by Jindra Cekan | Aug 4, 2026 | Aid effectiveness, Asia, Better Evaluation, Central Asia, ex-post evaluation, Exit strategies, foreign aid, humanitarian, international development, OECD, sustainability planning, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impact Evaluation (SEIE)
Continuing to Learn about Sustainability, Now more than ever
Since 2024, foreign aid has taken multiple shocks (post-Covid): wars, climate shocks, and a widespread retreat from foreign assistance, especially among OECD countries: “Official development assistance (ODA) by Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members and associates amounted to USD 174.3 billion in 2025, a 23.1% decrease over 2024. It is the largest annual contraction on record and a second consecutive year of decline, bringing ODA to where it stood at the start of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Notably, many of these cuts were bilateral donations, notably from the USA, Germany, France, Japan, and the UK. Least developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa. A striking statistic cited by the US Council on Foreign Relations was that by 2025, Americans collectively spent more on their Halloween candy ($3.9B) than their government did on life-saving humanitarian aid ($3.4B).” However, they excluded in-donor refugee costs, humanitarian aid and debt relief, and while USAID was dismantled in early 2025, a bit of health funding has been restored. Still, 72% of the UN’s funding needs are unmet, unparalleled, which includes 25 million fewer people received aid in 2025, such as those with rising needs in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, Haiti, Yemen, and Ukraine’s wars not to mention rising natural catastrophes from floods and fires raging currently in 2026’s El Niño.
In mid-2026, OXFAM reported that “aid’s crucial role in combating diseases like HIV-AIDS and malaria, the Institute of Global Health of Barcelona estimated that global aid cuts of such magnitude would kill hundreds of thousands of people in 2025 alone. If this trend continues, aid cuts could kill over 9 million people by 2030” while Rockefeller Foundation cites Lancet projections that “aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date.” (Oxfam pointedly notes that “top 0.1 percent richest people worldwide hide $2.84 trillion in tax havens. Even a small tax on that wealth would yield much more than the amount of aid cuts,” but political will is needed for that, in a world led by elites, thus unlikely.)
So this is bad, as according to a 2026 poll that found that 46% of African youth believed the “closure of USAID would have a damaging impact on their countries, with healthcare services and disease prevention seen as the areas most affected.” Yet a quarter of African youth, believed USAID cuts were positive, as they want their governments “to take agency and responsibility for their own reality” and stop being influenced by foreign powers. Further, “A lot of people find aid very demeaning…“they didn’t feel that the aid was being used for the right things and there is a sense of ‘We can do this for ourselves’.”
This gives us several learning opportunities, in addition to re-examining why the messages about the need for and effectiveness of aid were not heard.
1) We would ground-truth the modelling and confirm the projected negative effects as well as document the unintended positive effects of these aid cuts in terms of how communities coped This is because most sustained results documented by our SEIE (Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation) and other ex-post evaluation show that national uptake and continuation is key to results lasting as we documented in five cases in Part 1:What Happens After the Project Ends? driven by Country-national Ownership in Part 2.
2) We would also continue to evaluate the sustainability of results, as Japan’s JICA, which performs ex-post evaluations in addition to “terminal evaluations” and “post-project monitoring” several times post-closure for rich design learning. They have done 3,000 such evaluations and are a continued leader in this field, most recently highlighted in this recent annual report on lessons for Technical Cooperation, ODA Loans and Grant Aid, which showed they did 66 ex-post evaluations for Technical Cooperation, 24 for ODA Loans, and 26 for Grant Aid. Of the projects that do remain, the need is even more vital to show sustainability results to combat more aid cuts on the supposed lack of effective – and defensible- results.
3) What can be done immediately for all projects that are currently underway is to embed learning about projected sustainability by planning for it. This involves by using checklists from at least the mid-point onward that create the conditions for sustainability, as well as consider needed commitments to sustainability and revise implementation pre-closure. Authors from Central Asia and Asia share insights about the need for continued knowledge from such evaluations, below.
This table comes from 9 checklists cited in the following work we did on capacity development and lessons pre-exit and ex-post closure: https://valuingvoices.com/fostering-values-driven-sustainability-through-an-ex-post-capacities-lens-reposting-a-book-chapter/. Please note the increasing need to evaluate the ecological systems in which development and humanitarian projects are embedded.
The blog posts above noting the need to embed resilience and institutional pathways during the crisis itself, as well as excellent pages from Muhammad Maksudul Hannan from Bangladesh noting the need to retain knowledge locally and how we should be measuring behavior change rather than trainings done, show how, overall, to do good monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). This continues to be true for the remaining 77% of aid programming that continues to assist ‘development’, as well as the many corporates launching projects in LDCs such as for community-level carbon credits which are equally in need of MEL.
A recent Better Evaluation post on whether evaluating sustainability in humanitarian contexts matters amid shrinking budgets and hyper-prioritization; “whether today’s investments yield benefits that endure and whether responses help build systems and capacities that can last.” Examples from Central Asia and Afghanistan show the need to localize evaluation to the context, but that it is still sorely needed, pre-exit and post to “provide evidence on humanitarian interventions’ lasting contributions.”
4) For those restructuring foreign aid (USA especially): The ex-post sustainability learning shows that when donors design and implementation by putting ownership in local communities from the start in true partnership, take sufficient time to implement (up to 10 years, not 1 or 2), put in feedback loops and act on their input by revising implementation to support capacities to maintain assets and pass on knowledge to non-participants, have sufficient resources generated to pay for ongoing costs and expand livelihoods in emerging ways to be resilient to new shocks (and opportunities!) in their ecological contexts, sustainability and greater resilience will follow.
Let me know your thoughts during this turbulent time…
by Jindra Cekan | Feb 13, 2016 | Aid effectiveness, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Central Asia, Ethiopia, Ethiopian Red Cross, Evaluation, Federation of the Red Cross, Lutheran World Relief, Mercy Corps, Niger, PACT, Partners for Democratic Change, post-project evaluation, Sustainability, Sustainable development, Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation, USAID
What happens after the project ends?
Lessons from post-project sustained impacts evaluations (Part 1)
We talk a lot about impact of our interventions, but far less is analyzed about the sustained impact of our work in the years after projects close out. We take for granted that successful strategies will continue after projects shut down. Do they always? Maybe they do but we don’t know. Maybe there are innovations and impacts to be learned from…
To answer these question Valuing Voices spent 2 ½ years looking for and analyzing ‘post-project’ evaluations of projects undertaken 2-10 years after projects ended. The result: in our $137 billon international development industry, some 99% of projects remain unevaluated after project close out [1]. Only 17 agencies we have found so far have publically available post-project evaluations; most of them have one, while the OECD and JICA have dozens. Hundreds of studies recommend such learning that is missing from our industry’s program cycle (green slice).
Six decades on, this astonishing finding raises serious questions about stewardship of resources and commitment to learning—particularly learning from participant and partner stakeholders for whom sustainability matters most, and who are tasked with it over the long-term.
A review of post project evaluations generate food for thought about good program design and illustrate the value added of post project perspectives. This rapid review of select ‘ex-post’ evaluations points to three early lessons:
How we do it matters for great results
Expect unexpected results
Who takes over? Country Nationals
First, organizations go back to see how well their projects results were sustained. What we learned was that how well they used participatory processes in how they implemented and handed over mattered a lot for sustainability and that we must expect unexpected results.
How we do it matters for great results
1. Catholic Relief Services/ USAID PROSAN food security project in Niger
Valuing Voices evaluated this food security (agriculture, health and resilience project in 2015 which ran from 2007-2012 (report forthcoming). The $32 million project was implemented in a consortium of CRS, CARE and Helen Keller but this evaluation focused only on CRS areas.
- Interviews with over 500 participants found that three years after project closeout, 80% of project activities still continued, as did many village committees and there were a variety of community innovations [2]
- On average, households can feed themselves through their own production or purchase of food for 8-12 months three years after closeout compared to 6-9 months at closeout three years earlier. Such impact was unexpected. [2]
- 91% of respondents reported improved household health, hygiene, and nutrition [2]
- A 2.5-year participatory exit process from CRS to country stakeholders (local government, an array of local and international NGOs and the private sector ensured continuity and boosted local ownership [2]
- 20% of the activities did not continue, mostly food-assisted NRM and resilience-related [2]
- Youth make up 50% of the population and need to be engaged during the project for long term sustainability to occur. [2]
2. PartnersGlobal (formerly Partners for Democratic Change)
Their mission is to “to build sustainable capacity to advance civil society and a culture of change and conflict management worldwide” uses an approach that is “bottom-up, locally-led rather than foreign-led, based on the belief that change comes from sustainable efforts led by local people, organizations and institutions invested in their own long-term future.” They went back and to review 55 case studies of projects through 22 centers they founded in central and eastern Europe from 1989-2011. They found:
- In 80% of cases, there was advancement of good governance by influencing the participation of civil society working with government [3]
- In 50% of the cases there was increased access to justice and managing and resolving disputes/conflicts, thereby strengthening civil society [3]
- 18 of 22 of the centers that had been established still exist today (82%) [3].
3. Mercy Corps
They did a post-project evaluation in Central Asia in 2007, one and three years after two conflict resolution projects ended which were worth $18 million. These complex community mobilization programs with aims “to empower communities to work together in a participatory manner to address the infrastructure and social needs [while] developing sustainable skills [and] empowers communities to identify and utilize existing resources within the communities and not to depend only on external assistance.”
- 72% of youth report that they continue to use at least one skill they learned during the programs (e.g. teamwork and communication, and skills such as sewing, construction, roofing, journalism and cooking) [4]
- 68% of community members witnessed local government becoming more involved in community activities after the end of the programs as compared with before the programs [4]
- 57% of the communities studied continuing to use one or more of the decision-making practices promoted during the program [4]
- 42% of members, representing 70% of communities, reported that the community had worked collectively on new projects or repairs to existing infrastructure. Participants and partners had implemented almost 100 infrastructure projects by themselves independent of donor funds. [4]
These are terrific expected results.
We also learned to Expect unexpected results
4. Federation of the Red Cross and Ethiopian Red Cross
Valuing Voices combined a final evaluation of “Building Resilient Community: Integrated Food Security Project to Build the Capacity of Dedba, Dergajen & Shibta Vulnerable People to Food Insecurity” that had funding over $3 million in 2009 from the Swedish Red Cross with an assessment of projected sustainability. It was an IFRC/ERCS collaboration with the Ethiopian government to provide credit for food security inputs to 2,259 households, which were to be repaid in cash over time as well water and agriculture/ seedlings for environmental resilience. We answered the DAC criteria for evaluation and found the project overall to be quite good, albeit with weak data tracking systems.
In terms of sustainability, we used participatory methods to learn about what people felt they could self-sustain once the project left their area, so we could shape a similar follow-on project design to be moved elsewhere in Tigray, particularly around the credit for animals.
- While 87% of the loans had been promoted by the government and given for large animals (oxen and cows), and 13% was for small animals (sheep, goats, chickens)…
- But project participants we interviewed, strongly preferred the small animals in terms of being able to sustain them on their own. They felt they could afford these smaller amounts of credit as well as the feed to sustain them, without taking the risk of animal death leaving them with large debt. This was especially true for women, who preferred poultry to all other animals 15:1.
In our quest for fast results, are we asking participants to bear too much risk? As one of our Valuing Voices team asks, Who is responsible for sustainability?
5. Lutheran World Relief
From 2005-2007 Lutheran World Relief intervened in Niger, the world’s poorest country, with a $500,000 Pastoralist Survival and Recovery Programme (ARVIP) drought rehabilitation project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There were numerous outcomes from targeting sheep, wells and animal fodder to 600 of the poorest women in 10 communities in northern Niger, among them:
- Women’s share of household income increased from 5% to 25% in some households. This was due to the value of the sheep grants, as well as time-savings used for income generation. Access to wells in five of the villages saved women a staggering 7-10 hours every other day from not having to go fetch water 3.5 hours away each way for household and animal needs and were free to weave mats or cook food for sale [5]
- Many said they didn’t have to resort to worse survival strategies during the next hungry season after they received the sheep [5]
What was not expected were these results:
- Many women in several villages reported an impact that was completely unexpected to the implementer and donor which was “our husbands don’t beat us anymore” [5]. This was thanks to both increased respect and income from the sheep as well as access to well-water which led to cleanliness and their ability to be home for their husbands, children and mothers-in-law, rather than fetching water whole days 2-3 times a week. The same was found in PACT’s WORTH empowerment and village banking project in Nepal that wrote, “one in 10 reported that WORTH has actually helped “change her life” because of its impact on domestic violence” [6].
- We defined success too narrowly. Many interviewees were content with the project even though prospects for project-expected drought resilience or sustained food security were less likely. Some women sold the sheep to buy food, pay their children’s school fees or their daughters’ dowries, while some had their sheep sold by their husbands who used them to buy other animals, pay for ceremonies or other expenses. Participants saw the project as bringing them resources and considered it a success. Spending assets on immediate needs is not at all illogical for a community who can feed itself only 4 months a year; for some households, their pressing needs far outweighed the luxury to wait and buffer seasonal food insecurity far down the line.
We hope you agree that allocating funds and attention to post-project sustained impacts evaluations is necessary for the remaining 99% of international development projects as it offers a fantastic learning opportunity about how to ‘do development’ well now and for the future. Without returning to look for what participants and partners valued enough to continue on their own, without returning to learn about unexpected sustained impacts, we rob ourselves of pivotal learning needed for success.
In part two, we look at ownership onward, planning for handover and lessons from who takes over? Country Nationals. In part three, we focus on Funding, Assumptions and Fears.
Please join us in advocating for this! Please think about your own projects… and whether you have considered these things, or need our help. We’re listening!
Sources:
[1] OECD. (2015, December 22). Detailed final 2014 aid figures released by OECD/DAC. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/final2014oda.htm
[2] Cekan, J., PhD, Kagendo, R., Towns, A. (2016). Participation by All: The Keys to Sustainability of a CRS Food Security Project in Niger. Retrieved from https://www.crs.org/our-work-overseas/research-publications/participation-all
[3] Carstarphen, N., PhD. (2013, November). Sustainable Investment in Local Capacity for Democracy and Peace: A Global Evaluation of Partners for Democratic Change. Retrieved from https://www.partnersglobal.org/resource/sustainable-investment-in-local-capacity-for-democracy-and-peace/
[4] Westerman, B., & Sheard, S. (2007, December). Sustainability Field Study – Understanding What Promotes Lasting Change at the Community Level. Retrieved from https://reliefweb.int/report/world/sustainability-field-study-understanding-what-promotes-lasting-change-community-level
[5] Cekan, J. (2013). Increasing women’s incomes, increasing peace: Unexpected lessons from Niger. Participatory Learning and Action, (66), 75-82. Retrieved from https://pubs.iied.org/G03661/
[6] Mayoux, L. & Valley Research Group (2008, June). Women Ending Poverty: The WORTH Program in Nepal – Empowerment through Literacy, Banking and Business 1999-2007. Retrieved from https://www.findevgateway.org/case-study/2008/06/women-ending-poverty-worth-program-nepal-empowerment-through-literacy-banking
by valuingvoicesjin | Dec 12, 2013 | Central Asia, Evaluation, Governance, International aid, International non-profits, Sustainability, Uncategorized
Mercy Corps – early leader in evaluating sustainability… and what donors are funding
Mercy Corps shared their work in post-project sustainability early on, inspiring me it was possible. As they put it, "clearly, a sustained ability for collective problem solving offers the best path to lasting improvement in people's lives and, for donors, the best return on investment" in two conflict resolution projects in Kyrgyztan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan: Peaceful Communities Initiative $6.5 mil (2002-2007) and Community Action Investment Program $11.8 mil (2002-2005). These two projects were complex community mobilization programs with aims "to empower communities to work together in a participatory manner to address the infrastructure and social needs [while] developing sustainable skills in problem solving, consensus-building and accountability. The process also empowers communities to begin to identify and utilize existing resources within the communities and not to depend only on external assistance."
So what happened? Their report on sustainability in 2007 random-sampled and interviewed youth leaders and in community action groups, 55% of the communities and found promising results:
According to the evaluation:
*93% of surveyed projects are still being actively used by the community after programs closed.
*73% of members of the community action groups (CAG) felt it was still easier to approach local government at least one year after the programs ended and 68% witnessed local government becoming more involved in community activities after the end of the programs as compared with before the programs [participants and partners had] implemented almost 100 infrastructure projects by themselves and independent of donor funds.
* 72% of youth report that they continue to use at least one skill they learned during the programs. Those cited most often include teamwork and communication, as well as practical skills such as sewing, construction, roofing, journalism and cooking
*57% of the communities studied continuing to use one or more of the decision-making practices promoted during the program.
* 42% of CAG members, representing 35 of the 51 communities, reported that the community had worked collectively on new projects or repairs to existing infrastructure
* In total, 40% of general community members interviewed reported that youth had initiated community activities since January 2007, and 68% of these community members recognized that some or all of the activities had not taken place prior to Mercy Corps’ program
This appears excellent! They interviewed youth and key local stakeholders (CAG), used country nationals to evaluate (both of which are wonderful as it is their country) and they distilled best practices in community mobilization in accessible reports shared within the international non-profit world via the web. Quibbling only a little, a difficulty is that while the report states that they "I dentified factors that influence sustainability, through both positive examples and non-sustained projects and practices" our ability to learn from what didn't work was hidden. Mercy Corps discussed what didn't work only by recommending what to do, rather than discuss the extent to which specific activities simply didn't work. While focusing on the positive is the best path forward, ideally Mercy Corps would have also shared what failed, possibly why and whether they had seen this elsewhere (thereby suggesting such activities may not be promising to replicate). Further, what would be valuable is to gauge roughly the percentage of the program value these successes represented versus those that did not work well. Sucha cost-effectiveness ratio would benefit our industry.
Overall, such successful national-level capacity building and program effectiveness learning is terrific, and new focus may lead funding to follow. Two major foundations have lately said that they have an interest in supporting national capacity building and empowerment (Rockefeller) or cost-effectiveness (Bill and Melinda Gates), respectively.
More specifically, Nancy Macpherson of Rockefeller Foundation states the Foundation is "committed to evaluation practices that are rigorous, innovative, inclusive of stakeholders’ voices, and appropriate to the contexts in which the foundation works." This is done by "integrating the views of developing-region evaluators" as well as:
* "strengthening developing country evaluation practice and ownership of results…
* developing innovative methods and approaches to evaluation and learning…
* the empowerment of people; and
* the effectiveness of development interventions by national governments and international partners and, increasingly, by non-state actors—foundations, philanthropists, and agencies that promote investing for impact."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation mentions cost effectiveness
* When evidence is needed to fill a knowledge gap or evaluate a significant policy decision. Evaluation can help to resolve uncertainty and determine the relative cost-effectiveness of different interventions, models, or approaches" (Gates) and
* Both quantitative and qualitative data are relevant in evaluating processes, operations, cost effectiveness, key stakeholders’ perceptions, and enabling contextual factors" (Gates)
USAID seems not to have done any ex-post evaluation since a single one on a Philiiipines loan in 1980, whereas parts of the EU seem to be doing many more such evaluations in agriculture and rural development (2002-06), industrial technologies (2009-11) as recently as 2013 for ICT. Given the size of its portfolio of development assistance, $20.4 billion in development and humanitarian programs in fiscal 2014, learning about sustained impact seems imperative from a return on investment (ROI) perspecive.
Supporting national capacity and evaluating programs' return on investment is pivotal. In Mercy Corps/ USAID's funding case alone, this comes to over $18 million dollars. But Mercy Corps paid for this evaluation themselves, from private funds. If we are in the process of fostering country-led and eventually country-financed development, they need to know how much such investments get them – as we do.
Does anyone know of such great program learning that begins to teach about return on investment? Can you share?
