Resilient local systems are key to sustainability. This is affirmed in a new (2024) position paper on local systems from USAID that lays out six approaches to nurturing a systems practice in development programmes. 

We couldn’t agree more. So we asked:

Can short-term projects really strengthen systems, so that local actors problem-solve today and keep doing it over time? 

An ex-post evaluation of two seemingly siloed social accountability projects implemented by World Vision in the Dominican Republic's education sector shows how actors and their relationships (intentionally) strengthened participatory management and regulatory processes in schools–during, between, and after short-term projects. 

Using a “systems-practice” lens to conduct programme evaluations enables us to observe outcomes and understand mechanisms that we might otherwise not have seen using traditional evaluation approaches. We know that change in local systems does not happen because a single project either succeeds or fails, according to their defined metrics. To understand systems strengthening, people and relationships (or relational infrastructures) are the thread that ties the system together in the long term. A "systems-practice" evaluation lens prompts us to better assess the value of interventions that take implementation context, political economy, and relationships as primary rather than secondary concerns. 

What did we learn? 

Locally-led and systems-aware programmes:

• Expand the capacities of local actors—governments, civil society, and the private sector—and the system as a whole—so that those local actors are able to better use the system to solve problems and generate outcomes.
• Ensure communities are the leading agents of their own development story. In the DR, this was achieved through context-driven social accountability approaches.
• Layer! - Layering is a strategy that works within the parameters of a system by placing new elements on top of old ones in the hope that their interactions gradually shift the way the system functions over a period of time.

This evaluation demonstrates that social accountability interventions with a “systems-practice” lens can contribute to strengthening education systems by fostering locally driven, culturally relevant, and impactful reforms. 

This report was funded through WVUS’ Accelerator Fund. We thank the authors, Florencia Guerzovich and Tom Aston, for their innovative evaluation design and thought-provoking findings.