Evaluation of Action Aid’s ‘Tax, privatisation and the right to education’ project

Between 2015 and 2020, ActionAid implemented a project across Pakistan, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda to tackle education financing and the growth of private schools. The project’s overall goal was to ensure that the communities are aware of two key concepts: education is a right and should be free and taxes can pay for education.
Key Aid Consulting was commissioned to undertake the final evaluation of this initiative to understand the impact of their work at local and national and international levels, to determine if the project should continue on to third phase.

This evaluation sought to test whether the project achieved the outcomes outlined in its Theory of Change, using a light-touch process tracing method in order to overcome the usual challenges associated with the evaluation of advocacy and capacity-building work. It followed three key steps: check for the presence of the outcome (what did the project achieve?), reconstruct the pathway to change (what actions led to this achievement?) and investigate alternative explanations and multiple causes (what else might have happened to contribute to this?).