Abstract
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)?s Building Alliance for Local Advancement, Development, and Investment (BALADI) Activity, implemented by the René Moawad Foundation (RMF), has come to a close after ten years of implementation. BALADI-RMF?s work under the Request for Municipal Assistance (RFMA) and Supplemental Program Description (SPD) modalities consisted of 80 interventions valued at $12,124,262.06 and was implemented in all Lebanese Governorates with the exception of Beirut. This Endline Performance Evaluation of BALADI-RMF builds on an Interim Performance Evaluation conducted in July 2020. It examines the relevance, effectiveness, and adaptability of BALADI-RMF?s work in order to draw conclusions and make recommendations for future programming. The findings of this evaluation highlight important contributions made by BALADI-RMF between July 2020 and September 2022 to respond to the urgent needs of local communities. The evaluation concludes that BALADI-RMF has continued to gain relevance in meeting its intended outcomes. More so, its relevance has expanded to include building municipal capacities, supporting decentralized governance, and formulating the needed administrative practices to sustain projects in response to emerging community needs amid declining sate services. Moreover, BALADI-RMF has demonstrated effective implementation and management practices manifested in the satisfactory delivery of intended projects outputs. BALADI-RMF has also shown an unequivocal ability to adapt to difficult environments, as it was capable of navigating projects despite Lebanon?s unprecedented and uncertain economic and political circumstances. BALADI-RMF?s experiences and practices can certainly be considered a reference point for recommendations targeting future USAID programming in Lebanon; however, certain adjustments are necessary. Most notably, it is recommended that efforts aimed at supporting the capacities, decentralization, and management of municipalities to improve service delivery (i) be expanded to target clusters or unions of municipalities and (ii) be expanded to include multiple specialized implementing partners at once. The evaluation also recommends that such expansion be more inclusive of women and contribute to the localization of labor and resources. Furthermore, a rapid and flexible tendering and approval procedure should be utilized by RMF, as well as follow-up activities that scale up good practices, expand partnerships, maintain local engagement, and mainstream lessons learned in development and recovery activities.