A Conversation with Oxfam’s Claire Hutchings

Oxfam member of staff helps to carry one family's newly received non-food items home in UN House, Juba

Photo by Anita Kattakuzhy, Oxfam/CC BY 2.0

Program

In 2011, Oxfam GB established its Global Performance Framework (GPF) to help the organization to deliver on its commitments to be accountable to its wide range of stakeholders, and to improve its ability to understand and communicate the impact of its programs. The GPF focuses on seven thematic priorities: humanitarian response; adaptation and risk reduction (resilience); livelihood enhancement; women’s empowerment; citizen voice; policy influencing; and accountability. There are two main elements in the GPF: a Global Output Report which details what the organization is doing to bring about a world free of poverty, inequality, and injustice; and Effectiveness Reviews, intensive evaluations that consider the extent to which projects have contributed to change in relation to the selected global outcome indicator. Our speaker will discuss Oxfam GB's experience implementing this alternative approach to operating global outcome indicators as a means of understanding program impact and organizational performance.

Speaker

Claire Hutchings is the Head of Programme Quality for Oxfam GB. She provides strategic leadership on Oxfam's Global Performance Framework. She is currently leading Oxfam's efforts to test and refine a qualitative research method known as process-tracing, exploring how to reach credible conclusions about the contributions that Oxfam's interventions make to outcomes around policy change and citizen engagement. Her team supports the development of organisational systems and culture that promotes learning, accountability and measurement of results; provides strategic leadership and a global overview of organisational Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) processes; and builds capacity to carry out high quality M&E.