Methodological reflections on creating the Compendium of Innovative and Good Practices and Lessons Learned for Spotlight Initiative

By Alexandra Pittman, PhD
Founder and CEO of ImpactMapper

We work with many donors at ImpactMapper and help them track, analyze and communicate the impact of their investments and programming. When we were commissioned by Spotlight Initiative to produce this Compendium, we were excited for many reasons.

First, Spotlight Initiative is a historic initiative, with the largest pot of funds being dedicated to ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) around the world to date. The Initiative deployed 500 million Euros over five years to 122 countries through 34 country and regional programmes. This meant there was a massive amount of data, most of it in text format, gathered from country and regional reporting that we had access to and would get to analyze – which for data geeks like us, is gold.

Second, we were able to collect original data from country and regional offices and had the opportunity to do site visits with five countries, which afforded us a behind-the-scenes look to better understand what worked and what did not, practices that could be shared and adapted, and even scaled up in the future.

Third, the mission of Spotlight Initiative and the legacy of learning that they were interested in creating inspired us. Donor agencies sharing knowledge and lessons learned from their grantmaking and implementations are too often missing in the sector. Yet it is incredibly important in a world where there are rising rates of violence against women and girls, reversals of legal progress and rising extremism. The more concrete examples we have in the sector of what is working and not, the easier this data is to find and to search examples of success by topic, region and issue. The more inspiration for others working in the field, the better.

Below we share methodological lessons learned in the process of producing this important knowledge product for Spotlight Initiative and the ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG) field.

This methodology blog is the first in a series of two that our team will produce. The second focuses on lessons from our travel and site visits to six countries.

The data

Taking the time to analyze existing annual reports from Spotlight Initiative’s country and regional offices surfaced incredible insights into strategies that were working, successes and remaining challenges that would have largely been lost if unanalyzed.

Systematic knowledge management and qualitative analysis of reports and results databases yielded incredible insights. To start the process, our team developed a detailed taxonomy focused on lessons learned, best practices, case studies around different themes, and then coded nearly 270 documents from country and regional programmes using the ImpactMapper software and interviews from five site visits to Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, and Trinidad and Tobago. While time-consuming, this systematic analysis process created a knowledge repository for Spotlight Initiative and our team that allowed for the quick retrieval of excellent case studies, lessons learned, and best practices on a particular aspect of ending VAWG. With the click of a button, unseen lessons and impacts emerged, and were quickly found for diverse purposes, e.g., filtering by country, region, particular VAWG issues, quotes by different stakeholders, lessons learned, etc. When it came to producing the Compendium, this made searching for examples much more efficient and richer, since all of the original details related to programmes were easily accessible. This database and knowledge repository are also accessible to the Initiative's team to produce different knowledge products in the future as well. (See a knowledge product brief produced with this comprehensive coded database here, in addition to the full Compendium.)  

Case study development

Including data on the specific landscape that Spotlight Initiative partners were operating in helped to contextualize the depth of the VAWG problem in that country or community and helped to frame the impact of the solutions and why this work is so important.

What often happens when working across cultures and countries, is that contextual realities connected to violence against women and girls, such as the nuance in how different forms of violence show up in that context and prevalence rates, can be obscured. We wanted to ensure the case studies we wrote brought the reader into each context, so we shared statistics on the specific type of violence faced in that country or region and explained the reason why Spotlight Initiative and partners prioritized the interventions it developed for that setting. See a screenshot below for an example of our context analysis from a case study on Zimbabwe’s one-stop service provision centres. This type of evidence-based framing of the problem, when coupled with detailed results, helps to also prime the reader for why these interventions matter and can even serve to underscore why more attention and funding are needed to fully address the scope of the problem.