PIL’s year 2023 in review
In 2024, Policy Impact Lab counts its eighth year in existence. Our team has successfully worked on 58 exciting assignments to date. And while we support our clients in reflecting on and communicating their impact and learning, we realise we need to do this more for ourselves too. Over the past year, we institutionalised some useful practices related to this, including our team’s monthly and annual reflection meetings, and initiated methods workshops in collaboration with our partners and external experts. We’ve also decided to renew our commitment to keeping our friends, colleagues and partners informed and engaged with our organisation’s progress, and revamped our website, complete with an up-to-date list of projects we engage in. So let us take a moment to reflect on some milestones we have achieved over the last year.
We expanded and strengthened our relationships with clients and partners. In 2023, we were involved in 11 projects, working with intergovernmental organisations such as the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), non-profit organisations and charities such as the Kindernothilfe and Humanity & Inclusion, and associations such as the European Association of Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities (EASPD). In many of these assignments, our team worked closely with our long-standing partners Blomeyer& Sanz, as well as around a dozen individual associates based in Africa and Europe. This year we really felt that working in global, diverse teams is our forte.
We worked on topics we are passionate about. Through our research and evaluation activities, we’ve assisted humanitarian organisations in tackling issues such as enhancing the quality of life for people with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa and are currently exploring innovation opportunities to better address the needs of older-age persons and people with disabilities in acute humanitarian contexts. We are also proud to have completed evaluations on programmes dealing with complex human rights issues, such as ending violence against children, or the little-discussed but important topic of ensuring access to justice for victims of crime with disabilities. Our expertise in migration management and mobility has expanded significantly through several evaluation assignments for the ICMPD, covering topics such as anti-trafficking and labour migration. We are especially excited to kick off a three-year assignment, in collaboration with Blomeyer & Sanz and a consortium of partners across three continents, to support and evaluate the ICMPD’s Migration Partnership Facility (III and IV), a financing mechanism encompassing over 70 multi-country initiatives.
We provided rich evidence and valuable insights to our clients and the wider public. Across evaluation assignments, we applied diverse approaches such as Theory Based Evaluation, Developmental Evaluation, Outcome Harvesting, Contribution Analysis, and Most Significant Change. Most importantly, we stayed true to our value of challenging power dynamics and bringing different perspectives – from duty bearers to end-beneficiaries – to the table. This not only allowed us to provide well-rounded evidence but also drove the culture of shared decision-making in our client organisations. We are also happy to share some of our work publicly – for instance, together with the EASPD, we hosted a webinar on the best practices of transitioning towards inclusive education systems and published an open-access report on this topic.
We continued enriching our professional experiences with and beyond PIL. Working as a network, we have the freedom to allocate our energy where we see fit, with all of us at PIL wearing two or even three hats. We are proud to highlight several achievements of our colleagues. In 2023, our associate Ieva Giedraitytė fulfilled her dream and spent half a year in the US as a Fulbright researcher. There she continued developing work on her now completed PhD topic project that compares the US and EU’s engagement with its neighbours. Meanwhile, Lara Bezzina carried out an extensive research project on personal assistance for persons with disabilities in Malta, feeding into government reforms. Melissa Miller formed part of a panel of experts with lived experience of using Assistive Technology, feeding into the work of ATScale. Ksenija Paksina was able to reconnect to the people and issues she is deeply passionate about, as well as produce her first high-quality report in Spanish language while supporting Association Entrepueblos and the Institute of Human Rights of Catalonia in evaluating their work with human rights defenders in the contexts of ecological and climate emergency across Latin America.
Finally, our Director Elma Paulauskaitė reconciled her PIL-related work with a part-time in-house Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) expert position at Red Noses International. Over a bit more thana year, Elma supported two major initiatives. She co-designed, facilitated, and reported on the learnings of an Artistic Research Lab that brought together artists from different disciplines to collaboratively engage in social interventions and research the impact of their work. She also supported the coordination team of the ClowNexus project, which brought together eight healthcare clowning organisations in Europe to explore co-creative approaches to support institutions and persons providing education and care to persons with disabilities, focusing on children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and adults with advanced Dementia. As part of this work, Elma facilitated international learning laboratories for participating clown artists and documented their individual journeys and approaches.
In the year ahead, we are excited to continue working on long-term projects on migration, inclusion and human rights more generally, and aspire to engage more in communities of practice around evaluation and human rights programming, as well as joining a global community of mission-driven organisations.