Strategic Evaluation of IDRC’s Contributions to Capacity-building in the South

To gain a deeper understanding of what capacity-building means and to examine the development results achieved, IDRC commissioned Universalia to conduct this corporate level, program-wide evaluation with three distinct phases: (1) to investigate how IDRC staff and managers understand capacity-building and how they apply that understanding in their work; (2) to develop a framework for describing capacity-building results and apply that framework to a group of 45 IDRC-supported projects to test how well the framework meets the Centre’s needs; (3) to carry out three organizational case studies in Uganda, Senegal, and Peru (three other case studies were carried out by other authors) to explore issues of significance more in-depth using the framework previously developed. This multi-year (January 2005 – to date), multi-phase outcome level evaluation includes: interviews (face-to-face, telephone) with key stakeholders including IDRC staff and managers located in either Ottawa or in the regional offices, project partners, government officials and representatives of civil society.