The Catalytic Fund – 2022 year in review

IDinsight is thrilled to share the achievements of the Catalytic Fund in 2022. After one year of operationalizing impact-focused decision-making through flexible funding, IDinsight has been able to improve lives and livelihoods across five urgent projects. IDinsight is grateful for those who supported this initiative to catalyze high-impact projects that would otherwise not be funded in time to directly improve lives.

Why is the Catalytic Fund important to IDinsight?

After 10 years of informing decision-makers, IDinsight understands the components that yield high-impact results. Many of these high-impact projects, which are not sector-specific, often cannot wait for funding. The IDinsight Catalytic Fund takes flexible funding dollars and applies them directly to these projects to make a measurable impact on human lives.

2022 Catalytic Fund Projects

IDinsight was entrusted with funding that allowed us to invest in 5 high-impact projects across Africa and Asia that would not have received funding otherwise.

Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED): $250,000

With support of the Catalytic Fund, IDinsight conducted a Phase I process evaluation for ARED’s accelerated learning pilot program, Ndaw Wune, which aims to provide academic remediation and support to children in Senegal. The IDinsight team has provided recommendations from the process evaluation, several of which were adopted, and all aim to improve the training and preparation of educators involved in the remedial program.

Remaining funds enabled the launch of Phase II, which will continue providing monitoring and evaluation support to ARED as they continue refining the program while scaling-up. Read more about these efforts from IDinsight’s West and Northern Africa Regional Director and ARED’s Executive Director here.

Video link here

Indian State Government Evidence Unit: $250,000

Catalytic Funding facilitated the continuation of IDinsight’s embedded learning partnership with an Indian state government’s Department of Women and Child Development, while the IDinsight and government teams pursued other funding opportunities. The evidence unit provides technical support, innovation design, and M&E support to improve health, nutrition, and empowerment for women, adolescents, and children in a state in India.

IDinsight’s team has developed a training toolkit that facilitated uptake of a health application to improve nutrition programming for women and children. The team is using this toolkit to train ~200 master trainers from across the state who will use these tools to cascade training to thousands of district frontline staff. Most recently, the team completed assessments on 4 schemes schemes that focus on conditional cash transfers, schooling, and skilling for women’s development and empowerment. Their findings and recommendations will impact more than 450,000 women and girls annually.

Language and Learning Foundation (LLF): $179,000  

IDinsight is conducting an impact evaluation, a process evaluation and providing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) support for LLF’s home language programs. This multilingual education program, ran in Bastar district, Chhattisgarh, India, operationalizes the inclusion of children’s home languages in primary school classrooms, and aims to improve learning outcomes of children from marginalized or tribal communities. 

IDinsight Catalytic Funding supported the baseline for the impact evaluation. The IDinsight project team completed data collection in mid-January for their baseline assessment of grade 3 students, assessing a total of 2680 students in 344 schools (172 treatment, 172 control) in Bastar district.

Philippine Department of Health – Universal Health Care Annual Survey (DOH-UHC): $250,000

IDinsight is developing and implementing the M&E strategy and the first round of a provincially representative household survey for the rollout of UHC in the Philippines. Catalytic Funding allowed the team to launch the project right away and participate in measurement strategy setting meetings with DOH, instead of waiting for formal procurement from DOH to begin work. The study’s implementation will be funded directly by the Philippines DOH.

The IDinsight team has participated in measurement strategy sessions across the health sector planning for the next 5 years as well as consultations with multiple internal DOH bureaus, PhilHealth (the main Philippine social insurance provider), and two local government teams to inform the UHC study design. As a result of these discussions, we co-designed – and are in the process of receiving DOH funding for – a more rigorous sampling strategy for the survey, moving from a nationally representative approach to a provincially representative one, which will make results relevant to provincial decision-makers.

Philippine Department of Health – Health Promotion and Literacy Survey (DOH-HPLS): $107,000 

IDinsight is gathering a nationally representative panel of data on health literacy and knowledge, attitudes, and practices that surrounds it twice per year in service of the Philippine DOH Health Promotion Framework Strategy. Catalytic Funding enabled the team to pursue an improved sampling strategy when the original plan was not technically feasible, as this is our first nationally representative sample in the Philippines and our first Data on Demand project in the country.

The IDinsight team has successfully designed the first ever nationally representative grid-based sampling approach in the Philippines, and with Catalytic Funding, will be able to carry out this rigorous design. The team piloted in January, began data collection in April, and will start data analysis in June.

Moving Forward in 2023

In collaboration with IDinsight project teams, the Catalytic Fund working group and steering committee continue to refine the Catalytic Fund processes. In the spirit of continuing to catalyze impact, we intend to direct at least $2M in funding towards high-impact projects in 2023.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can engage with the Catalytic Fund, contact Jake Taesang Cho and Meg Battle.