Applying CLA in Whole-of-Project Evaluations to Improve Health Outcomes in the Philippines

For three years, USAID/Philippines' Office of Health (OH) has been using a whole-of-project performance evaluation for analyzing progress in achieving its overall objectives for improving the health of Filipinos. This includes its entire Health Project of up to 11 activities and their implementing partners. The Health Project performance evaluation (HPPE) is based on CLA principles, yielding a powerful methodology for facilitating cumulative decision-making and for committing disparate implementing partners to the notion that their whole is greater than the sum of their parts.

Assessing the progress of multi-activity Projects has been challenging for USAID Missions. Although activities are meant to be complementary and achieve overarching health targets, evaluating them in a unified way is difficult because they are implemented by different partners, on different timelines, and with different objectives.

As a solution to this challenge, the HPPE cycle is grounded in a learning agenda developed by the USAID/Philippines Office of Health’s CLA working group. The 12 essential questions that make up that agenda have driven an annual five-step process comprising large-scale information gathering, data analysis to identify progress, results sharing, joint learning and decision making, and tracking adaptations from year-to-year.

Using the CLA-based HPPE model for whole-of-project evaluations has improved USAID/Philippines’ capacity to evaluate Health Project results and, more importantly, has strengthened the decisions and actions that come from those evaluations. OH and its implementing partners have changed their view of the project cycle in noticeable ways, now taking a more systematic approach to data collection and jointly viewing results through a CLA lens.