Mid-term Performance Evaluation of USAID/India Millennium Alliance Program
Team leader for high-quality USAID evaluation of granting programme for start-up inclusive innovations in India, including agriculture, clean energy, WASH, education, and health. The report made 35 recommendations (17 high priority) for Millennium Alliance partners to address in the short, medium and long term.
Background
In 2012, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in India launched the Millennium Alliance Program to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify innovations, test promising solutions, and scale effective interventions and products. USAID/India contracted Social Impact, Inc. to conduct a performance evaluation to examine project effectiveness, identify the factors that promoted social innovation, and document best practices and lessons learnt to inform the future of USAID’s involvement in the Millennium Alliance Program. USAID provided evaluation questions related to innovation, leveraging, development outcomes, sustainability, management, gender, knowledge management and communications and the design of the Programme.
Approach
The Evaluation Team used mixed methods including document review, secondary data analysis, semi-structured interviews and group interviews to identify findings that addressed the evaluation questions. This report outlined key findings that the Programme had been effective at identifying and financing inclusive innovation in India that addressed the development needs of the bottom of the pyramid; however, there were several design and implementation challenges that impeded efficiency (staffing limitations, monitoring and evaluation system weaknesses), effectiveness (development outcome, innovation, sustainability, and leveraging limitations), and equity (regional and gender).
The report made 35 recommendations (17 high priority) for Millennium Alliance partners to address in the short, medium and long term. Overall, the evaluation concluded that there were many areas for improvement of Millennium Alliance, but that continued investment into the project, with FICCI as the managing partner, would likely be beneficial for developing the inclusive innovation space in India.