Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s and the British Council’s use of aid in response to the Arab Spring

Review

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has put major effort into developing the capacity to deliver rapid and flexible support in response to the Arab Spring, but it needs to improve the way it measures results. The British Council’s response to the Arab Spring has been considered, strategic and a good complement to the FCO’s. As a result of our findings this review is marked green-amber. We made five recommendations.

Findings

We found that the FCO has put major effort into developing its capacity to deliver rapid and flexible support in response to the Arab Spring. Its largest programme in the Middle East and North Africa region, the Arab Partnership Participation Fund (APPF), has a sound strategy and good delivery capacity, although it is limited by weaknesses in project management. APPF shows some promising early signs of impact, supporting key transition processes such as elections, constitution-making and media reform, although the volatile environment and the small scale of the investments limit the prospects for sustainable impact. While the FCO has proved adept at learning from operational challenges, it needs to improve the way it measures results.

The British Council’s response to the Arab Spring has been considered, strategic and a good complement to the FCO’s. It has a strong delivery model based on good local partnerships and beneficiary engagement and has proved effective at its core goal of skills development and individual empowerment, with some wider impact through social mobilisation.

The Arab Partnership represents a significant step forward in the FCO’s ability to deliver Official Development Assistance (ODA) effectively and it is a welcome innovation. We found good collaboration between the FCO, DFID and other UK Government organisations within the Arab Partnership. The focus of joint effort is where it should be – at the strategic and technical level. There are improvements that should be made in project management and financial systems which would add further value to the programme.

ICAI recognises that the immediate response to the Arab Spring in late 2010 and 2011 required rapid and flexible support and commends the FCO and British Council response. We recommend that the FCO introduces explicit theories of change into its country strategies that identify the outcomes it wants to achieve and how they will be achieved and measured. We also identified a deficiency in sharing learning that should be addressed for the benefit of partners and country programmes.

We recommend that the British Council continues its strong evaluation of beneficiary feedback but improves its weaker systems for impact measurement.

Recommendations

1. The FCO should introduce explicit ‘theories of change’ into its country strategies to identify clearly what outcomes it hopes to achieve and how, particularly in the good governance area. It should then measure and report on progress towards these outcomes, to produce a clearer picture of overall results.
2. For the next annual round of APPF grants, the FCO should introduce grant-making procedures that distinguish amongst partners with different levels of delivery and financial management capacity.
3. During this financial year, the FCO should adapt its financial system to include new modules on programme management. It should support this with improved staff training and guidance material.
4. The FCO should invest more effort into sharing knowledge and experience among partners and country programmes.
5. The British Council should develop improved methods of measuring the institutional or social impacts of those projects that have broader goals beyond skills transfer to individuals.