Overview
Oxfam operates in 55 countries with an annual budget of approximately £286 million. Globally we operate over 250 programmes and 1,200 associated projects in diverse contexts across various thematic areas. Despite the scale, breadth, and complexity of our work, we are strongly committed to being accountable to a wide range of stakeholders and getting better at understanding and communicating our effectiveness.
Introducing Oxfam's Effectiveness Reviews
Our Global Performance Framework is intended to help do this in a realistic, cost-effective, and credible way. In particular, both output and outcome data are collected across six thematic areas: humanitarian response; adaptation and risk reduction (ARR); livelihood enhancement; women's empowerment; citizen voice; and policy influencing. All relevant projects, for instance, are required to report output data against these thematic areas on an annual basis. This - referred to as Global Output Reporting (GOR) -
enables us to better understand and communicate the scale and scope of much of our work.
To be fully accountable, however, we also want to understand and evidence whether all this work is resulting in positive change. We recognise that the undertaking of rigorous evaluations is the only credible way of doing this. Unfortunately, with over 400 starting up and closing in any given year, this would be difficult to manage for all our projects - at least in the short to medium term. Instead, we drill down and rigorously evaluate random samples of our projects under each of the above thematic areas. We call these intensive evaluation processes Effectiveness Reviews.
In 2011/12, 26 of these reviews were carried out. A selection of these reviews that have been signed off so far are available to download from the links below together with our summary of lessons learned and our methodology. More reviews will be added to this page as they become available.
Project Effectiveness Review Sample 2011/12
Humanitarian response
Adaptation and risk reduction
Livelihood enhancement
Women's empowerment
Citizen's voice
Policy influencing