Coordinate

Engagement with, and mapping of, prospective national institutional stakeholders in advance of a project taking place is critical to ensuring that the activities proposed align with their interests and priorities and are feasible in the timeframes proposed.

Supporting a grantee to expand its geographical area of operation can enable them to create and build new networks that can increase awareness of what they do and even contribute to institutional sustainability.

Bringing together groups of women in places where they feel comfortable talking and discussing issues can help build longer-term momentum for a shift in attitudes, even if this is very hard to measure.

Given the numerous challenges of the Palestinian context, it is increasingly relevant to engage Palestinian youth in order to increase their individual resilience and help them cope with the stress they face. Youth in Gaza face double exclusion compared to their peers in the West Bank as a result of settlements and internal conflict, which makes engaging them more difficult and therefore requires additional funding, effort, and monitoring to achieve meaningful change and results.

This project has demonstrated that even in the complex and difficult context of Palestine, setting realistic objectives in terms of the number of beneficiaries and communities of intervention, and adopting a pragmatic approach that includes relevant and useful activities such as training and community services, can engage different target groups, regardless of their political affiliations and sensitivities, and generate impact at both the individual and community levels.

The adoption of a coordination strategy between the project and other relevant actors (mostly from the Academic arena) would have been key in order to optimize resources and avoid duplication, while strengthening coordination. It is therefore important that UNDEF continues to require such strategies for all its projects.

The elderly project should be a source of learning for both UNDEF and the grantee organization LBH Apik, since both parties have not dealt exclusively with elderly before. In a short project such as this (especially with an unexpected challenge like the pandemic), the Donor and Implementing Agency should conduct more frequently periodical pause and reflection to assess direction, progress, challenges, and lessons learnt in order to be able to manage the project adaptively. Ideally this is done every quarter. Sessions for the purpose of learning need to be intentionally planned from the outset. It is unclear whether programmatic learning is being performed from the bottom to the top, and vice versa. It is useful however to cohesively provide a picture on the differences and similarities, and what worked and what did not work.

The grantee organization LBH Apik and its local chapters are well-established grassroots organizations with internal systems and procedures in place. Building good rapport with local stakeholders was one of the key strengths of LBH Apik and a good strategy to secure commitment and can be continued in future programmes.

Project activity costs can be reduced through close coordination, mutual trust and regular consultation with key implementing partners that can lead to financial burden sharing and increased buy-in. This project, for example, reduced costs by persuading implementing partners to share some of the financial burden for certain events, when co-hosting.

Advocacy projects in highly complex contexts require rigorous monitoring to (i) strengthen coalitions and ties despite changes to the positions of stakeholders and changing power dynamics; and to (ii) capture and adapt to the different levels of changes that could occur.