBQ+ rights violations, movements, and struggles for justice. As will be seen in this report, people assigned female at birth bear the weight of highly gendered expectations which include marrying and having children with cisgender men, and are punished in a wide range of ways for failing or refusing to meet these expectations. Many LBQ+ people intentionally decenter cisgender men from their personal, romantic, sexual, and economic lives. In this way, the identity LBQ+ itself is a transgression of gendered norms. Whether or not an LBQ+ person identifies as transgender as it is popularly conceptualized, the rigidly binary (and often violently enforced) gender boundaries outside of which LBQ+ people already live, regardless of their gender identity, may help to explain why the allegedly clear division between "cisgender" and "transgender" categories simply does not work for many LBQ+ communities. This report aims to explore and uplift, rather than deny, that reality.

Participatory Health Systems Strengthening: Reflections from Malawi and Kenya

December 19, 2022

Systems thinking is a phrase development practitioners and funders hear often, but isn't always aligned with the day to day experiences of local actors. It does not have to be that way.Systems thinking is not about big shifts and changes and reinventing strategies. Small tweaks that often require limited resources and short timelines can have a big impact as long as they are grounded in a deep understanding of the context and its dynamics.Systems thinking reveals multiple reasons for a problem and multiple solutions. We believe systems thinking is an approach that can help uncover structural factors underlying a problem.Global Integrity came to this project to learn about the value and limitations of applying a participatory systems thinking approach (PSTA) that could contribute to better health outcomes, by sparking small, and incremental changes in the system. We wanted to answer the following questions:What are the critical components in systems thinking to address health service delivery challenges?How would it be to engage with civil society and grassroots organizations to implement systems thinking in a short period of time and with limited resources?To what extent is systems thinking for everyone? What would result from it?What could our partners change within their radar and sphere of control?

Learning Report of the Using Participatory Approaches for Health Systems Strengthening Project

October 1, 2022

Problems within the health systems that lead to poor outcomes are complex, multifaceted, and differ across contexts, countries, and even communities. Systems thinking approaches have great potential to address these deeply embedded challenges and the technical, political, economic, and social causes that underlie them. However, systems thinking has traditionally been designed and tested with academic partners and with significant resources, without adaptation to engage with civil society and grassroots organizations.In this report, we share findings from a developmental evaluation that analyzed a participatory systems thinking approach that differs from traditional approaches in three core ways: (1) it is led by domestic civil society organization partners rather than academics or international partners, (2) it is time-constrained to under twelve months, and (3) it does not include outside resources for partners to undertake actions designed as part of the systems thinking process.Working with partners in Malawi and Kenya, we found that a systems thinking approach can be adapted to be more participatory and to achieve several critical outcomes, including increasing stakeholder understanding of root causes, supporting more diverse and stronger alliances among stakeholders, increasing collaboration on collective action, and increasing adaptation of actions. While the project and evaluation timeline does not allow us to observe changes in the health system, the evaluation did provide evidence that the within-partner changes related to systems thinking and multi-stakeholder collaboration have continued to expand beyond partners to their constituents and stakeholders, including youth and government leaders.

COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP): Lesson Report

September 1, 2022

COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP) is an initiative that seeks to promote accountability and transparency through the tracking of COVID-19 intervention funds across 7 African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone. This learning report explores its first phase.

Forgotten by Funders

December 1, 2021

This report highlights the underfunding of work with and for imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women and girls,  alongside a worrying increase in the global female prison population. The report draws from the survey responses of 34 organisations, most of which are based in the Global South and have women with lived experience of the justice system involved with or leading their work. Calling to donors that fund human rights, women's rights and/or access to justice, the report concludes that this heavily gendered area of human rights tends to fall through the cracks of donor strategies, including recent Gender Equality Forum pledges. 

True Value: Revealing the Positive Impacts of Food Systems Transformation

October 14, 2021

This report True Value: Revealing the Positive Impacts of Food Systems Transformation presents powerful and compelling evidence that food systems transformation is possible and having an impact now. Conducted by TMG Think Tank for Sustainability, an inclusive and true cost evaluation approach is applied to six food systems initiatives featured in the Beacons of Hope series to understand the breadth and depth of their positive impacts. True Cost Accounting (TCA) is an innovative tool that provides a holistic understanding of the relationships between agriculture, food, the environment, and human well-being.Using TCA enables us to see the significant monetary and non-monetary benefits sustainable food systems have on issues like public health, biodiversity conservation, climate, workers' rights, cultural diversity, and gender empowerment. It also demonstrates how TCA can be used for a variety of organizations -- from businesses, farmer cooperatives, food banks, research facilities, and more -- as a systemic approach to assess, measure, and value the positive and negative impacts of food systems. 

Sexual Harassment in the Media – Africa Report

July 12, 2021

In 2020, WAN-IFRA Women in News (WIN), in partnership with City, University of London,  set out to establish the extent of sexual harassment in news organisations and to gauge their effectiveness in managing it. The research project focused on regions where WIN operates: Africa, the Arab region, Southeast Asia and Russia. In addition, a survey of Central America will begin soon.This report is a summary of its findings in Africa. The project included an online survey and interviews. Some 584 media professionals completed the online survey. They were from eight countries in Africa, namely Botswana, Malawi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The overall tally includes eight responses from within Africa that were outside the focus countries. WIN conducted supplementary interviews with 32 media executives from those countries.

Learning Through Play: Increasing impact, Reducing inequality

January 1, 2021

What is the potential of children's play to promote equality in outcomes and address learning gaps between children from more advantaged and less advantaged backgrounds? Drawing evidence from early childhood learning programmes across 18 countries, as well as from interviews with the authors of various contributing studies, this report aims to understand whether and how the evidence about play and learning relates to tackling the learning crisis, especially in terms of inequality in learning outcomes around the globe.This report published by the LEGO Foundation shows that play not only helps children learn, it also supports inclusion, and reduces inequality, therefore demonstrating that policymakers and international organisations need to pay close attention to play. Building on their findings, the authors suggest four areas for future investment, innovation and investigation.

Building Youth Life Skills: Lessons Learned on How to Design, Implement, Assess, and Scale Successful Programming

June 27, 2019

There is growing recognition that youth need more than formal or vocational education to thrive in school, work, and life. They also need life skills - a set of cognitive, personal, and interpersonal strengths that position them for success in their lives and livelihoods. To leverage the growing momentum and give youth access to these vital tools for success, the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) supports grantee partners testing diverse approaches to strengthening life skills. The PSIPSE commissioned an in-depth study of 18 projects in 7 countries, uncovering actionable lessons on how to design, implement, assess, and scale youth life skills programming in low- and middle-income countries. The study is intended for practitioners and government officials interested in building, improving, and expanding work around life skills, as well as donors looking to advance this field and provide useful guidance to their grantees.