BACKGROUND
USAID/North Macedonia’s Local Works (LW) initiative is empowering local actors to take the lead in identifying and addressing development challenges in their own communities. LW strengthens local monitoring and evaluation capacity by enabling USAID missions to explore creative ways to promote local ownership of monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) processes.
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
This activity prioritizes learning, with a dual focus on managing for sustainable results as well as accountability to local people and communities. It supports well-thought-out engagement with local sources, owners, and users of data. The MEL Activity has four components:
a) Monitoring at a higher level and across USAID LW activities.
b) Evaluating individual activities.
c) Collaborating, learning, and adapting.
d) Building the capacity of USAID partners to jointly. develop measurements of success with their communities.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND IMPACT
- Through the MEL activity, the main stakeholders co-created tools for measuring top-line indicators to report on their achievements, including resources mobilized, capacity building, and community actions.
- The aggregated results of data gathered by MEL from all Local Works activities show 21 community actions—including park rehabilitation, pavement of a village central square, and erecting a fence around a landfill—were completed. The communities mobilized more than $200,000 of local municipal, private sector, and individual donor resources.
- A Local Ownership Index was conducted to measure how invested local citizens, businesses, and municipal authorities are in improving their community through local actions. The findings enabled the project implementers to better tailor their approach with individual communities.
- A geographic information system was created to support data analysis for Local Works and other USAID/North Macedonia activities.
