The present publication is the culmination of a lengthy process that began long before any of the current members of the Evaluation, Learning & Accountability (ELA) Unit at ACF-UK had joined the organisation. In 2005, ACF-UK launched their first Meta-Evaluation. This Meta-Evaluation, and those that followed it annually until 2010, aimed to provide ACF International with a sense of its collective performance and the strengths and weaknesses of its programmes. All of them, 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 analyse data, something to guide the process and ensure that evaluations were useful and transformative. In 2011, the ELA Unit decided to address this by introducing a new ACF International Evaluation Policy & Guideline (EPG). The EPG brought together three key ideas that are at the core of the ELA Unit’s vision for evaluation and learning. First, evaluations are only valuable if they are used. ACF field teams can and should look forward to external evaluations, as a means of answering the kind of questions that no one in the field has time (or the necessary detachment) to investigate or research. Second, evaluations must give us some way to track progress. Progress made from year to year at field level, and between missions and country offices at a global level. Third, evaluations must be made an integral part of organisational learning. Few processes are capable of sharing with one field mission what happens in another, and evaluations must support this kind of cross-fertilisation. The architecture put in place under the EPG set out to prove that all of these processes could not only co-exist under a common framework but could also yield the necessary information to produce a new kind of annual learning review. The content of the Learning Review reflects this multi-layered, but interconnected, approach to learning and evaluation. It opens with a brief overview of the external evaluations carried out by ACF International in 2011. It then offers an analysis of collective organisational performance using the internationally-recognised DAC Criteria. The aim is to identify common strengths and weaknesses and highlight areas for future improvement. It continues with a summary of some of the most interesting and relevant aspects of the programmes evaluated in 2011, from Good Practices in Fresh Food Voucher Programmes to Remote Programming and the increasingly important issue of nutrition programme coverage. 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. These Best Practices were identified and analysed jointly between the ELA Unit, the consultant(s) and ACF field level staff. They offer an insight into some of the most unique, cutting-edge and un-orthodox approaches being used successfully by our missions around the world. Together they remind us of our capacity to innovate and think outside of the proverbial box.
