RECLAIM Sustainability! Programme Mid-Term Review

Overview

Mid-term review of RECLAIM Sustainability!, a 2021-2025 Power of Voices partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is implemented by Solidaridad regional centres (including East & Central Africa), Fairfood, TrustAfrica and Business Watch Indonesia in 17 countries, across cocoa, coffee, tea, palm oil, cotton and textiles, gold and food products. The review covered January 2021 to December 2022 and was carried out in 2023. It assessed relevance, coherence, effectiveness, sustainability and partnership collaboration, and made recommendations for the rest of the programme and for programming after 2025. In ECA, the programme works in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.

Key findings

• 153 inclusive multi-stakeholder dialogues were initiated, strengthened or convened by 2022, against a target of 94 by 2022 (reported as 163% achievement).
• The programme influenced 102 policies, leading to 31 new or improved policies for sustainable sourcing, production, trade and investment (16 public sector, 15 private sector).
• 327 civil society actors and target groups were supported by 2022, against a 2025 target of 200. The outcome KPI on civil society actors with increased lobby and advocacy capacity stood at 98% of the 2025 target.
• The 'Advocate' outcome KPI exceeded its 2025 target by 29% and the 'Amplify' KPI by 436%, though 'activated' and 'mobilised' were interpreted and measured inconsistently across the programme. The 'Accelerate' KPI on improved bargaining position was at 52% of the 2025 target.
• Examples from ECA include amendments to the Uganda National Horticulture Development Strategy and the Kenya National Potato Strategy, input to Kenya and Uganda tea policies, a minimum wage policy paper for Ethiopia's cotton sector, and recommendations to Uganda's National Coffee Bill.
• Traceability pilots for coffee in Uganda and Honduras and cocoa in Sierra Leone had not yet shown that they produce fair value distribution.
• Internal learning and coordination structures were well designed but did not work in practice: consortium frameworks served accountability more than learning, and there were structural disconnects and communication gaps.

In figures

Recommendations

• Build staff and stakeholder familiarity with the Theory of Change, reassess its assumptions against practice, and add an assumption on gender and social inclusion.
• Keep building evidence as a basis for lobby and advocacy, and strengthen CSOs and multi-stakeholder platforms so they can operate independently of RS! support by the programme's end.
• Have strengthened CSOs and platforms monitor how new policies are implemented and enforced, and use power analysis to decide which other actors to target.
• Strengthen local-to-global links so that EU lobbying and country interventions together make new EU legislation a driver of sustainable business models, and gather evidence on how smallholders are included under national sustainability standards.
• Measure campaign effects on knowledge, social norms and behaviour, involve the media more, and scale up the gender champions approach within a wider gender-transformative approach.
• Explore financing models for smallholders (group and cooperative investment, revolving funds, carbon credits, government guarantees), and improve the Trace tool by adding production cost and living wage data.
• Keep central oversight of tools and innovations, give teams clear guidance on purpose and process, and review programme structures to improve linking and learning.

Lessons learned

• Avoid reinventing the wheel: look outward to other consortium staff and organisations working on similar issues.
• Individual smallholders are too small to make a difference alone; organising them into groups gives access to finance, innovation and value chain integration.
• Systemic change needs a meso and macro focus, not only work with individual smallholders.
• Power differences in partnerships (funding held in Europe) and in value chains (farmers as price-takers) need explicit attention.
• Building soft skills and self-confidence promotes social inclusion, especially for women, youth and marginalised groups, even though it is hard to quantify.

Methodology

Participatory mixed-methods review: desk review of over 150 documents, interviews with staff, strategic partners and target groups, Learning and Reflection sessions organised by the 45 projects (about 473 stakeholders), and five field studies (Ghana cocoa, Zambia cotton, India tea, Kenya gold, Honduras coffee), with feedback and validation sessions. Contribution analysis was used to assess attribution.

Limitations

• Gains in self-confidence and trust are hard to quantify and hard to attribute to specific interventions.
• Many staff interviewed were senior men and the partner cultures were largely male-dominated, so views may reflect a male lens.
• Staff expertise was mainly technical rather than social, and the review team acknowledges its own subjective biases.
• Interviewees and field studies were a selected, not random, subset of a very large programme.
• Even with 150+ documents reviewed, the team could not see the full paper trail or the reasons behind some decisions.