Multi-Year Funding and Results-Based Protection 

This case study looks at the benefits of multi-year funding for outcome-oriented protection approaches. It highlights experiences of Oxfam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in community-based protection programming, and of the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) in implementing a multi-country project to generate evidence on integrated gender-based violence (GBV) and economic recovery approaches. It draws on reflections from both organizations to outline facilitating factors for the planning and implementing of multi-year programs.

Results-based protection (RBP) approaches encourage us to work to improve protection outcomes, but effecting change can be a long process even when there are short-term actions that could take place to prevent or stop protection risks. Short funding timeframes can be incompatible with the steps and time needed to build relationships, understand protection risks, and work to properly address them.

Multi-year funding can be more efficient and cost-effective, reducing costs associated with repeat short-term funding such as administrative costs of grant management and frequent fundraising efforts. It can also help foster long-term partnerships, improving staff retention and therefore capacities. In turn, this allows greater trust-building with communities, stronger analysis, and space for adaptation based on learnings and changes in context—key tenets of outcome-oriented approaches.

• Consistency and stability allow the focus to be on program implementation and learning rather than constantly chasing funding, plus greater trust-building with communities. Passing multi-year grants onward to local partners means they gain similar benefits.
• Adaptations of program approaches respond to evolving community needs, changing contexts, and program learning. Feedback loops throughout program implementation are most effective when coupled with flexible and longer-term funding that allows adaptation of approaches.
• Enhanced partnerships allow local partners to be better involved in design, learning, research, and adjustment, shifting relationships from implementation arrangements to strategic partnerships.
• Investments in learning and innovation provide space for explicit learning objectives to be set, with sufficient time available to generate evidence, improve implementation quality and outcomes, and develop innovative approaches. Inputs from global technical teams, program teams, monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL) teams, and local partners can be repeatedly brought together.
• Integrated protection approaches with other sectoral outcomes can, through a more holistic approach, address root causes of protection risks for communities facing multiple challenges. Aiming to achieve multiple outcomes in complex environments can require iterative programmatic design and adaptations, not possible to fully realize with shorter funding cycles.
• Comprehensively addressing protection risks is made possible, allowing protection actors to work with communities to establish long-term plans to address more complex threats. Some protection threats are acute (e.g., roadblocks by armed groups). Others can be systemic and, when exacerbated by crisis, escalate risks for individuals or a community (e.g., gender-based violence or land disputes).

Fostering thinking and innovation: DRC’s evidence generation for integrated programming 

Multi-year funding can also facilitate research and piloting of new program approaches. DRC is currently implementing a three-year project to generate evidence and develop program models that integrate GBV and economic recovery. The aim is to find ways to address gender inequality as a root cause of GBV and women’s economic marginalization. The project, implemented in partnership with the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), spans four countries: Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, and Niger.

The three-year timeframe is enabling a sequence of research, then tool development and contextualization, followed by piloting, bringing together global and local actors. As well as aiming to produce tested tools and approaches that can then be applied elsewhere, capacities of local organizations working on GBV or economic recovery are being strengthened in the hope they can continue implementing successful approaches.

During the first year, DRC and WRC conducted research and developed tools at the global level, and established “Local Anchor Groups” (LAGs) at the country level.

To root the work in evidence, DRC conducted research on existing integrated GBV and economic recovery program models and MEAL systems, published in a Global Landscaping Report, and conducted a gender and market analysis in each country of implementation.
Drawing on this initial research and existing guidance1, DRC and WRC then developed a global Theory of Change Playbook—a guidance on how to develop theories of change for integrated GBV and economic recovery programming. In addition to being used for this project, the Playbook is designed for other (especially local) organizations. It contains exercises and tools to guide local actors through assessment and analysis, design, and monitoring and evaluation to develop a contextualized Theory of Change for protection and economic recovery outcomes. 

To center the work in local perspectives, LAGs were formed in each country. These comprised mostly local actors with experience in GBV prevention and response or economic empowerment of women. The LAGs aimed to bring together different actors, skills, and experiences to explore actions that could be taken toward integrated outcomes.

Each LAG had between five to 20 organizations  most of whom were civil society organizations as attempts to encourage duty-bearers to participate were less successful. Long-term funding allowed for building trust and generating buy-in and commitment, before starting to design capacity-development action plans.

In the second year, the project focused on supporting the development of local tools and capacities.

The LAGs developed localized, evidence-based, and shared Theories of Change and MEAL systems to track progress, using the Playbook guidance in a workshop format. The contextualized Theories of Change were designed to guide both pilots and local actor implementation after the project ended. Capacity-building continued with the LAGs, aiming to enable continued implementation.

International organizations often use theoretical and jargon heavy language, and one challenge DRC encountered was that more time than anticipated was needed to explore concepts such as “theory of change” and “outcome-oriented protection” with local actors, and to translate the theories being developed into practice. A straightforward learning is to ensure supporting documents are using accessible terminology and are readily available in appropriate local languages—a simple requirement, but one that needs enough time to produce an accurate translation. A more thought-provoking learning is on how to communicate and explore these theories in a manner that allows local actors to adopt the concepts into their own ways of working rather than just being conduits for international organization implementation. Both demonstrate the benefits of longer-term funding providing time flexibility and activity adaptability, staying true to the intention of empowering local actors.

The third year focused on pilots and further learnings.

Based on the contextualized Theory of Change, local members of the LAGs developed and piloted program models, with a small budget provided by DRC. DRC also supported local partners to develop MEAL plans to monitor progress toward the outcomes. Activities built on organizations’ existing experience and expertise to tie together GBV and economic recovery work and outcomes. The initial vision was that the pilots would have at least three iterations: activities run for a few months, a learning exercise conducted, activities adapted, and then run again.

They were initially planned to take place over a year, although delays, including due to external contextual factors (government perception of sensitivity around GBV issues leading to delayed project approvals in one country, and deterioration in the political and security context in another), have shortened some timeframes. Although these issues have required some adjustment, they were more easily absorbed within the multi-year timeframe given the flexibility compared to shorter-term funding.

At the global level, learnings from each country will be documented and shared through a global donor roundtable with the participation of key donors, humanitarian practitioners, and policymakers to promote and fundraise for the methodologies developed. The project aims to demonstrate why and how integrated GBV and economic recovery models are more effective in achieving sustainable outcomes.

At the local level, the intention is for LAG members supported and capacitated on skills that can be used beyond this specific project to continue implementing integrated GBV and economic recovery programming in ongoing or new program approaches. In turn, multi-year funding would benefit this, allowing international and national NGO actors to use the Theory of Change and tools to develop and rollout approaches aiming to change protection outcomes.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Oxfam has built a multi-year community-based protection program strategy with local partners Solidarité pour la Promotion Sociale (SOPROP), Groupe d’Associations de Défense des Droits de l’Homme et de la Paix (GADHOP), CEPROSSAN (CEPROSSAN), Centre de Développement Intégral de l’Enfant Rural (CEDIER), and Syndicat d’Initiative de Kasha (SIKASH) funded through multi-year and annual donor grants. Overlaying of grants has allowed Oxfam to fund its strategy over multiple years, learn and adapt activities, and expand geographic reach. It also allowed Oxfam to retain experienced national protection staff and explore integration of protection outcomes with other goals including governance and food security outcomes and strengthening of local humanitarian leadership.

In recent years, Oxfam’s community-based protection work has hinged on IrishAid and UK Department of International Development (DFID) funding covering multiple years, complemented by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)SDC and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) grants that were either multi-year from the outset or required annual proposals to extend funding. Additional funding including shorter-term grants from donors such as USAID-Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), European Commission of Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), Global Affairs of Canada (GAC), German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO), Country-Based Pooled Fund, World Bank, UNICEF, and the private sector have been used by the Oxfam team to support their multi-year program approach. Currently, the work is partly supported by multi-year funding from the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD) for six countries, including the DRC, for integrated protection and food security response.

Organizational strategic prioritization and commitment from Oxfam to its multi-year community-based protection approach was key to both securing these rounds of multi-year funding and maintaining a strategic longer-term vision for the work that was then rolled out with the support of multiple donors. A key benefit of receiving multi-year funding has been the sustainability of Oxfam’s interventions. A critical aspect for CPC success has been Oxfam’s ability to shift from one-year to two- or three-year workplans with CPCs—a recommendation strongly made by an internal sustainability evaluation conducted in 2016.

Setting a two- or three-year workplan with the CPCs which has a clear exit strategy from the beginning now allows Oxfam and its local partners to focus the second year on improving the CPCs’ autonomy, when activities and capacity-building are done by committee members and partner staff observe and support. This has not only reinforced CPCs’ capacities, but also improved the chances of CPCs being sustained by members after Oxfam and its partners exit.

The multi-year strategy gives time to build stronger relationships not only between Oxfam, local partners, and CPCs, but also between partners and local duty bearers. Oxfam and its partners are then able to raise protection issues in a more constructive way, more likely resulting in change. It also has enabled Oxfam to build strategic partnerships with its local partners, building mutual trust and implementing localization approaches. This has supported the organizations’ continued work together including in hard-to-reach areas.

The longer program timelines also enable less rigidity and better adaption of activities to local contexts. For example, Oxfam can design shorter workplans when communities already have protection knowledge and capacities, or plan longer implementation periods in locations with fragile or complex security.

The following facilitating factors, based on reflections from Oxfam and DRC program staff, can also be challenges to the smooth planning and implementation of multi-year outcome-oriented protection.

• Staff continuity or turnover: Multi-year funding can support staff continuity, especially in smaller or local organizations where gaps in funding often mean staff contracts aren’t renewed, resulting in loss of capacities and inefficiencies if having to re-hire for new projects. Conversely, if staff turnover is high during implementation of multi-year programming, this can adversely affect implementation through loss of capacities, institutional memory, and momentum toward project goals.
• Longer-term approaches can require a shift of mindset: Designing multi-year programming to be more “outcome-oriented” requires a different way of thinking than just extending shorter-term approaches. Equipping staff to be able to envision and plan longer-term approaches can take time and encouragement.
• Time to sit together and think is essential: Developing a multi-year strategy or longer-term vision takes time and should ideally involve multiple actors. Strategic planning involving program staff, local partners, communities themselves, and perhaps regional and global support teams takes time.
• Technical support within the organization and commitment to investment in learning: Encouragement from regional and global technical teams can help shift program visions toward the longer-term, using local expertise from different contexts to inspire others and sharing effective models and learnings between countries. Support and commitment by management teams in investing in learning and innovation is essential for its integration within program approaches.
• Changing contexts and crisis response: Changes in context, such as resurgence of conflict or new crises, can be disruptive to longer-term programming. Adaptation strategies can be built into design from the start, such as planning rapid protection response activities for any new crisis to sit alongside longer-term activities.

• Which contexts or types of activities could benefit from longer-term (multi-year) program approaches?
• What would different teams within an organization need to do to collaborate on design and planning for multi-year protection responses?
• What organizational challenges might there be in implementation of multi-year programs? What mitigation measures might be needed?
•  If working with local partners, are internal procedures equipped to sign and support multi-year sub-grant partnerships?

• To what extent do the current project proposal and implementation requirements allow protection actors to implement flexible multi-year programming?
• What operational or administrative efficiencies could be gained from multi-year compared with single-year grants for outcome-oriented protection programming?
• Could multi-year funding be used more extensively to support outcome-oriented protection programming? What would be required to increase this?