News from the KEY Programme supported by Groupe URD in Mali

26/03/2019

The overall objective of the KEY Programme is to help build the resilience of people who are vulnerable to food and nutritional insecurity in Northern Mali. Its aim is to support nearly 80,000 of the most vulnerable people to help lift them out of the ‘poverty trap’ into which they have fallen due to conflict, insecurity, governance problems and climatic events. Groupe URD provides organisational and strategic support for programme implementation and management. A quick look at current activities…

The KEY Programme, which is funded by the European Union via the European Development Fund (11th EDF) and the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), implements activities in Northern and Central Mali that aim to build the resilience of vulnerable people, particularly in terms of food and nutritional security. Groupe URD is responsible for the KEY Programme’s ‘agility, knowledge management and communication’ component, which aims to:

Increase the agility of the programme in this unstable and unpredictable context;
Increase the sharing of experiences and operational research;
Support communication by the consortiums involved in the Programme.

Monitoring

Every month, Groupe URD provides the European Commission and the KEY programme partners with monitoring and analysis of the context(political, security, economic, environmental, etc.). This looks at the operational zones and activities and the potential impact that changes in the context could have on the population and the implementation of projects. Recommendations are also made to the consortium members.

Real-time evaluations

Numerous activities are being implemented as part of the KEY Programme since its operational launch in Spring 2019. In order to help the operational partners to improve the quality of the Programme, a series of real-time evaluations will be carried out. This should help to:

Improve the actors’ approach and activities;
Encourage information sharing and collective learning, and create synergy between actors;
Identify changes that are needed and make recommendations to help achieve the expected results and guide strategic management of the Programme;
Inform the Malian authorities, the donors, partners and the beneficiaries about the progress made in implementing the Programme, particularly vis-a-vis accountability issues.

Training and transferal of responsibility processes

For each pillar of the programme, different stages of training and transferal of responsibility to the authorities are also planned. Regarding monitoring of activities by state bodies and partner NGOs, the selected approach is the MENOR method (external, national, results-based monitoring). The overall objective of MENOR is to check the general orientation of the projects/programmes in relation to the Malian national strategies and policies.

Training is underway, split into two distinct phases: the 1st phase is theoretical and will take place in Bamako from 25 to 29 March 2019. This will be followed by practical implementation in the field in April. The objective is to reinforce the monitoring and evaluation skills of the technical units involved in implementing the KEY Programme, so that they are able to prepare and carry out an evaluation using the MENOR method, and specifically to:

Define the concepts related to the quality, monitoring and evaluation of a project;
Use the evaluation criteria of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability appropriately;
Design and use appropriate data-collection tools;
Formulate conclusions and recommendations that allow the evaluated project to be improved.

This training is aimed at two distinct groups:

Humanitarians in charge of monitoring and evaluation of the KEY Programme;
The staff of the key technical departments at the national level who are involved in implementing the programme with the humanitarian organisations.

Communication

In parallel, several communication activities are being implemented in order to share the progress being made on the project. Videos are being prepared in the field with the partners and will gradually be disseminated in the coming months. Groupe URD is facilitating the approach in order to harmonise the communication for the KEY Programme, in keeping with the communication strategy that was previously established.