2018 is shaping up to be a busy year for Cultural Practice, LLC, with new contracts from International Development Research Centre, Global Communities, Mercy Corps, and Winrock International.
Cultural Practice, LLC (CP) started a new activity in February under a subcontract with Global Communities for the Resilience in Northern Ghana Project (RING) in Tamale, Ghana. The 15-month long project supports the Northern Regional Coordinating Committee’s efforts to strengthen the capacity of regional and local governments to collect, analyze, and use data for programmatic and policy decision-making. The CP Team is currently in Tamale to assess Regional and District M&E capacity and system functioning, using a hybrid of Outcome Harvesting/Outcome Mapping (OH/OM) methodologies to inform the development of an implementation strategy. CP chose OH/OM to change the focus from simply acquiring more knowledge about M&E to identifying what changes are needed in the behavior and practices of different actors to institutionalize M&E within local government.
CP welcomes two new employees for our RING activity: M&E Specialist Emmanuel Baapeng Aapengyeb (pictured above) will be supporting the M&E capacity assessment from the Global Communities’ office in Tamale and Victor Pinga, Capacity Building and Strategic Planning Advisor, will provide guidance and technical assistance on all capacity building. Jhonson Charles is also joining the team as a consultant on the DHIS2 database system.
International Development Research Centre (IDRC) contracted CP to develop a strategic report analyzing IDRC’s research on gender and climate change over the past twelve years. CP’s assessment will identify approaches used and will provide strategic recommendations for IDRC’s future work on this topic. CP is reviewing over 80 IDRC projects and conducting key informant interviews with project officers and grantees for the report.
CP is pleased to be a partner on Mercy Corp’s first-ever Master Service Agreement for Monitoring and Evaluation support, evaluation, and research. We look forward to working with Mercy Corps and its partners throughout this two-year agreement to strengthen approaches to building capacity in data quality assurance, developing new analytical tools, introducing complexity aware methods to complement standard qualitative and quantitative methodology, and integrating attention to gender in evaluations across different sectors.
Featured photo: Mr. Emmanuel Baapeng Aapengyeb near the RING office sign in Ghana. Credit: Wesley Laytham 2018.
