At Atlantic, we believe that a strategic approach to learning improves how we learn and how our grantees learn. It also helps us share our learning with our funding partners, practitioners and other interested audiences. To this end, we have a dedicated team that is focused on providing direct support to grantees by advising them on effective planning, strategy, organisational development and continuous evaluation.
We are committed to learning from our grantmaking efforts: we want to know what is working, what isn’t, and we want to understand why. We develop a range of evaluation designs and methods that reflects the variety of approaches our grantees use to achieve their objectives.
It is important to us to have external experts independently assess our work on an ongoing basis across the four programme areas and seven regions where we operate. These assessments focus on evaluating the progress of clusters of projects toward our strategic objectives.
Specifically, our strategic learning efforts are aimed at:
- enhancing our grantees’ capacity to improve their work by helping them assess their progress and learn from their experiences
- improving our overall philanthropic investments by helping us plan strategically, assess our progress and learn how to best target resources
- sharing useful, credible lessons that help other funders, policy makers and practitioners work effectively on behalf of disadvantaged and vulnerable people during Atlantic’s lifetime and beyond
- assisting grantees to build their own enduring evaluation and organisational learning capacities to sustain them after Atlantic has closed its doors.