Opinion: From attribution to contribution for Team Europe collaboration

The global economy is going through a period of turbulence and volatility not seen for decades. Russia’s war in Ukraine is causing devastating impacts on food systems with widespread disruption to agricultural input supply chains and soaring food prices, severely impacting the world’s poorest and most food insecure. These past 24 months have seen a backslide in progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, with parts of our world, such as the Sahel, becoming increasingly fragile. Amid these formidable global challenges, official development assistance budgets are increasingly constrained, while substantial declines in foreign direct investment, rising interest rates, and soaring inflation are limiting the provision of financing at levels required to get the SDGs on track. In the face of such pressures and rising needs, it is evident we must strive to scale the impacts of development interventions more effectively and efficiently than ever. These past couple of years have shown us we can indeed collaborate better, but a number of constraints to doing so in an optimally efficient way remain. Short time frames and project and implementation siloes have been highlighted for years as barriers to establishing better cooperation mechanisms across development practitioner organizations, although nexus and resilience-building initiatives and support for consortia-based approaches have gained ground more recently. An opportunity to achieve greater impact in global development work exists within the European Union’s extensive “Global Gateway” commitments, including the Team Europe Initiatives, or TEIs, mechanism. One significant constraint to more efficient collaboration remains the rigidity of project-focused monitoring and evaluation, or M&E, and results frameworks. With advancements in M&E systems and tools, development organizations are better equipped to obtain evidence and report against project activities and outputs. An M&E framework for more efficient delivery It would be misguided to argue against the importance of solid metrics and accountability tools, which are so necessary to providing assurances around destinations of financial resource flows in particular. Yet these invariably default to output metrics — such as the number of farmers with increased knowledge on applying climate-smart practices — and struggle to measure wider outcomes — such as strengthened resilience. Such frameworks inherently compel implementing organizations to measure and attribute direct outputs to individual projects, as opposed to focusing on longer-term impacts which are harder to correlate with individual projects. Short-term, inflexible project structures, combined with higher expectations on timely and precise reporting, serve as barriers to enabling a greater pooling of resources and implementation of collaborative activities in furtherance of outcomes and impact contributed to through a more collective approach. While numerous pooled funding mechanisms exist, in the main, they are short-term focused and oriented toward specific, measurable outputs, often within the context of humanitarian programs. They also have not resulted in the defragmentation of an overcrowded aid and development system. Various outcome-based financing initiatives and results-based financing have shown the potential to leverage additional finance streams, and a number of innovative metric frameworks have been developed. However, extensive inefficiencies within the project delivery models persist. Donors, development finance institutions, and the private sector also face barriers to establishing greater levels of collaboration and co-delivery, in that their traditional reporting requirements are structured against specific, preplanned activities and notions about how change will happen. The TEIs framework now represents a real opportunity for a range of different development organizations to engage in deeper levels of collaboration. The EU — and in turn its member states — harnessing the implementing capacities of development actors, such as those within the Practitioners’ Network for European Development Cooperation, is therefore excellently placed to take a leadership role in going further toward catalyzing and enabling more efficient ways for development actors to work together. From attribution to contribution The TEIs offer the potential to go beyond just sharing best practices and information, adopting common approaches, and building synergies across donors and programs, to a deeper pooling of resources into collaboration vehicles that a number of practitioner organizations — including private sector partners — contribute personnel and resources to. Such vehicles could be financed through an outcomes-based approach, with greater flexibility around specific activities. A concrete example of where this potential could be realized and efficiency gains made would be through some of our organizations committing to establishing such a collaboration vehicle focused on the outcome of strengthened resilience of people and communities most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis and rising insecurity and conflict in the Sahel, where several country-specific and regional TEIs are being developed. Within the European development landscape, a number of organizations, including SNV, have long-term presence and resilience-building oriented programs underway in the region. We know that in such fragile contexts, all our organizations need greater flexibility and acceptance of the fact that activity pathways toward the outcomes we are striving to achieve are not linear, requiring adaptability and agility. We could commit within the collaboration vehicle to contributing our respective areas of expertise to deliver a range of activities, which would be adjusted as contexts, needs, and opportunities change, while measuring and evaluating against the overall impact of strengthened resilience. By structurally deepening our collaboration and embracing the opportunity the TEIs represent for a less individual-entity-centric approach, we could offer a more efficient delivery vehicle for European member state development ministries and others to co-invest in, within an M&E framework which allows for less rigid measurement of contribution toward results, as opposed to insistence on direct attribution. If now — in the face of such global turmoil and challenge — is not the occasion to embark on some better ways of sharing resources and working together, when is? Let us not allow the opportunities from the current confluence of crises go to waste.