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Vredeseilanden (VECO)

Belgium Development Cooperation (main donor)

Steff Deprez

VE wants to contribute to viable livelihoods and empowerment of organized family farmers, male and female, in South and North by:
- Improving their position in the whole agricultural chain, from production to consumption.
- Improving policies at national and international level.
- Stimulating consumer buying practices for more sustainable consumption"

To adopt OM to move from a system that is mainly to meet the accountability needs of the main donor to one that facilitates a more learning-oriented planning, monitoring and evaluation with mutual accountability. OM was adopted as an organisation-wide practice, i.e. at Head Office and in the Regional Offices and 13 countries in which VE operates.

Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation

Through its particular logic and set-up, OM facilitated critical self-reflection on the previous and existing programme objectives, approach, structure and assumptions on which the programme was built. This in itself was already a valuable process for many country offices. The concept of boundary partners turned out to be very helpful in establishing a greater variety of partners as well as to explore a wider scope of strategies for capacity development of its partner organisations.

OM also inspired the assessment of its internal organisational processes. Seeing the country offices as boundary partners of the management & support services of VE head office resulted in an outcome challenge (+ progress markers) for the country office for the management & support services of the VE head office (e.g. finance, HR, communications) which will be used as the basis for an intra-organisational planning, learning & accountability system.

Difficult to aggregate material for annual reports - but OM has helped the process of aggregation since working with 'outcome challenges' has made the information more coherent.