Building Alliances for Local Advancement, Development, and Investment — Caritas Lebanon: Final Performance Evaluation

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This report presents findings and recommendations from the final performance evaluation of the BALADI Core activity implemented by Caritas Lebanon (CL) to improve the governance of municipalities and public service delivery; and establish sustainable local social capital. BALADI/CL’s relevance, efficiency, extent of women’s participation, and likelihood of sustained results are examined to provide conclusions and recommendations to inform future activities.

The evaluation shows that BALADI/CL achieved good results in improving services and creating economic opportunities, although more time and resources than planned were spent to identify, design, and implement construction projects due to BALADI/CL’s inexperience in managing construction projects and gaps in technical expertise in A&E, construction management, M&E, outreach and communications, program management. The overwhelming demands of the construction projects left fewer resources to pursue improved governance and sustainable local social capital. Positive factors included adding architecture and engineering quality controls and the resourcefulness of the mayors to secure additional cost-share funds needed to complete the projects. In the future, USAID should more clearly state expectations for sub-awards in its request for applications and could allow longer start-up timeline; implementers should improve MOUs with municipalities, design a more streamlined sub-award program and dedicate more resources to it, and provide more gender-specific training to their staff, partners and beneficiaries to highlight gender gaps and sensitize them to gender issues to increase impacts and sustainability.

Caritas Lebanon (CL) was one of three organizations awarded cooperative agreements in 2012 by USAID/Lebanon to implement the “Core services” of the Building Alliance for Local Advancement, Development and Investment (BALADI) program to advance long-term collaboration between municipalities or municipal unions, NGOs, and private sector entities to implement and manage community projects and deliver services. At the center of the US$13M BALADI/CL (B/CL) program was a grant fund for municipal projects. By the time of this evaluation, BALADI/CL’s (B/CL) contract was expected to end in February 2020.

USAID/Lebanon requested the Performance Management and Support Program for Lebanon (PMSPL II) implemented by Social Impact (SI) to conduct a final performance evaluation to address the following evaluation questions:

1. To what extent B/CL is contributing to USAID’s Development Objectives: Improved capacity of the public sector in providing transparent, quality services across Lebanon; and, Inclusive economic growth enhanced?
2. To what extent has B/CL achieved the activity’s goal and objectives? What factors have contributed or hindered the achievement (or non-achievement) of the activity’s objectives?
3. At what level were women involved in the supported communities where the activities were implemented?
4. What is the likelihood that the results B/CL has achieved are sustainable beyond the life of the activity?
5. What were the critical challenges, lessons learned, and recommendations from this program?