Learning to Learn: Harnessing External Evaluations to Build on Strengths, Enhance Effectiveness

Action Against Hunger has a long harnessed internal and external reviews to determine how our programs stand up against measures of impact, sustainability, relevance, coherence, coverage, effectiveness and efficiency.

Our 2011 Learning Review reflects the culmination of a lengthy process carried out by Action Against Hunger’s Evaluation, Learning & Accountability Unit and builds on ACF’s previous efforts at assembling meta-evaluations to provide the organization with a sense of its program strengths and weaknesses.

ACF has a long harnessed external reviews to identify common strengths, weaknesses and areas needing improvement. But the 2011 review also identifies over a dozen best practices from some of the most unique, cutting-edge, and unorthodox humanitarian programs taking place today.

All of these previous efforts, however, struggled to fully make sense of the complex qualitative and quantitative information generated by external evaluations, hindered by the lack of clear, comparable information with which to measure progress from year to year. What was missing was a framework to collect and analyze data, something to guide the process and ensure that evaluations were useful and transformative.

In 2011, ACF addressed these issues by publishing Evaluation Policy & Guidelines, a publication that brought together three key ideas that are at the core of ACF’s vision for evaluation and learning.

1. Evaluations are only valuable if they are used
2. Evaluations must help us track progress
3. Evaluations must be an integral part of organizational learning

The 2011 Learning Review reflects this multi-layered, but interconnected, approach to learning and evaluation, and offers an analysis of ACF’s organizational performance using internationally-recognized criteria to identify common strengths and weaknesses and highlight areas for future improvement.

But the real essence of this publication comes in the form of over a dozen best practices identified as part of the evaluations carried out in 2011—findings that offer insight into some of the most unique, cutting-edge and un-orthodox approaches being used successfully by ACF’s teams around the world. Together they remind us of our capacity to innovate and think outside of the proverbial box.

Publication: 2011 Learning Review

We hope you enjoy reading this review as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. But above all, we hope it helps answer persistent questions and raises new ones, creating an ongoing dialogue within ACF and beyond that is essential if we are to continue pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve.

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