The Global Evaluation of NCA’s HIV and AIDS work. The Global report

Background

This evaluation covers the period from 2002 to 2006, and aims at - among other things - to evaluate NCA's strategies and impacts of our HIV and AIDS response in the aftermath of the TV-campaign in 2001 ("The power of life"). The NCA Global Strategic Plan for 2005-2009 specifically states that the thematic priority called "Faith Communities Address HIV and AIDS" should be the focus of an evaluation in 2006.

Purpose/objective

A major motivation for the evaluation was a commitment to the principles of accountability and transparency. Another important reason is to enhance documentation of lessons learned to increase organisational learning. The ToR for the evaluation outlines the following goals for the process:
Goal 1:
Assessment of documented experiences, achievements and results of NCA's work on HIV and AIDS, with a special focus on how Faith Based Communities address HIV and AIDS in order to reduce stigmatisation and discrimination and their contribution to prevention, care and advocacy.
Goal 2:
Analysis and recommendations on future Right Based Programming of HIV and AIDS work, with a special focus on how Faith Based Communities can respond more effectively to the pandemic through choices of strategies and partner relations.
Goal 3:
Analyse and assess how relevant factors in the internal and external contexts have influenced NCA and NCA's cooperating partners' HIV and AIDS work and how NCA's specific contribution has informed and influenced the context.

Methodology

This global report is a synthesis of the main findings of five sub-regional evaluations; 1) Eastern and Southern Africa 2) Central America 3) Southeast Asia 4) Eastern Europe-Russia & Global ecumenical partners 5) Norway & International Alliances. Five sub-regional teams
EVALUATION SUMMARY
carried out the sub-regional evaluations. In addition to this, there was a "Global team", comprising of the Team Leaders for each sub-evaluation team. The Global Team was responsible for feeding into the work of Dr. Aboum on this Global report.
The methodology applied in all the sub-regional evaluations was participatory and it included literature review, focused group discussions and key informant interviews.

Key findings

The key findings can be summarized as follows:
- NCA's focus on faith communities has been a strategic success and should continue. This was a main finding in all regions.
- NCA should strengthen its implementation of gender mainstreaming into all HIV and AIDS programmes. NCA does not perform particularly poor on this issue, but there is a noted discrepancy between high ambitions at policy levels and what is actually performed at program levels.
- Some key concepts need to be better explained and elaborated to both staff and partners (e.g. "Rights Based Approach" and "mainstreaming")
- There is a need for better and more systematic monitoring of programmes and also more baselines studies. This is needed to improve the effectiveness and accuracy of future evaluations.
- NCA's staff situation will be a major challenge in the near future: Partners clearly signalled that NCA's main contribution was not necessarily the financial support, but more importantly the professional back-up and strategic exposure to and cooperation with a variety of networks, alliances and other actors. If the number of earmarked HIV and AIDS staff continues to decrease, this added value might be endangered.

Recommendations

- A continued alertness in terms of choosing the strategically right faith based partners is key if the current positive trend of NCA actually influencing the international faith based scene shall endure.
- More training on practical mainstreaming (of gender into HIV programmes, but also of HIV into other programmes) is needed and should be carried out in a systematic way
- More dialogue and training of staff and partners on key concepts should be implemented. Theological reflection around these concepts (how these concepts can be related to theology) could be one major entry point to this.
- NCA should develop a better framework for simple but accurate long-term monitoring of (at least) selected projects/partners.
- NCA needs to go look at the staff situation globally, and find ways of securing the needed knowledge and capacity to support partners.

Comments from the organisation

The evaluation process was quite complex and demanding due to its nature (covering several regions, using multiple teams). Putting together this global synthesis was also quite demanding and time consuming. Merging the five sub-evaluations into one synthesis was not an easy task since the sub products were produced by different teams with slightly different approaches to the ToR. Even finding competent people to staff all the different sub-teams was quite demanding. The end results do however show that NCA has indeed chosen a relevant and strategically sound course for our HIV and AIDS work, which of course makes the ordeals of the process worthwhile.