MacArthur's On Nigeria Big Bet program supports Nigerian-led efforts to reduce corruption by strengthening transparency, accountability, and participation, as well as applying a gender equity and social inclusion (GESI) lens.
To that end, the On Nigeria program's evaluation and learning partner, EnCompass LLC, produced a series of reports, briefs, and memos that explore evidence related to the program's overarching goals. Together, the On Nigeria team and grantees review the findings and make changes to strategies and programming accordingly. Key learning questions include:
- How do efforts to leverage collaboration between, within, and across voice and teeth actors affect the accountability ecosystem?
- How does On Nigeria use a GESI lens to include, engage, and advance the rights of marginalized communities in Nigeria?
- What On Nigeria programming appears to contribute to the emergence of a robust, sustainable accountability ecosystem in Nigeria? What factors enable and impede success?
Explore learning briefs, reports, and memos below that measure progress made and lessons learned as it relates to On Nigeria's theory of change.
Sustainability and institutionalization are essential to the success and legacy of On Nigeria. Given this, in the time remaining before the program’s anticipated exit at the end of 2024, consolidating the Program Team’s understanding of: (1) grantees’ strengths and weaknesses and (2) how grantees and the Program Team might further strengthen grantee organizations, are important priorities.
This learning brief explores these issues by presenting an analysis of the organizational characteristics and practices of a crosscutting group of On Nigeria grantees, and unpacking their views on sustainability. The evidence in the brief suggests that while individual grantees exhibit many of the characteristics and practices of strong, sustainable organizations and contribute to changes in the broader accountability ecosystem, more work is needed to strengthen the sustainability of cohort and portfolio-level practices and outcomes.
This case study report explores how On Nigeria grantees engage in and support investigative reporting on corruption in NIgeria, how their efforts contribute to action and reform, and under what conditions they do so. The evidence presented in this study suggest that Media and Journalism grantees are publishing and amplifying investigative reports in ways that contribute to increased awareness of and engagement around corruption and exploitation. To sustain emerging transparency wins and achieve long-lasting accountability, complementary actions to shift social norms and allocating resources to in-depth reporting and amplification may be necessary.
This case study report explores how grantees in the Joinbodi cohort: a) support communities and citizens to use accountability mechanisms to achieve change, b) apply and adapt their support to meet the needs of communities, including across ethnic, sociocultural, and regional groups, and c) identify and apply lessons to community-focused accountability efforts. The evidence in these cases suggests that, though significant challenges persist, Joinbodi grantees are leveraging relationships with grantee and nongrantee civil society partners to strengthen target populations’ knowledge and capacity to collectively monitor government initiatives and advocate for transparent practices. As a result, some government actors and institutions–especially at state and local levels–are showing signs of becoming more transparent and responsive.
This memo synthesizes the learning products thus far produced in the second phase of On Nigeria’s work following a strategy review in 2020. It explores evidence related to three of the On Nigeria Evaluation and Learning Framework’s overarching evaluation questions and provides a synthesis of the evidence and learning to date.
The memo demonstrates that there is some evidence of progress to date toward the On Nigeria theory of change, especially with regards to improvements in collaboration, skill-building, and the integration of GESI considerations into anti-corruption work. On Nigeria’s programming may have contributed to these gains, but room for further progress remains.
In late 2022, MacArthur's On Nigeria Program Team commissioned a survey to better understand On Nigeria grantees' priorities regarding organizational strengthening, collaboration, and capacity building needs. This memo presents results from the survey, and shares considerations that the Program Team used to inform their grantmaking activities and resource decisions in the final 21 months of On Nigeria.
This learning brief explores how On Nigeria Media and Journalism (MJ) grantees try to build investigative reporting skills among journalists, how they amplify investigative reports, and the results to which they contribute. In doing so, the brief sheds light on MJ grantees’ work to apply the skill building, collaboration, and GESI approaches that are integral to the On Nigeria Theory of Change, and to the Media and Journalism-specific Theory of Change.
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Encouraging citizens, civil society, and government actors to take action against corruption is a key element of the overall On Nigeria Theory of Change and the Behavior Change cohort Theory of Change. This learning brief explores how policy agencies, a subset of On Nigeria grantees focused on shaping government policy, apply the results of behavior change-focused partnerships to their anticorruption work. These agencies include the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission- Anticorruption Academy of Nigeria (ICPC-ACAN), the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER).
This tool is designed to support organizations as they integrate gender equity and social inclusion (GESI) considerations throughout the lifecycle of their projects and programs. The tool serves as a means of self-reflection that helps organizations determine what steps they can take to integrate GESI into their actions, rather than measuring impact of any GESI work. Included in this tool is the GESI Continuum, which helps determine if projects and programming are GESI unaware or GESI aware, with the goal of moving towards GESI transformative programming when possible.
This learning brief presents results from data collection and an analysis of how On Nigeria’s Behavior Change module grantees design and implement behavior change approaches to reduce corruption in Nigeria.
In this brief, the EnCompass team explains that grantees have 1) leveraged technical assistance and partnership opportunities provided by MacArthur, and 2) used data and evidence from their own research and others to craft behavior change approaches. The majority of grantees appear to monitor implementation of their approaches and are well positioned to adapt when needed.
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This learning brief presents findings and conclusions from an analysis of media monitoring data from 2016-2020, with a specific focus on the quantity and quality of corruption-related investigative reporting supported by Media and Journalism grantee organizations and non-grantee media sources in Nigeria.
This brief confirms the emerging trends captured in related findings submitted to the program team in November 2020. This brief further suggests that corruption-related investigative reporting grew—in quantity and quality—in Nigeria between 2016 and 2020, and that On Nigeria grantees have played a role in that growth. However, room for further improvement remains.
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This learning brief presents results from an analysis of how On Nigeria grantees understand and practice GESI in their organizations and in their work with beneficiaries.
This brief demonstrates that grantees represent numerous dimensions of diversity and deploy several strategies to intentionally increase GESI in their organizations and programming. Further, grantees often use diversity, inclusion, and GESI interchangeably and face a number of challenges in their efforts to fully integrate a GESI lens into their work.
This learning brief presents an analysis of how grantees support anticorruption agencies (ACAs) and accountability bodies (ABs) to engage with civil society organizations (CSOs) and Nigerian citizens and support citizens in their use of accountability mechanisms.
It shows that On Nigeria grantees have fostered collaboration with and between ACA/ABs, CSOs, and citizens, as well as strengthened the capacity of ACA/ABs to investigate and prosecute corruption. These efforts do not, however, engage all populations in Nigeria equitably.
A resilient accountability ecosystem—the networks of relationships “between citizens and governing authorities … [and] other important actors, including media, private sector, diverse organized citizen groups, and various actors within the state itself” that collectively support social accountability—is essential to the success and sustainability of On Nigeria’s anticorruption programming (for more on accountability ecosystems, see Halloran’s Accountability Ecosystems: The Evolution of a Keyword).
This social network analysis report explores how On Nigeria grantees collaborate with other actors in the broader accountability ecosystem and with each other. It discusses how the collaborations contribute to outcomes and how and to what end collaborative networks might be further strengthened, now and in the future.
This learning brief explores how the media reported on corruption in Nigeria in 2021 and assesses the quantity and quality of investigative reporting in Nigeria for the period from 2016 to 2021, with particular focus on 2021. Consistent with the trends captured in previous findings, the evidence in this brief demonstrates that the quantity of corruption-related reporting and investigative journalism in Nigeria continues to grow, though there has been a decline in the quality of investigative reporting since 2018.
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