Mid-term review of DFID project in Mombasa

Kuza is a market systems development intervention funded by DFID Kenya aimed at creating employment opportunities for unemployed young people in Mombasa, Kenya. It was launched in Mombasa in May 2014 and is expected to run until June 2017.

Genesis was contracted to conduct a mid-term evaluation which assessed the efficiency and effectiveness of project implementation, evaluate how any changes in intervention design and delivery could be improved in the future, and identify opportunities for development and project scale up.

We conducted interviews and focus-group discussions with market players as well as the beneficiary youth. This information, together with desktop review, internal interviews and the analysis of Kuza’s existing monitoring data, was used to answer the evaluation questions.

The evaluation framework was aligned to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) criteria with an additional scale criteria which was modelled on the approach outlined in Coburn’s (2003) “Rethinking scale: Moving beyond numbers to deep and lasting change”. At the end of the mid-term evaluation,

Genesis workshopped the programme level theory of change with the funder and the implementers. Using the findings of the evaluation, the revised theory of change reflected the critical assumptions underlying the impact pathways and provided the client with a better understanding of the market system in which its intervention was operating.

The evaluation also provided a response to the question of scale, highlighting obtainable and evidence-based solutions to scaling and replication, while also cautioning against full programme scale-up before a fully established proof of concept.