Project Background
The IKI Secretariat of Zukunft – Umwelt – Gesellschaft (ZUG) gGmbH has commissioned Arepo to conduct an interim evaluation of the IKI project ” Scaling-up ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) measures in rural Latin America “, which is currently being implemented by a project consortium led by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The implementing partners are the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE). The German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) is funding the project approach to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities and ecosystems in rural areas of Ecuador, Guatemala and Costa Rica, where critical actors from the public sector, civil society and the private sector at local, sub-national, national and regional levels have implemented successful EbA approaches in rural areas of selected countries in Latin America.
Interim evaluations offer the opportunity to review project progress already during the project and, on the one hand, to formulate conclusions and recommendations for their readjustment of activities and, if necessary, focus, i.e. to pursue management purposes, but, on the other hand,, also to pursue the “normal” evaluation purposes of verifiability and learning, and to derive lessons learned and recommendations for comparable projects.
Type and Scope of Service
A significant part of this evaluation involved field research in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Ecuador. Arepo evaluated the project using the criteria derived from the OECD-DAC criteria, which relate to the thematic areas of relevance, planning, governance and coherence, effectiveness, and transformative impact and sustainability. Evaluation criteria on safeguards, IKI standard indicators, and project-specific learning questions complemented them.
These interim evaluations offered the opportunity to review project progress already during the project and to formulate conclusions and recommendations for their readjustment of activities and, if necessary, focus. Furthermore, lessons learned and recommendations for comparable projects could be derived.